albert – Life @ U of T

In Which I Close a Chapter

ALT="My friend looking back standing next to his car" — I've finished looking back for now.

It's hard to believe we're at the end of the year. I feel like I say this every end of April, but school went by so fast; scarily fast. It seems like just last week I was putting on boots and trudging through the snow-- oh wait, that was last week! Jokes aside (though Canadian weather is not a joke sometimes), I wanted to squeeze out one last blog post for the wonderful folks who read my work all year. This blog post will be my advice to you consisting of the 4 most important lessons I've learned in my third year at this wonderful university.

In Which I Write a Letter to First Year Me

ALT="A girl staring off into the distance"

Hey, It's been a while.

In Which Change is Not a Bad Thing

ALT="A sunset" — Things did not go well into the sunset

When I first got to university, I was convinced that I knew my path in life; things would go swimmingly. I was going to finish strongly academically with a degree in history and cinema studies, move on to do graduate school and eventually become a filmmaker or get a job within the film industry. I had no time to think about pursuing extracurriculars or consider my hobbies as important or even get into a romantic relationship. I had a concrete route and I wasn’t planning on exploring the woods around me. But a year later, I slowly got involved with my student council. I started seriously taking up and practicing photography, changing my plans for what I wanted to do after university with every photo session I couldn’t help booking. I had adamantly told myself that I wasn’t going to date in university, and I went and got myself a partner.

In Which I Survive Election Season

It's that time of year again. You probably have seen it: posters of smiling faces scattered all around campus, Facebook advertisements and endorsements all over your news feed, people stopping you on your walk to class to ask if they could just take five minutes of your time. Yep, I'm talking about election season.

In Which I Attend a Leadership Conference

ALT="a photo of a dark path" — Learning how to lead can be as forboding and intimidating as a dark path

For students new to it, learning how to lead can be hard, not to mention intimidating. Even for students with some experience, leading is a concept that isn’t the most intuitive. Are you supposed to just take charge in every group assignment? Make sure your voice is the loudest? Delegate responsibility until all that’s left is you as supreme overlord of the Sith and—ok, maybe not that last point. The truth is, leadership is something so dynamic and diverse that there isn’t a single way to learn it. That was one of the main guiding principles behind this conference I attended last Saturday called UConnect, a leadership conference based in University College.

In Which I Keep Falling Asleep in Class

ALT="A photo of me sleeping" — This is me but everywhere I go

With a new year, the old problems don’t disappear.

In Which I Attend The Hart House Literary Fair (An Editor’s Perspective)

January air is brisk, chilly, but full of promise. Maybe it’s the prospect of a new year, and subsequent ‘new year, new me’ mentality, but I’ve noticed that my to-do list has been growing longer with more and more goals. It is this air itself that I felt during the Hart House Literary Fair on Thursday.