Better Coping Skills: Balanced Thinking Workshop The Better Coping Skills online series is available to students who want to develop strategies they can use in everyday life to engage in more balanced thinking and deal with negative emotions. It was…
Humanities students, I know what you’re thinking. We have so much readings to do in a week, how could we possibly benefit from more reading? Sounds exhausting just thinking about it, right? But it just works. My recently-graduated Masters friend…
In my last few years at U of T, I've found joy in many venues on campus, whether it is the Mango Madness smoothie at the Innis Cafe, or venturing into a library and glancing across all the titles I…
Hey everyone! This marks the first day of #JoyatUofT week, an initiative to spread happiness and meaningful reflection on what brings you joy. It’s especially important at this time of the year when it’s cold outside, midterm season is in…
Being a don is one of the most worth while life experiences that I have ever had. The position allows me to step out of my comfort zone and be creative as I have to be an advisor for students…
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.
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.
I think it’s safe to say I was at the point in midterm season, or huge-influx-of-essays-due-in-one-week season where my mind was frayed.
It was the kind of fraying where I just comfortably threw my clothes on my chair when I got home. I comfortably began ‘forgetting’ to put away the snacks I had on my nightstand. I comfortably hadn’t made my bed in who knows how long. I comfortably stopped using my table as a study space and instead used it as a storage for all the books and articles I had to read.
It was like when Frank Ocean sang “a tornado flew around my room before you came”, only my situation was a lot less poetic and probably wouldn’t win any awards. I’m just going to come out and say it – my room was a mess.
An example of how my room looked at the time
Who knew procrastination would not only be the reason for it but also the resolution of it?
As the photoblogger on this team, meaning the person who blogs and alsomanages the Instagram, part of my job is to see the pretty cool things on or around campus. If you’ve been following along with my eyes and perspectives on the 'Gram, you would notice that a huge portion of my photos are of landscapes and sometimes people. As midterm season rolls in with the dropping temperatures of autumn, I’ve decided to share my top four favourite places to visit on or around campus for destressing, procrastinating, fire Instagram photos, or sipping tea while you Snapchat.
A very cool spot on campus where you can see the CN Tower framed perfectly by the trees.
A summer sunset view.
With August comes the stark realization that summer is almost over.
Alright, there. I’ve said it. There’s no turning back now. How did it breeze by so fast?
