After a year of bouncing between Surrey, West End Vancouver, Delta, Burnaby and Downtown (ranging between 40-100km round trips between Surrey and the other locations!) while managing work, school, family, social and romantic lives, I realized that I really didn’t get the ultra cool first year experience that people go home and brag to their families about.
In fact, I actually missed the big concert (??) thing on my first day because my boss at Kumon wanted me to work. I also skimped out on studying for Latin 101 due to having my tutoring job, which sucked because my first assigned grade in term one (since I was taking Arts One and it was a linear course) was a 69%! How horrible that was for someone that had never gotten anything less than an 80% in an arts course before.
Didn’t go to stART up either, because that was way too expensive. Never got to go to a single T-Birds game (even though I bought the First Week kit and it came with a pass to go to any T-Birds game for free). Didn’t attend any First Week events. Never got to go to socials. I missed out on a lot in my first year, now that I look back at it.
It’s unfortunate because I feel like I missed out on so many opportunities to make new friends for reasons such as:
- Financial hardship: Hey, shit doesn’t come easy when you need to pay for your own tuition. I was always worried about not having enough money to pay for tuition and books, therefore I had to stick with my job (at one point I had two jobs!) and spend less time at school.
- Location: Trust me when I say that it’s extremely easy to attend a 6PM club meeting when you live on campus. When you live 1.5 hours away and you still have homework due the next day? Not so much. Apart from being super tired at the end of the day (I have to leave 2 hours before my class starts, and I wake up at least 2 hours before leaving – therefore, if a class starts at 11AM, I still have to wake up at 7AM, which is gross on so many levels), it’s impossible to study on the bus (people who claim they can study are lying, I can feel it). I can’t afford off-campus housing either, so I’m kinda bound to my home.
- Hover parents: Okay, so they’re not super hover-y (is that a word?) but my parents have always been anal about my safety (for good reasons!) but sometimes it gets in the way of living, you feel? They always ask me to come straight home one I’m done class, even though sometimes I want to meet up with friends or study a little at the library.
- Anxiety: The god awful crippling sensation I feel when I try to socialize with people and having them laugh at a potential stammer or pronunciation screw up? No thanks, not into that. I can socialize with people once I get comfortable with them (and if I’m sure they won’t make fun of me for trivial reasons), but until then I’m in a constant state of “?????????? pls save me”.
- Wanting to allocate more time for my significant other: Okay, so I chose this among the other four aspects above. I know there might be a super important person in your life, and you may disagree with me on this (feel free to!), but I had a lot of trouble balancing the four aspects above AND having a partner in my life. I would skip classes, go WAY out of my way to do things with them, and I would always want to prove to them that my interests wouldn’t shift to another person so I never really pushed myself to meet new people in fear they would question my motive for branching out (they posed this concern to me before I started school, and it was always a conscious thought in my mind). Technically I’m not even allowed to date still (???), so it was actually a huge disadvantage to me.
But this year I want to make up for the loss of my budding first year experiences by joining clubs! I found a few clubs on the AMS website and these were a few that caught my eye in particular:
- UBC Cooking Club – I need to learn how to cook anyway, so this could be a great place to branch out and meet new people (who may or may not also need to learn to cook)
- UBC Fashion Club – I’d like to pride myself on being fashionable (it’s just that I’m unable to afford my style, that’s all), so I think that I’ll be able to meet like-minded individuals (and maybe I’ll gain inspiration to start buying chic and start a fashion blog).
- UBC Pre-Education Club – This is probably the most important club I could join seeing as I want to become a teacher someday (and because my majors don’t lead straight into the teaching program’s requirements).
- UBC Jazz Cafe Club – Jazz and food and good company (who probably also enjoy jazz and food)? There’s enough ‘jazz’ in that to convince me to go (sorry, I had to).
- UBC Speech and Linguistics Students Association (SALSA) – Another important club/association I want to belong to since one of my majors will be Linguistics anyway! Maybe I’ll meet somebody that I can talk to about the ever-so-interesting discourse particles that hail from Singapore.
- UBC Yoga Club – Might as well join the hype. You’re not really from Vancouver if you haven’t participated in at least one yoga class and own at least one article of clothing from Lululemon, right?
- UBC English Students Association – Let’s talk about pragmatics? And Shakespeare? And The Great Gatsby? Thanks.
I hope to see these clubs during Club Week! And I want to meet new friends in the process 🙂
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