Month: September 2003
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4th Year: What The Hell Am I Doing Here?
I picked my school by process of elimination. I toured universities and joked that I would be choosing where to go in the fall based on which school had the nicest swimming pool. After settling on an institution, I picked my major by process of elimination.
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Suddenly Blue is my Favourite Colour
When I arrived at Laurier on the first day of Orientation week, I was scared. I was far away from home, surrounded by people I didn’t know, and living on my own for the first time. I couldn’t help feeling like I was in over my head. Fortunately, this did not last long.
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‘Fun’: Frosh Week Apparently Pretty Weak
Ah, university. The hallowed halls of higher learning. A place where knowledge is shared, intellect fostered. Well, if you were to stumble upon a university campus during the first week of September, it might seem that this description is sadly idealistic. Making a judgment based solely on that week would leave one with the impression…
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Rules of Set: 2nd Annual AFF Betters Itself
The Aspirations Film Festival allows Canadian students to showcase their films, perhaps on the road toward greater success in the film industry. The festival is in its second year, with a four-day event in Waterloo that ran from September 25 to 28, as well as a two-day event at a new venue in Toronto on…
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My House Is A Mess
Am I paying tuition to hear my professors or to hear the banging-away of construction workers? Apparently they’re packaged together like extended cable, so even though all you want is Teletoon you have to take the Discovery Channel with it. My professors are forced to compete with the noise, but sadly they’re no match against…
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Save Up, Kids: Now Even More So
A spectre is haunting post-secondary education: the spectre of deregulation. Although I wish I could continue on to say that all the Great Powers of Canada have joined together to exorcise this demon, I’d be lying, because students are essentially by themselves and isolated on this one. The fact that post-secondary education in Canada is…
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Equal Benefit
It would be okay in here if it weren’t for the smell, I think. Well, that and the fact that we have next to no functional heating system. I rub my chapped, blue-tinged hands together and stick them doggedly in my armpits, as if in desperate defense against the icy, pervasive fingers of chill as…
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High Class: “True, some people come just to smoke up”
It is 4:20 on a Wednesday afternoon and a circle of smoke is forming at the communal fountain of the University of Victoria. You are a first-year student, new from Ontario, and you poke through the crowd to see what’s going on. You are passed a fat joint.
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Tunnels and Locked Doors
A couple of weeks ago, my roommate called me into his room to show me a document he had found on the internet. It was written by a guy named Rick (probably a pseudonym) who, four or five years ago, had infiltrated the tunnels and corridors beneath WLU. As a student here, I knew that…
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Conscientiousness
Wilfrid Laurier’s picture is on the 5 dollar bill largely because of his appeal as a moderate and a champion of compromise, which kept him in the PM’s office for 15 years around the turn of the century. He is Jean Chretien’s personal hero, this country’s first Francophone Prime Minister, a man who had to…