tl;dr

College kind of sucks in general, so don’t worry too much about any particular part or any particular one. It’s not a place where giving a shit in any capacity is worth doing. It’s that simple.

intro

My first week at college has been a little weird. I’ve always been an introvert (and very, very much of one), so my experience getting used to (a) sharing a dorm room with another person, (b) meeting at the very least ten new people every single day, and (c) figuring out how to live autonomously and efficiently like a fully-grown adult should for the first time in my life has been tumultuous to say the absolute least.

To paint a quick picture, right now, I’m sitting in a lounge one-thousand miles away from my actual home, writing this blog post from a shitty lounge in a basement of my residence. I genuinely could have never imagined what life would be like to live like this, making an immediate 180 from a life of complete privacy and seclusion to sharing everything from showers to meals with complete strangers. If you were to describe my current life to myself from even as little as two weeks ago, this would sound like a complete and total nightmare, but from my perspective currently, this is simply and purely okay.

pros and cons

This place certainly has its pros and cons. Con: This campus is far too large. Pro: But that means that there is always more of campus to explore. Con: Housing is a lottery, and you might have to share a dorm in the basement. Pro: The basement is an incredibly tight-knit community. Con: You’ll have to meet a lot of new people. Pro: You’ll get to meet a LOT of new people.

addendum

I’m probably going to add little bits and pieces of new information about life at university over time. To be honest, this place is more than a little weird. I genuinely believe that choosing UBC was a good idea, but the core lesson that I’ve come to learn about university after only a few days here is just how truly boring college can be. The great misconception of high schoolers looking toward university hold is that this place is some gargantuan, terrifying, dramatic mess, and to be honest, I think it’s more that accurate to say that that sort of description of university is actually more aligned to what many university students subconsciously want. In reality, it’s sort of just a boring grind. University is a lot of simply going to class, studying, hanging out, and just having a good time, I suppose. Some people certainly do live their lives like movies, so that certainly can be a way that you live if you so prefer, but for the people where that sort of thing actually really worried them about university (‘people’ like me), don’t worry. That’s it. That’s the core message of this post. Don’t worry about it, because in the end, everything ends up working out.

update july 21, 2025:

I haven’t touched this website in quite a little while, but I’m done with my first year of university. I agree with most of what I said here, but I think it was just a super nearsighted post to write. Nothing, and I really do mean nothing, in this post actually matters. You’d be surprised how little individual things matter and just how much you can get used to in university. I’ll leave it at that.