Summer is soon coming which triggered the prospective Explore students around me to start freaking out about whether they had been offered a place at any of the schools they applied to. This promptly stirred up some memories from my 6 weeks at l'Université de Québec à Trois-Rivières last summer.
The Explore program is a 5 week program run by the Canadian government to encourage Anglophone students to travel somewhere in the country to learn French (and vice versa with the Francophone students with English). A ton of Glendon students go during their undergrad years because we are a bilingual campus and it's an incredible booster for practicing French speaking. It's paid for entirely by the government (except for travel fare there and back) which is pretty awesome. I stayed an extra week to take another course, which turned out to be a terrible week (I`ll vlog about it or something).
UQTR at night
The view from inside the building looking out to the front.
The lovely Michel Sarrazin residences!
We got meal tickets which covered all of our weekday meal costs...
but over the weekends we had to resort to groceries, or in my flatmate's case, heating up McDonald's.....
When we went on trips we tried some "cultural" food. Italian pizza, poutine, onion rings = white people food?
Their cafes were pretty awesome though. Café Morgan is as rampant in Québec as Starbucks is in New York.
I think it was the first time I had ever tried macarons too!
Yeah.
And now I'm super determined to get a camera for this summer so I don't have to look back at my gross camera phone pictures for memories. Hopefully I'll be working full time this summer but I have some plans for new photo and vlog creations!
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
While this is interesting and for the most part, true. If you actually delve into the complexities and the metaphysical aspects of the statement, you'll find that it's not exactly correct.
fig 1: banana
There are three ways to tell time. Not by your watch, clock and computer, but rather by three "arrows" of time that point in a direction. These three arrows are mental, thermodynamic, and expanding universe. The easiest of the three to understand is mental. We experience time in one direction, forward. We can't suddenly say oh hey I want to go back to yesterday please. Take me there. That doesn't work (unless you're Hiro from Heroes), "forward" is the only direction we have ever lived with.
fig 2: exception
The second arrow of time is thermodynamic. This is taking advantage of the second law of thermodynamics which states that the entropy in an isolated system NEVER decreases. We can imagine this as such. Say I have a wine glass in my hand and I toss it at the ground with great force. Unsurprisingly, it would shatter into hundreds of tiny tiny tiny pieces of glass that scatter everywhere (don't try this at home. unless you want to). The "disorder" in the system increased since the glass is scattered around the room instead of being a single, uniform entity. The second law of thermodynamics broadly states that in this case, it would be impossible to put the wine glass back together again without exerting some sort of energy upon it. We define the thermodynamic arrow of time to be pointing in the direction of increasing entropy. The universe is always continually getting more and more chaotic. Coincidentally (or maybe not) this is pointing in the same direction as our mental arrow of time.
fig 3: physics
The third arrow of time is a tricky one. The universe is expanding and we know this by observing various galaxies and calculating their speeds using the Doppler Effect. This arrow of time specifies that it is pointing in the direction at which the universe expands. In the early 1990's, scientists thought that theoretically the universe's expansion is slowing down and eventually it would stop expanding and being contracting. This is a mindbogglingly weird answer. If you think about it, all mass in the entire universe is attracted to everything else through gravity. Since everything is attractive in the universe, it would only be a matter of time before things being attracted to each other causes the universe to start shrinking right? So what happens to the expanding universe arrow of time then? Would it point in the opposite direction of our mental and thermodynamic arrows?
Things got even more messed up when the Hubble Space Telescope discovered something amazing. The universe's expansion isn't slowing down, it's speeding up. What? How? What's making it speed up? That's what scientists are dubbing as Dark Energy.
fig 4: dark energy
Judging by the acceleration of expansion, it was discovered that about 70% of ALL the mass-energy in the universe is made up of dark energy. This dark energy is continually pushing the universe away from itself and countering the force of gravity felt by galaxies. For something that has such a huge impact on the universe, we know surprisingly little about it except that it exists.
I don't know about you engineers, but choosing courses as a liberal arts student can be a painful process. We actually have some choice in what we take, and for an indecisive person like me with a general interest in pretty much everything.. it can get pretty frustrating.
While I need to take courses that will get me through my program I also just really, really want to take a bunch of courses that just sound cool and interesting. But of course to make things even more difficult, I have reached the point where I am questioning my entire program and why I am in it. How typical of me.
I grabbed my friend for some advice while I was at the cafe and he said some interesting things. This man is very wise, but halfway through his talks I end up questioning whether he even remembers the original question. Regardless of if he really answered my question or not, I found what he told me insightful so I thought I'd share:
Think of each of the courses you take as an investment.
Of course, you could think this way about your program or your university degree in general, but for the purposes of simplicity we'll just consider a single university course.
