Durham Cathedral and the River Wear

Welcome aboard HMS Durham, bound for the British city of the same name! This is my inaugural blog post so I’d love to take the time to introduce myself, say what this blog is for, and maybe talk a bit about myself and how I ended up writing this.

First things first my name is Mackenzie Lockhart and I’m a third year student at the University of British Columbia.  I’m majoring in Psychology and Political Science and looking to graduate in 2016.  I was born and raised in Vancouver and have lived here all my life.  I have a twin brother, Angus, as well as an older brother and sister.  I’m sure you’ll find out more about my family as this blog goes on!  Come late September I’ll be packing my bags and heading out to the beautiful historic city of Durham in northern England to study at Durham University for 9 months (269 days to be exact).

So what’s the point of this blog? Well I guess there are a few.  First, and for me most importantly, this blog will be a record of my adventures.  Nine months abroad might seem like a long time but it will be over before I know it and I’ll need a way to remember it. Some people keep journals while on Exchange, but me? I’ll be keeping this blog.  Hopefully knowing people are reading this will help keep me posting!

But I’m not just keeping this blog for myself! I’m also using it as a way to keep in touch with my friends and family I’ll be leaving behind.  There are just too many people I love for me to tell each and every one of them about everything I do, even if I spent every night dutifully Skyping.  Facebook is great but as a medium for sharing in depths thoughts and feelings as well as long stories, it becomes cluttered and less useful.  It also doesn’t let people look back at my older posts very well! So this blog will have to do.

There’s one more reason I’m blogging and it’s not quite as obvious.  I’m blogging because hopefully this blog can become a resource for future students looking to go to Durham University on an exchange, from UBC and from elsewhere.  By recording and sharing my experience with the world at large I hope that next year or the year after or even ten years from now, someone stumbles across this blog and decides to follow in my footsteps.

So that’s why I’m writing this, but how did I get here? No, I’m not philosophizing.  I mean how did I get from being just a UBC student looking to graduate to being a UBC student facing a year abroad and blogging about it! Now the whole story of my exchange up to this point is pretty long, so I’ll save that for another day.  For now I’ll keep it brief.  I can’t remember exactly what happened to make me first consider exchange, but I remember that it happened in about October of this year.  I wasn’t really sure I wanted to go on exchange at the time, but nevertheless I spent hours looking over Go Global’s (UBC’s exchange coordinator) website.  I looked at dozens of different universities all across Europe.

At first I wanted to go to France, I even started working on my application based on wanting to go to Science Po in Grenoble.  Then I stumbled across this interesting university I had never heard of in England called ‘Durham University’.  What really stood out to me was the college system the university had.  Every student is placed in one of 15 colleges located around the city.  These colleges serve as residences as well as communities for students.  Each has a unique history, unique traditions, unique features, and is a unique experience for students.  The promise of community captivated me.  I was enthralled by the possibility of being a part of a foreign community and from then on Durham University was where I wanted to go.

After that, a lot of what was left was to be patient and wait.  Wait after submitting one application so I could be accepted and submit the next. Months passed before finally, on June 18th, I was accepted to Durham University.  Eight months after I had decided where I wanted to go, I could finally say with confidence that I would be spending the next year at Durham University.

That’s the absolute shortest summary I could do – you can be sure it was a more exciting 8 months than I make it out to be, but alas that is too much for this simple blog post.  I’ll end this, my first blog post, with a challenge for you, the reader.  Going on exchange, while being incredibly exciting, terrifies me.  It terrifies me more than anything I’ve ever done and that’s what makes it so exciting for me.  So reader, I challenge to do something that scares you.  Do something you would not usually do, something way out of character. Expand your horizons.  The world is beautiful and it’s yours to discover.

Yours in blogging,

Dude Does Durham.