imagine

September 4th, 2018

At 6am the alarm blares through my room and I slide myself out of bed. I get dressed, brush my teeth, and have some breakfast before heading out the door. My bus comes pretty quickly and I glance at my phone and am pleasantly surprised to see I'm ahead of schedule. When I get to the skytrain station I shoot a message to the group chat with Phil and Sarah, asking them if they've arrived yet. They respond that they just got off the bus and that's when I realize that when they said they have to meet at 7:30am they meant on campus.

I mentally slap myself on the wrist for being dumb and buckle up for the rest of the trip. To add on, I'm actually running behind schedule and should be on campus by 8:00am. I text my leader and let them know that I will be late and spend a good chunk of the trip staring at Google Maps location. Ultimately I arrive at 8:22am, and while it isn't the end of the world (the students are supposed to arrive at 8:30am for check-in), I'm still disappointed in myself.

The rest of the morning goes much better and I finally get to connect the names I've been emailing for the past month to a face. We head out on the campus tour I roughly hashed out yesterday and although it feels like I'm talking at them for most of the tour they seem to get along with each other just fine. The tour I give them is pretty cookie cutter, but it's difficult to do anything particularly special for Computer Science transfer students - there are literally two comp sci buildings on campus and they're right next to each other.

After the tour my group and I head over to Doug Mitchell for a classic welcoming from the dean of science. We have a panel of experienced transfer students come up for some questions and once we're done with that we head over to one of the aforementioned comp sci buildings for the department hosted lunch. I let my group have free reign at that point after letting them know how the lunch worked, but to my surprise three of them ask to stick around!

We each grab a hot dog, a bag of chips, and a can of pop, and start to look for a spot to eat. I find a table close by with some other students eating there and I ask them if we could join them. We all introduce ourselves and I find out that two of the students are actually second years and had graduated from Mountain.

Some of the other Transfer Orientation Leaders (TOLs for short) joined us, their groups having gone off on their own way, and we talked about courses and such. I gained a lot of insight from the older TOLs and I'm really happy that they came to join us for lunch. They finished up lunch and then they asked me if I'd like to join them to see what clubs were out on Main Mall. To be honest I was thinking that they would leave me behind, so I can't tell you how happy I was to hear them ask that.

Our newly founded group walk down Main Mall and we have a blast checking out all the different groups. I feel like I'm brand new to the school and I regain a sense of the wonder and awe that I had when I was participating in my Imagine Day. We make a quick stop at Abdul Ladha to drop off our signs (we had been holding onto signs with our program name on it) and outside the building S wins a raffle. J meets up with us outside the bookstore and we continue to explore the campus.

We check out what the rest of Main Mall has to offer and after D suggests that we sit down we enter the EOSC building. There I do a cool little personality test with them and in general it's a good time with them. A and K, two other TOLs meet up with us and shortly the other TOLs and I head back to Abdul Ladha to set up for the team social later today.

To be honest there isn't much to set up and most of us spend the remaining time before the team social starts "play testing" the games. I have a lot of fun playing Jenga with B and then Settlers of Catan with the other TOLs from EOSC. When the students arrived we have ice cream and it looks like everybody is having a good time.

Of course the event eventually ends and we start clean up. As we're cleaning up Settlers of Catan the other TOLs talk about how much fun they had playing and we agree to meet up sometime and play again.

Afterwards I meet up with Ja, Je, and Sha so that we can fulfill our plan of going out for dinner together. J from earlier is meeting up with us at the restaurant so we grab seats first. We're seated and the whole night passes by in a blur, but it was a really cozy time and even though we were all relatively new acquaintances it feels like we all get along well. Once we're done eating J kindly drives Sha home and I head home along with Ja and Je.

=====

I feel really proud to be a UBC Science student and a UBC student at all. I'm really fortunate and happy that my orientation group was willing to talk and seemed genuinely happy and engaged at UBC. I hope that I had a positive impact on them and I think back to the words that one of the engagement officers said,

"They won't remember you for what you said, but for how you made them feel."

henlo

So I've been meaning to write this post since the beginning of summer but I think that putting it off until now has helped me further understand the topic.

=====

When the summer first started I was a lonely and lost boy. To some degree I still am, but much less so now. Networks like Snapchat and Instagram amplified my feelings of social mediocrity yet I continued to stare longingly at the vibrant lives of those around me. I felt like my life was colourless and bland in comparison to those that my friends led.

If I were to pinpoint one specific thing that shifted my mentality, it would have to be Canada Day.

I was invited to a barbecue + sleepover at my friend's house and this invitation came out of the blue to me. The friend group was one that I was familiar with, but I didn't think we were close enough to be invited. I was pleasantly surprised and I remember thinking This is how I get that colourful life.

The get together was great and I ended up sleeping over despite not planning to (my first sleepover at another person's house). We spent a lot of time outside just listening to music and talking, and overall it was a very cozy and comfortable environment to be in. The morning after we made a pilgrimage to IHOP and had a nice breakfast together.

While it sounds like pretty standard fare, the party was important to me because it deglorified the lives of others. I had only ever seen these friends through the filters of social media, so spending some quality time with them helped me realize that my life is just as interesting as theirs are. Perhaps it's not even a good train of thought to compare the quality of our lives like so.

Regardless, I had a blast and this event kicked to life some friendships and strengthened some that were not as strong before, and for that I am eternally grateful.

=====

There is another friend group that I have, though as time passes it feels as though we grow more distant. They are the friends of my ex-girlfriend. Only last summer did I hang out with them no less than three times a week, and I'll be damned if that wasn't a fun summer. However after the breakup the physical act of even being with them was difficult. It was always obvious that they would choose her over me, but it didn't lessen the blow.

For a while this had me feeling really low, but as I met more and more people in my life, I found that maybe they are not the close friends I was looking for. Their entire culture and dynamic is incredibly different from mine, and while I had dismissed this as my fault in the past, I know now that I just don't agree with some things that they do.

They're all great people and they mean well, but they're probably not (and they haven't been) the people I want to spend time with the most. I blindly assumed that because they were friends of my partner at the time that they would be what I need, but that has changed after some introspection and critical thinking of myself.

=====

This all sounds good and all, "Wow Kevin had a epiphany, he must feel great," but that couldn't be further from reality. Writing this feels difficult because it feels like I am speaking poorly of the people I really did consider my closest friends when I mean anything but that. I still care for you all and I do enjoy hanging out with you!

- Kevin