Day One: Luck

I cannot get over how lucky I am at the moment. Right now I am sitting in my brand new room in my brand new building in Totem Park. Today was whirlwind of a day, running around trying to buy all of those last extra things, hauling everything out into the car and driving out to UBC with my sister eager to find my new home. Finding it, and bringing three large suitcases, five boxes, three bags and a bike up into my room. Unpacking all of the carefully folded clothes and trying to devise a way of fitting them into the drawers provided. Meeting suitemates, floormates, housemates, and other undergraduates all at once. Walking around with new friends. Going to the cafeteria and waiting in the line for dinner. Floor meeting. And finally going out to a toga frat party wearing pillowcases… First official undergraduate must that has been checked off of my list! I am lucky for so many reasons and although I am often unlucky too, right now I can only think of the lucky things. The whole year seems to be stretching out in front of me, so much to do and so many possibilities.

Day Two: Not quite so lucky!

Second day of Totem: This morning I woke up after four hours sleep and pulled myself out of bed. Wearily I dragged myself into the bathroom only to find out 15 minutes later that our shower does not work. Another thing to add to my small list of “room issues”.  Topping the list right now is the lack of internet in my room… You just do not realize how dependent you are on internet until it is gone!!! With the the IT department in my room for what felt like close to an hour, it still is not fixed. So I am having to hijack other people’s ports while waiting until Tuesday before anyone is working again. Also unlike our other floor mates our room upon arrival was missing a variety of essential things such as garbage cans and toilet paper. Fortunately my roommate and I figured things out!

Anyways other than that I had a fabulous day, breakfast in the cafeteria is delicious (they have excellent oatmeal), and walking/ riding around campus with new friends to get the rest of the essentials (large mirror, lab coats & goggles, e.t.c.) was fun. Everyone here is really nice, friendly and very, very international!  Tomorrow morning I am going to walk around campus and find out exactly where my classes will be held before going to Wreck Beach!

Some things to bring to residence:
– Clothes, but not too many. space is very limited so try to keep it to one suitcase
*remember to bring a swimsuit, there is a beach and a couple of pool parties
– hangers
– over the door coat hook
– extra shelving if possible
– laundry basket and detergent
– plastic bags for garbage
– bathroom necessities including toilet paper and cleaning supplies
– chargers for computers, cameras and phones
– pictures of friends and family
– anything to personalize your room
– ethernet cable
– printer (not really necessary), can be purchased at Future Shop for as little as $30, but make sure that you bring paper and ink if it is not included
– umbrella and rain boots
– bike (if you can bring one)
– bath mat if you are in a shared residence
– possibly a mirror to keep in your room

There is also more detailed residence checklist available here: http://www.housing.ubc.ca/files/van/pdf/resident_section/what_to_bring.pdf

Places to get things on campus (that I have found so far):
-The Dollar Store in the village has garbage cans, mirrors, plastic storage containers e.t.c. for reasonable prices
–Shoppers Drugmart (close to the Dentistry building)
-There is also a Staples in the Village
-During move in day Home Hardware was selling items in the commonsblock
-The UBC Bookstore sells nearly everything you can imagine.
–Save-On Foods is also nearby

Tomorrow is Imagine Day and classes fully start on Tuesday! <3

p.s. This is also my first official post as a member of the blogsquad! I am really excited to continue writing throughout the year and looking forward to meeting everyone else soon!

My two bags a three boxes have morphed into, 3 suitcases, 4 boxes and a bike. My boxes are elegantly held together with duct tape (which is useless on cardboard), and I am trying to figure out how to label my suitcases with my room number (paper and more duct tape?). Somehow I have managed to come down with a last minute cold, cannot stop sneezing for the life of me and although I am really excited to get going half of me is questioning things. I’ve already received emails from 3 of my professors with mini assignments… Well not really: reading 50 pages for PHYS (which I have done along with the exercises), setting up accounts for CPSC (total disaster), and reading the PSYC syllabus. Not actually bad at all, but I was surprised that we were being contacted before classes even started! The internet is a dangerous thing! Anyways along with being excited I am also nervous hence the newest ramble:

Tomorrow I move into residence, tomorrow I start with university life, tomorrow I meet the people that I will be living with for a year, and I am shaking. The last time I felt like this was before I jumped off a cliff.

Climbing up the cliff was fine, I had no concerns until I was about to jump. Looking down into the water 13m below me I analyzed how I was to hit the water….I could do this… Minimize the area of impact … stay perpendicular… g=9.8 m/s^2… My legs suddenly felt weak and I wasn’t entirely sure if I could jump out far enough not to hit the rocks. After a couple of false starts I went, and half way through the air I started to scramble. Suddenly my mind decided that the water did not look all that inviting. My legs flew up as if they were trying to escape but gravity persisted, I crashed into the surface. Under the icy water I realized that I had made a big mistake. I could not move my legs, they were completely numb and locked from the hit. As I floated upwards I could already feel the bruising… face hot from humiliation I was helped up onto the boat. I could barely sit down on a hard surface for a week…

I am suddenly apprehensive about going to university full-time. My bags are packed. Plans all laid out. Everything looks perfect, fully financed, fully organized. After my first university exam this summer my prof remarked that she did not think that I would have a problem in school. In pencil I read 95% and “I see a successful future for you”, but felt the exact opposite way. It can’t get much better than that, “downhill slope here I come”. After leaving the examination room I should have felt happy but I was shaky. Putting a bar up high and expecting to jump over it is just like climbing off a cliff and expecting to land well. The future is unpredictable. No matter how far high you climb, how well you plan, how strong your mindset, there is always random chance. And although random chance can be minimized it is always there. Chance is no stranger, yet it always seems to take me by surprise. I am sure this year there will be many ups and downs, but please, Chance, let me land on my feet. <3

Finally my mark popped up on my SSC today and I am was really surprised to receive an A+.  Anyways for any other first years who are required to take the course but are not too sure about what it is like, here is some information for studying e.t.c. Please take it with a grain of salt:

What is ASTU?

