Hello first years, it’s mama ebakes, your wise upper year student who blogs, with tales from her first year of university.

Here’s a good story about my first day of classes.

Things were going well. I had successfully found all of my classes throughout the day without any prep beforehand. Hebb was a little bit difficult of a building to track down, but I did it all on time and with big smiles. That was until my last class of the day, Poli Sci 101, came along.

I couldn’t find Poli Sci 101 and I only had the ten minutes in between French in Buchanan and Poli Sci somewhere in the Chemistry building to find it. I started to ask random students walking by if they knew where my class was. I chose to ask guys that were in flannel (trustworthy survival skills at work) or had nice orange haired beards. None of them could help me find my class and just giggled. I didn’t mind, they looked cool as always.

It was now a half hour into my class. All I wanted to do was learn about the Canadian government and I couldn’t even find the classroom to do so. I couldn’t argue with anyone about policy or Harper, at minimum to say it was very depressing. I stood on the corner of University and East Mall, across from the Bookstore, and called my mother back in Ontario weeping that I’d never learn about the Canadian Government and that I was a major fail. It was actually a very hilarious event now that I look back on it.

I eventually found the class a few minutes after it ended. Turns out, I was looking for a classroom number that didn’t exist but I had the right building. I just had to double check my schedule (good one, Erica). I found the class as it was being let out and found this really cool prof in shiny silver Nike sneakers talking to students as they left. I tried not to show that I had been crying but when I approached the prof he just smiled and handed me the syllabus as he understood that I was a first year distraught with fear of failure. Turns out that Poli Sci 101 was my favorite class of first year and I had my highest mark (and first A) in Professor Baier’s class.

So first years, the lesson of this story is not to freak out and call your mother in Ontario and think that the world is going to end because you will fail out of UBC when you can’t find a classroom. And you can always, ALWAYS, trust big bearded men in flannel on campus. Remember those survival techniques. You will do fine.

Until next time,
mama ebakes loves you all. have a good rest of your first week.