One of those awful summaries I write to make up for not updating more often

Somehow or other, time has flown by and I’ve been at UBC for over a month.

I’ve sorted out most of my ‘official stuff’: what I like to call tedious, but necessary, matters such as paying my tuition, opening my bank account, buying necessities, and so forth. I went down to East Van — a rather sketchy place, it feels — last week to get my Social Insurance Number (as a Canadian citizen, I need one to open a savings account and I never had one before). My savings account is now open, I’ve been down to the dollar store to buy random things, and I’ve eaten way too many bananas in the past week.

For the record, I’m really glad that I came for ASSIST. Although I left earlier than most of my friends and shortened my golden summer, it gave me a head start on getting used to UBC and has helped me make a fairly smooth transition so far. I’m way more familiar with the resources and the campus layout than if I had just come for IMAGINE, or even GALA, but most importantly, it was a great way of meeting people, particularly since I didn’t really know (m)any people coming to UBC. (My own set of secondary school friends are mostly split between the UK and Toronto.)

So to any prospective students out there, I do recommend coming early to UBC. I count as a domestic student, but I’ve lived outside of Canada for as long as I can remember, so I felt more like an international student than anything else when I first came.

Returning to the topic of meeting people, I find it somewhat more difficult to make friends with people in my classes. This is mostly because when you’re in a lecture hall or even a smaller class, you don’t really get to chat with the person next to you and have lots of deep conversations. The person next to you may also change each time you go to class. Then, of course, people are rushing to and from their previous or next classes so conversations are limited to a hurried ‘Hello!’ and ‘Goodbye!’ Making friends in classes is, for me, slow going.

Which is why I’m looking forward to Clubs Week next week. I think everyone should go. As I’m only doing four courses this term, I seem to have a lot of free time on my hands. (This is bad for my studying as I procrastinate when there is very little to do. Classes go at a slightly faster pace than the IB, but I don’t yet feel as challenged. Yet.) There are a lot of clubs that I’m interested in and I want to join about three, give or take. Is it sad that I’m mentally categorizing clubs in terms of CAS (Creativity, Action, Service)? It is. Curse you, vestiges of the IB. You’ve changed me irrevocably.