It has been just over three weeks since school started, and already, my first midterm is coming up on Monday, I have handed in one essay and am puking out the second, handed in un brouillon de rédaction, and failed miserably at my first quiz.

I have dreamed about going to UBC for so long that I don’t even remember when I first came up with the idea or why I thought about it in the first place, but it was always something I included in my bucket lists. It was also something I just took for granted. I never seriously considered any other option. I was always a planner: just like I knew all the courses I was going to take in high school since grade 9 started, UBC was just always on the to do list. There’s still something so surreal about being at school every day. It still hits me sometimes that studying here is a dream.

My Arts One seminar prof told a room of 20 presumably high achieving students today that a low B on our first essays should be thought of as an A+. The tension in the room after he said that was tangible. He gave us a very small laugh and said that basically the honeymoon period is coming to a close.

I don’t know, though. I was sitting on the 84 today today, staring at the Student Recreation Centre and the Waffle Building (aka Buch Tower) in the distance, a few hours after I had gotten my miserable failure of a first math quiz back (thank goodness workshop quizzes are worth only 10% of 10% of the overall course mark, but unfortunately, I think the miserable failure of a first math quiz was a bad omen for the future), and I texted my boyfriend: I still don’t believe I get to go to school here.

School is hard. Arts One is a lot of work (even if it is work that I love doing). Math is hard. French is… tedious. But I love every moment of it. Even when I am struggling, even when I am bored, I am so happy.

I’d heard la vie en rose before, of course, but I really, really listened to it a week ago, and I discovered that it’s probably the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard! (I use it as my reward whenever I get a WeBWorK question right.)

I think I’m never going to stop seeing ma vie en rose, particularly not as long as I’m at UBC. No matter how difficult it gets, no matter how close to tears it drives me, I dreamed of this, and it’s lived up to that dream so far. I didn’t dream of a honeymoon, after all. I dreamed of the University of British Columbia, and every hurdle that comes with it.