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August 27th, 2010 • Academics, Student Life

I feel the same way about first blog posts as I do about the first page in a new notebook- it seems to demand some supernatural breed of witticism to set the tone. I’ve been backspacing half-hearted sentences for half an hour now (after postponing it with twenty minutes of choosing a theme which, let’s be honest now, is the best part of creating a blog) to try and come up with something good for my inaugural post but I’m still drawing a blank… makes a compelling case for why I’m not an Arts student!

I suppose that no blog is complete without an introduction for a bit of context- my name is Sara and it is a pleasure to meet you. I am a third year Computer Science student, and my path to UBC hasn’t been the most traditional. After graduating from high school, I worked as an oil painter for two years, shared a studio with some brilliant artists and paid the bills (the Starbucks ones, anyways) by selling my stuff in gallery shows. However, the nerd in me was getting anxious without the structure and constant stress of school and so I applied for and was accepted to both Emily Carr University and Sheridan College (in Ontario). Though not my first choice, I ended up going to Emily Carr on the pretence of staying closer to home for awhile, but my year-long stint there rendered the left side of my brain painfully underused and I applied to UBC to study astrophysics.

After my first semester and a particularly painful bout of Physics 101, I realized that physics was better-suited as a hobby for me (read: I pretty much sucked). To my great fortune, though, I had taken CPSC 111 in the summer as a “fun elective” and enjoyed it so much that I figured I would fill my first year at UBC with a few second-year Computer Science courses (since I had a considerable amount of room in my schedule). Lo and behold, I fell in love with it and am now a full-fledged computer geek.

For the next six minutes, there are officially two weeks left until the beginning of the school year. From past experience, this would be about the time of the year when I start crawling up the walls from utter boredom and yet this year, powering down my synapses and being intellectually sluggish for the past few weeks has been absolutely satisfying. (That is, despite the fact that I’ve managed to go another summer without going camping, which I am kicking myself for.) The first couple of months of summer were full of Calculus III and TAing for a couple of Computer Science courses and my fall term will be anything but sluggish, so perhaps this should just be viewed as the calm before the storm.

I sort of miss that feeling of intense anticipation that I had last year, though. Last August, I was preening in my new UBC sweater and arranging all my books just so. (Don’t you love that new textbook smell?). Maybe it just hasn’t sunk in yet that third year is almost upon me- or it could be that my subconscious mind is desperately trying to keep me from mulling on the fact that I am going to have to endure four painful months of honours math. Either way, this new school year is going to be an exciting one and I’m looking forward to sharing it with my fellow Blog Squad writers and readers alike!

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