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 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 Harness Procrastination For Good

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.
ALT="A photo of my nightstand and corner of the room cluttered with clothes."
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?

In Which U of T is Really Pretty During Midterm Season

As the photoblogger on this team, meaning the person who blogs and also manages 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.
ALT="The CN Tower framed by trees"
A very cool spot on campus where you can see the CN Tower framed perfectly by the trees.