(Or, More Information About Me Than You Could Ever Possibly Need)
I’m Helen, a first year UBC student in Arts, enrolled in the CAP stream Law and Society.
I chose CAP because I chose UBC, and let’s be clear: I never thought I’d choose UBC. My dream growing up was to graduate and then get the hell away from home, take a gap year and then go to a tiny liberal arts college in the states. My dream school was St. John’s in Annapolis, Maryland, a school with around 475 students and a student to faculty ratio of 1 to 8, in which all students took the same courses that students have been taking there since the school was founded, the same courses that all of their peers were taking as well. I was determined not to be a number.
UBC couldn’t be any further from my dream, but somewhere along the line, it became the new dream. A few days before my twelfth grade year started I decided to home-school myself, distance-ed with a local traditional learning organisation. I settled down that fall to study for four AP exams and three languages in the hopes of turning my academic career around. I had no idea of what lay in wait.
In October, I read a book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. Presenting the story of the clash of the culture and beliefs of a Hmong family with an epileptic daughter and that of the American medical system, the book changed my life. I’m passionate about many things, and one of them is preventing and solving needless problems. I fell in love, then, with the idea of cultural mediation, led by Fadiman to the inescapable conclusion that someone was and is desperately needed to intervene between western cultures and minorities. Whether I will be a mediator, or another researcher pushing the still-emergent field of cultural mediation further, I’ve yet to determine. Maybe I’ll fall in love with something else entirely, nothing is ever set in stone.
That fall, I also fell in love with Vancouver. I made several friendships that I really value, and just before I jetted off on the year I wanted to spend away from home post-graduation, I decided I would stay in the city for school. Getting into UBC sealed the deal- I was planning (and still plan) to major in Anthropology, and that made UBC the most logical choice. The rest, as some would say, is history. I was still determined not to be a number, so, CAP. And I wanted to take at least one inside of major course for first year, so Law & Society, with Intro to Cultural Anthropology, was the most logical choice.
And here I am. Still not sure I’ve made all the right decisions, but by and large, content with where I’m at.
Academia is an odd and alien discipline. But blogging is something warm and familiar, and thus far this has been a great place to gather my thoughts.
HEADER IMAGE IS NOT MINE; find it and other similar images at http://simoncpage.co.uk/blog/2012/03/ipad-hd-retina-wallpaper/