My name is Nina and I am fourth-year Arts student majoring in Psychology. I was born and raised in Japan for 18 years, and then I moved to Canada by myself for studying abroad. Currently, I live in Japan and taking all course online and I am planning to graduate this summer.

My academic interest has been going this way and that. At the very beginning of my academic life, I was interested in philosophy and sociology. My interest was to know what is the fundamental meaning of life, and how people can find it. However, after spending couple years of learning basic English skills and taking various courses in community college, I started to change my mind. I realized that I am more interested in how people can live mindfully and I decided to major in psychology when I transferred to UBC.

When I transferred to UBC, the pandemic starts. Until this moment, I had been planning to be a counselling psychologist, but the chaotic society and the stay-home days made me start to rethink about my life. After spending a year of online student life in Vancouver, I decided to go back to Japan and started my own business in online entertainment services. It has been almost a year since I started the business, and it has been going better than I expected. Now, I am planning to build a global fan base to make it bigger. It is true that my academic interest is almost gone at this point, but I hope this course would be helpful to develop my career in the future.