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Survival of The Wittiest

University Band Aid (UNIBANDAID)

The first year of any university experience can be a positive or negative one, and for many of us, it may be the latter.  Whining and complaining, growling and griping, those are actions that come naturally to first year students attending any high caliber science program in any university.  However, this seems most prevalent in a little school -- perhaps you've heard of it, maybe even read about it, or even thought of setting foot on their sacred ground?  The University of Toronto boasts a fantastic number of undergraduate students.  In fact, back when BIO150 was the landmark first year course, it housed over 1500 students in Convocation Hall, just off of Kings College Circle.  That's how many first year Life Science students the University of Toronto can hold, and that doesn't even account for the BIO150 night classes.  It's not unusual to feel like a number; it's not unusual if the first piece of ID required for examinations is your student number and not your name.  A big school's got to do what a big school's got to do.  And I get how you feel; I get how most people must feel about the school.  I just managed to live on, swim forward and past the grueling (yet, oddly rewarding) years.

How could I possibly know this?  How could I be so well versed in the art of analyzing the administrative and systematic flaws and fashions of the U of T dynamic?  It's simple: I was once a whining, griping, growling, complaining undergraduate at the University of Toronto.  If you don't believe me, you can check out UTRIOT and confirm that I did, indeed, gripe through my first year.  It became somewhat of a tradition after a while, blogging that is (not griping).

I closed UTRIOT after completing my first year of undergrad.  The point of UTRIOT was simply to document the trends and the oscillation of my emotions over time.  I became so obsessed that I even managed to procure a soundtrack of my own: UTSG vs. Suzette.  Great music, I must admit, and made to fit the events that occurred in each semester: chemistry midterm, calculus midterm, lab report, essay, lab quiz, you name it.  After the year passed, the ridiculous almost 40-hour school work weeks and all, I figured I was done with writing about UofT.  It had it's 15 minutes of fame, and I had my say.  My hope was that anyone who felt the same would know they weren't alone.  In a school as big as UofT, you often feel that your misgivings are yours and yours alone; you blame plenty of what happens to your inadequacy and feel isolated.  You all need to get out of Gerstein Library and meet people.  Because then you'd realize how many people think and feel the exact same way, like I did.

Every year, I received a few emails or comments from current students or transferred students.  They often were in a panicked state, wondering if their first bad midterm was indicative of their success at UofT.  Their spirits were broken, their resolve to work harder shattered.  I've never relished in anyone's misfortune, so I found this heartbreaking.  Despite my griping, I had a solid social support network to fall on and so I had that feeling of hope.  A lot of the people who've emailed me did so because they felt like they had reached some sort of turning point, like nothing could be changed.  So, I emailed them back.  I offered any support I could give.

When I recounted these events to a friend of mine, they urged me to make another blog.  I know that the number of hits are likely to be insignificant and I know that few people actually Google: surviving University of Toronto + blogs, but I've made this for the individual who does.  I certainly might have done that in my undergraduate career.

This blog is dedicated to anyone who has lived through a grueling undergraduate experience, for better and for worse.  In it, you'll be able to read some of my awful memories and a lot of my good ones as well.  I'll give advice where I can, but I'm not an expert.  I'm simply a student who found my niche, my pace and survived, for the better (though some may argue that I'm a little nutters).  I hope that university students out there, not just from my alma mater (though I hope you're out there reading this as well), can benefit from my experiences and can learn from my mistakes.  University of Toronto was a hard place to be, but it made me who I am today and I can't say I'm perfect, but I can attribute a lot of my good work ethic to what I endured.

Remember, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  And no, it's not a train.