Year One

I had always dreamed of going to university

When I was in grade 6 I got my first pay for babysitting. As I put on my shoes to leave the mum of the kids I had been looking after asked me what I was going to do with my own money, having never had any of my own before. I am sure that the expected answer was something along the line of “buy ice cream” or “go see a movie”. But grinning I responded “save it for university”. She gave me a weird look, and years later I realized that saving money for school was probably an insane dream for an 11 year old. But for years I saved for this dream of school.

Finally, I made it. First year was an odd year. I think it was for everyone. There was this pandemic, a once in a lifetime event. It shut down everything that I had seen as key to the university experience. It meant that my dreams of moving away for school were dashed, and replaced with zoom calls in my childhood bedroom. That whole year felt like a non-ending cycle of “loosening restrictions” and “opening society” just for your hopes to get dashed two weeks later as cases spiked and we were forced back inside.

Despite everything, university was all it was cracked up to be. I took a variety of classes in first year, as I really only had the two mandatory politics classes. This lead to me eventually deciding to drop the law-arts program (which I had applied into out of highschool) and become a politics and history major instead.