The first few weeks of university can be a scary time. As a first-year trying to figure out a new set of customs and navigate an unfamiliar routine, it can be easy to feel like the odd one out. A lot of first-year students have probably caught themselves thinking something along the lines of “look at all these cool seniors, there is no way that I can ever be as cool as they are.” Calm down. Please relax. You’re going to be fine. Seniors were not always as cool as they are now, and to prove it, we asked Vic seniors to anonymously reflect on some of the embarrassing, irresponsible, or otherwise noteworthy situations they found themselves in during that weird transitional period that is the first year of university. Frosh, learn from our mistakes so that you don’t have to learn from your own.
“Frosh Week made me appreciate the importance of hydration. Hailing from a milder climate, I was a shuffling husk by the end of the parade on Friday. Someone asked me what college I was in and I said ‘Trinity’ because Trinity was visible behind their head. After correcting myself, I went back to residence and spent a long, restless night on my bed. I kept sporadically waking up, confident that a shadowy stranger was standing over my head and ducking out of sight whenever I looked. So yeah, hydrate.”
“‘My BODY is a CAAAAAGE,’ blasted my laptop the moment that I opened it. No. God, no, I thought, slamming it shut. The class was silent. Twenty-four faces stared at me around a round table. Twenty-four faces and Professor David Wright. Former Canadian Ambassador to NATO, David Wright. ‘He-invoked-Article-Five-didn’t-you-know?’ David Wright. I was still panting from having run into class ten minutes late. I could feel my cheeks burning from embarrassment. After a brief pause, Professor Wright resumed his lecture. I stared at my laptop. I had closed it instinctively without turning off Arcade Fire’s soulful tune. A cold sweat formed on my forehead. What. Do. I. Do. I took a deep breath. I needed those notes. Hands trembling, I opened my laptop as quickly as I could, ‘THAT KEEPS ME FROM DANCING WITH THE ONE I LOVEEE…’ and hit mute, silencing Win Butler’s vocals forever. I dared to glance at Professor Wright. He was looking at me with a perplexed expression on his face. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’ I mumbled pathetically while my friends shook with laughter in my periphery. Three years later and I still can’t listen to ‘My Body is a Cage’ without cringing.”
“As you will come to learn, there is a game at Vic called Assassins which, when played, pushes the level of paranoia among students to new heights. Like many first years, I decidedly wanted to win my residence’s game by being the last person alive; unlike most students, however, I was willing to go to ridiculous lengths to make these dreams become reality. Our house’s game was Toddlers and Tiaras-themed, and, as such, it had its own unique set of rules. If students wore a very silly looking paper crown on their head, they would be safe from being killed via wand (our equivalent of a sword). After taking out three people in the first day of the game and undoubtedly elevating the house’s collective blood pressure 30 points, everyone decided that it would be for the benefit of the house if they all teamed up to assassinate me. Defiantly, I wore my paper crown everywhere I went on campus for nearly three weeks before finally being cornered by multiple housemates in a room, stripped of my crown, and assassinated by wand. To this day, I still have people come up to me and ask whether I was that guy who wore a paper crown for a few weeks back in first year.”
“Everybody has people they meet and hang out with during their Frosh Week but never speak to or see again, right? After a fine fast food feeding at the Bloor Street McDonald’s (RIP) on Friday, I befriended some guys at the first of four frats we would visit that night. We battled the rain under my umbrella, fed some wine to the Beta House’s pet cat, and said screw it to Trin’s KA after they wanted to charge us to get in. I’ve seen those guys a few times in the years since, but I don’t think any of us recall that night well. We walk past each other as if we’re strangers, but they all live on as phone contacts thanks to my legendary inebriated typing skills. The only vivid memory? The warm, greasy, and crisp Burwash Dining Hall bacon the following morning.”
“The biggest change in the transition from high school to my first year at university was the lack of a rigid schedule. I was so used to operating within the confines of my high school’s 8:30 AM to 3:30 PM timetable, with extra-curriculars crammed in at the beginning and end of the day. After starting university, my 18-year-old self felt an overwhelming sense of liberation, thinking that he would finally have control over how he managed his time. The thing about my 18-year-old self, though, is that he was not very disciplined and spent a lot of his time doing really senseless things. I remember trying to pull an all-nighter one evening with my former roommate (and current VUSAC co-president!) Ben Atkins to get our Vic One term assignments done for the next day. For most of the night we did anything but our assignments, and in retrospect it was pretty amazing what we managed to distract ourselves with in our state of sleepless delirium. We spent three to four hours down a YouTube rabbit hole of Robyn music videos, contemplating whether or not we could pull off her dance moves and fashion choices (we could not). Like two young Jeff Koonses-in-training we poured boiling water into plastic bottles to study the abstract form that the melted plastic took. Only after realizing that the sun was beginning to rise did we actually buckle down to get our work done. I wasn’t so practical in my approach to class assignments back then, but I made some good memories and I wouldn’t redo a thing.”
“When I first started at Vic, I was very excited about the amount of liberty I was given concerning class attendance. No one was on my back about starting assignments or attending lectures. It seemed like a good idea at the time to cut the classes I found boring and spend my days binge watching television instead. While I did complete four seasons of Breaking Bad and four seasons of Parks and Rec, I regret not going to my first-year classes. First year is the perfect time to experiment with studying styles and capitalize on college resources. University will provide lots of opportunities to skip out and not pay for the immediate consequences, but don’t make that mistake. First year study habits can be really hard to change, especially when the later years become far more important.”
“As a first-year student, my primary concerns were surviving on a limited budget and minimizing the amount of travelling time necessary to get to class. Unfortunately for me, these two needs manifested themselves in a very unforgettable dinner at Burwash. Knowing I wouldn’t have enough time to run to the store after class, I decided to fill up a reusable bottle at the pop machine, seal the lid, and subsequently forget my bottle at the salad bar. As I ate, I was given a front-row seat when moments later the carbonation caused the lid to shoot off and spray soda ten feet in the air. It’s safe to say I never did get that bottle back (nor would I have tried).”
“My frosh week was full of awkward experiences that some how turned into friendships, and the best example of this is the first person I met at Vic. We kept seeing each other through the open doors, and eventually our parents forced us to go through and meet each other. Fortunately, this didn’t completely scare this person away. By the end of the week, we had both sat around quietly drinking and been loudly crushed by Kin students in beer pong. An awkward start to a friendship, but that’s what the week was.”
Comments are closed.