Not fun. At all. My body refused to get out of bed. I could get out of bed for my club meetings, but not class. Second semester. Just one course.
Okay, I can do this, I thought. First Nations and Indigenous Studies A course that I was truly interested in. So that someone could hold me accountable. Numerous mornings of tears in bed, anxiety attacks and emotional breakdowns in front of the computer, I got through. School is not for everyone. I love learning. I love to watch Ted Talks, listen to Podcasts, and read articles. We are just not compatible. And yet, since day 1 I blamed myself.
I blamed myself for not being smart enough, for not being able to focus enough, for not being productive enough. The past year was especially difficult for me. I tried science. Without knowing if the student is male or female, a Psychology major or an aspiring Marketing student, a social butterfly or a nerd allows users to create their own sense of who the blogger is and diminishes cross-faculty stereotypes. Secondly, the content of the site is relateable. All UBC students have experienced fellow students asking questions just as class is supposed to end or having to detour for miles around campus just to reach their class.
Students experience these frustrations daily and this blog offers a place to vent with other likeminded students.
Lastly, the bloggers ability to turn frustration and anger into something laughable. After a stressful day, students love to relax and laugh at something that happened to them and frustrated them just hours before. I would take many quizzes online to see if my interests matched any careers or academic disciplines. As for my choice of school, I remember all the way back from when I was 8 that I knew I would want to go to UBC even though I only had a vague notion of what a university was!
At the time, I had absolutely no experience in programming before, but I learned that programming skills are valuable no matter what area you work in. The course became significantly harder as it progressed, but I decided to press on and work harder.
In the end, it was my highest mark that term and that experience helped me set my future path - I was going to major in Cognitive Systems COGS. One CPSC course was not enough to convince me to major in Computer Science as it only gave me a little taste of what it would be like.
To give you a brief background on it, Cognitive Systems is a multidisciplinary program that involves computer science, psychology, linguistics and philosophy.
To major in it, you would choose a stream which happens to be one among its four disciplines, and you can get a Cognitive Systems degree from either the Science and Arts faculty. In the Science faculty, you can specialize in computer science or psychology, and in arts you can specialize in psychology, linguistics or philosophy. I was genuinely interested in some parts of it, especially in psychology, but for the rest of it I had the most difficult time listening to the lectures.
My listening problem became so severe that I began to record the lectures, and it took a considerable amount of willpower for me to listen to the audio afterwards. This experience served as an indication to me that I had absolutely no interest in certain parts of COGS - specifically, linguistics and philosophy. Each lecture focuses on one COGS discipline, and I nearly groaned aloud when the time came for linguistics or philosophy lectures.
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