ASTU stands for Arts Studies in Writing, from my interpretation it is basically an English course where you are taught the more practical aspects of “scholarly writing” by looking at research papers rather than novels e.t.c.

What was ASTU like?

My course was really nice (I know, ambiguous). Let me explain: It was tiny, we started off with about 14 people in the course and for some reason each week less and less people showed up, so the class size dwindled to 9. Normally I think the class size is 30 but this is still small for a University course…Most of my courses next year have about 300 people in them. We also only met once a week for three hours of which we did not really need the whole time. The course material was fairly simple and I often felt like we had more than enough time to cover everything. So even though I was a little sad that we only met once a week (everyone in the course was really interesting and friendly) I could not imagine meeting three times a week for the same course.

In the course we learnt how to write in a “scholarly” fashion. We learnt how to write a summary, lit. review, research proposal, and research paper. We also learnt how to analyze other academic writing and understand the functions of academic writing. One of the best things I though about the course was that we were encouraged to read research papers. As a high school student I literally never came across this type of thing…. and if I did I probably skimmed over it or scanned it for useful information. However, by being forced to read research papers I actually started understanding them a little better. I also think that this helped me a lot when I finally wrote my own.

What books did we use?

We read Academic Writing an Introduction by Janet Giltrow and the Broadview Pocketbook for Writers. Although the text book was easy to read and understand some of the terms such as “the Knowledge Making I” seemed like they were pulled from thin air as I could not find any more information on them anywhere. Also the idea of “making nonsense to make sense” really does not make any sense to me at all, c’est la vie, does anything make sense?

What did I learn?

I (and most of the others in the class) felt like our instructor was really good at marking our assignments. She often did this by asking questions about unclear things e.t.c. and stating the good and the bad. This helped me figure out where my academic writing was weak. I learnt that my writing is often quite vague and that I need to sandwich a lot more examples into my essays instead of expecting the reader to follow along. Other people found out that their writing was far to detailed e.t.c. so it was really nice to have all that individual attention in a Uni course. As I stated before I found the exposure to the research genre also quite eye opening. One day I went down into the journal section of Koerner library and just browsed through journal articles for a while. As a naive first year I been through all 12 years of mandatory schooling without actually reading a proper journal article before… I really wonder how some of the journals can survive as I cannot imagine that they attract a large audience.

Review Sheet

 This is not a substitute for going to class, actually it probably will not make sense if you have not attended class, but I made this while I was reviewing for my final (basically a compressed version of my notes). Please use it as you like… if any information is wrong just tell me and if you would like to add to it please do so below!

Genre Theory = Situation + Form

– different situations require different forms -> different genres

Primary research: your own research

Secondary research: the research of others

How to Write an Effective Summary:

Use gist, higher level abstractions, lower level details, reported speech, citations

Key Aspects of a Summary: RMFFSK (not necessarily in this order just a mnenomic for the key aspects)

Research site

Methods

Focus

Findings

State of Knowledge

Knowledge Gap

Differences between citation, reported speech and reporting expressions

Citation: blah, blah, blah, blah (Soandso 197)

Direct Reported Speech- uses a quote: Soandso said “blah, blah, blah” (197)

Indirect Reported Speech- Summarizes what someone has said on a topic while still indicating the speaker: Sonandso effectively said nothing (197)

Reporting Expressions -He said “blah, blah, blah” (Soandso 197)

Anything that indicates that someone has said something, underlined above

Use a tree diagram to figure out your argument! Go from higher to lower levels. *I hate tree diagrams! Highest and lowest levels seem ambiguous to me, in the end everything is usually intertwined somehow.. right, but for the purpose of this course*

The world

|

The people

|

Their thoughts

/           \

Yes          No

/                \

Mr. Yes           Mr. No

Remember to report reporting!

Definitions:

-Create or reinforce common knowledge

– Sometimes used to box in a complicated term (or one that has many meanings) “For the purpose of this study we define students as human beings that go to an elementary, secondary or post-secondary school for more than 5 hours per week)

Types of Definition:

Apposition: putting an equivalent expression beside the term being defined often using: i.e , – ; “” ( ) :

Formal definition: sounds like a dictionary… narrows view

Sustained definition: places term by locating it amongst other phenomena… expands view (adds context)

Nominal Style: lots of long noun phrases!

– can create ambiguity

– leaves the rest of the sentence free

– increases the “density” of the sentence

– creates failed then revised hypothesis sequences

-> purpose: stabilization

Tenses:

Past: I was

Present: I am

Present Perfect: has ___________ed

Present Progressive: is ________ing

I hope this helps, obviously it does not cover anything in detail and I think that different classes might have slightly different slants on everything. Good luck in ASTU 150!