Lets start from the very beginning. A very good place to start.

Today was a beginning for most but not for me. Going into my second year, I was a wise guide to the new guppies that are entering the big sea of UBC. I promised that I didn’t bite.

What a strange nostalgia, I felt today, as if I had suddenly grown up and I was no longer allowed to feel nervous, anxious and excited for school anymore. I had to be a grown up today and know everything. Which I don’t.

As we walked around campus today, I gave the best advice I could to the newcomers whose eyes were keen and wondering, and whose brains were hungry for answers. It was honest and true, personal and experience-based. But I wondered all day, what makes me the expert?

We arrived at the pep rally, faced with a stadium filled with 8,000 students new to UBC. I remember it exactly as if it were a year ago. Actually, it was. I remember feeling nervous, scared, excited, confused, happy, sad, inspired and everything that is in between. And today, I don’t know if I felt that much different.

My first year was a year of growing, one of which I learned an abundance of things about myself and about the life I may want to live. As an Orientations leader today, I was a leader and guide, as a second year student. But I realize that I was not an expert, nor was I expected to be. Because we are all growing up, every day of our lives. Is there even such a thing as all grown up? Every experience will be new in some way or another, with another perspective that just kaleidoscopes our lives a little more. After sending off my little birds to fly to the Main Event today, I felt a little bit older and experienced I suppose. But I was treading in the little foot steps of my first year self as I made my way to 99 bus stop, which made me smile.