Ask yourself the following questions and try to find the balance:
1. What is the return on this investment? Employable skills? Good grades?
2. What makes me happy?
3. What is the purpose in my life that I am trying to fulfill with my education?
a) employment
b) achieve financial freedom
c) intellectual fulfilment
d) to delay a reality check
He went on to point this out: "Look how the question of happiness is right in the middle on the list. It's the key balancing point."
He does have a tendency to elevate things to a grandiose level, but talking to him got me to face the questions that I hate having to answer. I don't think I've ever been able to answer these questions with answers that were fully my own. Especially the third one... the answer to that was always automated as answer a) which would eventually lead to b). Why? I'm a pro at second-guessing myself and my parents want me to follow the tried and true path to "success" in life.
Oh hai Mr Drew Dudley and Glendon LeaderShapers :D
Here's the thing though; I think I'm ready to write my own list. I heard a talk by the wonderful Drew Dudley yesterday and one of the things he said was that everybody needs to write their own list. That point really struck me because it's basically the same message that I've been hearing for the last two months, over and over again. My friend jokingly said this yesterday, but I think it really is a sign.
I've still got a lot to figure out and I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed by all of this, but somehow I'm still super excited for our TEDxYorkU event this Thursday and I've got the rest of my second year of university to wrap up...
Jack Layton quote shirt from vintage thrift store Exile. I liked the quote, and I liked Jack Layton. I cried when I found out he had passed. I like hope, optimism, and love. I want to change the world. I like this shirt.
I have a folder in My Pictures called Those other happy things I like to take close up pictures of.
I don't know why I take pictures of half the shit I do, but there are some gems in there.
HEY J YOU GREAT POOHEAD you stopped posting :(
But to be fair, I stopped posting AND responding. I admit, I haven't been the best at catching up (as usual).
This second year of university has been a crazy roller coaster.
There's still two weeks of class and a month of exams left, but I'm in a rare mood to recap so here we go...
Academically, this year has been hell. I've been driven to the point where I've finally realized that I shouldn't be studying what I am if I don't want to compromise my happiness and interest in my education. Making that realization and decision to change it was a long and torturous process, but I will be making a visit to my favourite Academic Advisor first thing on Monday to talk about what's possible for me. This struggle has helped me to realize what I should be doing, but it probably won't fly as smoothly past my parents and that is a battle I will have to face in a couple of months.
Other than my academics, everything else has been absolutely amazing. It will infuriate Mother to no end that I have made more progress in gaining work experience and networking than in improving my grades but I guess seeing the learning curve is just a cultural, generational, societal difference that we will have to struggle through. The two campus jobs that I have been working have taught me so much this past year, and I've met incredible people through them. I've also further developed great relationships with my peers, colleagues, and bosses, and I am so grateful for how much I've gained and learned from them. They are great people that helped me through my struggles that had been occupying my brain for the majority of the school year.
I went to LeaderShape, which kept me out of the city while the rest of my old friends were back to visit. Although I was a little upset at the missed opportunity to see them, I really could not have traded my experience for another. The leadership conference put things into perspective, clarified things that I didn't even know I was questioning, and created a whole new batch of connections to some amazing people I would never have been able to meet otherwise. It also stirred up an incredible amount of confidence and determination in myself to be more outwardly true to who I am. I came back with more emotion and willingness to express my thoughts and opinions on the campus issues I was concerned about.
LeaderShape has gotten me to come out of my comfort zone and take these kinds of "bare my soul" projects like the Draw My Life video.
So what exactly have I come to realize?
- I missed having J around in my second semester. Although we could only hang out once every two weeks while he was still in Toronto, those chill times helped to keep me distracted and sane in the fall semester
- I probably won't go to teacher's college as I had planned to for the last 3 years. I want to approach a career in education not through teaching but through administration and policy work, so I'm looking at other options after graduation
- I will still do a Masters in Education at one point in my life. But I am now very open to whatever career paths and life experiences come my way between my undergrad and that masters degree
- I cannot finish my English degree. Ideally I will be able to do Communications and Linguistics at Glendon as an Individualized Studies major (since Communications is not a Glendon program until 2015) but that's what I'll have to talk to Advising about
- I cannot repress my creative side any longer. I need to do things that will let me experiment and learn in design, photography, and story telling through other (digital) mediums
- My videos on my Glendon channel mean a lot more to me than I thought. I really care about what I have been doing as an eAmbassador and continuing to do this type of thing as a vlogger, editor, or producer is in my plans for the next while
I think that makes for a sufficient recap at this point. There are still so many things that need to be clarified and figured out, but I just need to take the time for them so I don't make my decisions based on stress and confusion again. I'm not off the roller coaster, but I feel as though I've been on enough rides to know what to expect and how to deal with it.
