By: Erica Baker

Here’s a good story about my first day of classes.

Things were going well. I had successfully found all of my classes throughout the day without any prep beforehand. Hebb was a little bit difficult of a building to track down, but I did it all on time and with big smiles. That was until my last class of the day, Poli Sci 101, came along.

I couldn’t find Poli Sci 101 and I only had the ten minutes in between French in Buchanan and Poli Sci somewhere in the Chemistry building to find it. I started to ask random students walking by if they knew where my class was. I chose to ask guys that were in flannel (trustworthy survival skills at work) or had nice orange haired beards. None of them could help me find my class and just giggled. I didn’t mind, they looked cool as always.

It was now a half hour into my class. All I wanted to do was learn about the Canadian government and I couldn’t even find the classroom to do so. I couldn’t argue with anyone about policy or Harper, at minimum to say it was very depressing. I stood on the corner of University and East Mall, across from the Bookstore, and called my mother back in Ontario weeping that I’d never learn about the Canadian Government and that I was a major fail. It was actually a very hilarious event now that I look back on it.

I eventually found the class a few minutes after it ended. Turns out, I was looking for a classroom number that didn’t exist but I had the right building. I just had to double check my schedule (good one, Erica). I found the class as it was being let out and found this really cool prof in shiny silver Nike sneakers talking to students as they left. I tried not to show that I had been crying but when I approached the prof he just smiled and handed me the syllabus as he understood that I was a first year distraught with fear of failure. Turns out that Poli Sci 101 was my favorite class of first year and I had my highest mark in Professor Baier’s class.

Now, I’m at the end of my fourth year. It’s all gone by so fast. Sometimes, I walk up the stairs behind MacMillan and am reminded by the first time I walked that way through campus with my new friends from my residence floor. Sometimes I think of the bouncy bushes that used to be, the old UPASS cards that had your photograph on them, and a time when the AMS wrote a human rights letter to the UN.

Things at UBC change so quickly. In the time you will be here for your degree, multiple buildings will disappear without a trace and new ones will pop up in their spot. Soon, most of the core of campus will be unrecognizable and the UPASS, again, will change its look. I wish I could relive the whole experience again. UBC has been the greatest experience of my life and the special thing about great experiences is that they can only happen once, so don’t forget to appreciate every bit of it.

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