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.

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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."