Shmily Lin is a first-year student interested in life sciences. He enjoys long walks on the beach, naps, video games and bubble tea.
To My First-Year Self
They say your first year of university is one for the ages. It’s unforgettable, unimaginable, and irreplaceable.
I can’t say they lied.
Like many of us, I went into the year with a profound feeling of loss—that I was missing something I’d never get back. It went beyond turning 18 or leaving home for the first time, and it was coupled with the bitter tinge of disappointment that I’d been robbed of the past four years of hard work.
For the majority in our senior year of high school, perhaps it’s not quite right to say we deserved better. After all, what we get in life is largely drawn in varying shades of privilege. Still, my expectations didn’t seem that unreasonable: partying with classmates while flushing our GPAs down the metaphorical drain, practicing the bleacher walks as the principal handed us our papers, and temporary liberation from learning that was over a decade in the making.
There was a small hope that the pandemic would end along with the last of our childhood, but it seemed only one of those was to be.
I dimly recall spending my 18th birthday in a hotel room at the Chelsea, drinking lukewarm tea from the semi-broken boiler and idly finishing a virtual colouring book with the rest of my quarantine cohort. This was four days after I had arrived in Canada, trading the sunny shores of San Fran for the laze and haze of downtown Toronto.
Exiting that hotel room and re-entering the world was elating, until I remembered that the world was still turned off. University wouldn’t be some magical coming-of-age moment. Nothing had changed except my occupation with fresh air. My life would be lived in my dorm, working on problem sets and hoarding food from the Canada Room.
Life online wasn’t awful, although often I can’t tell whether that’s because I truly feel that way or I’ve just never had the chance to experience anything different. Sometimes I’ll hear stories from the upper years about all the things we’re missing, and they’ll proclaim their profuse apologies. And yet, it’s hard to miss something you’ve never had, much like an absent father or being an only child.
For me, it was okay that the most exciting thing in frosh was when one of our coordinators forgot to un-mute. For me, it was okay that we had to scream over the six-foot distances between the tables in the Canada Room just to have a conversation. For me, it was okay that I have never got to meet my study group in person.
This is the year we were handed, and it was the year I’d make do with.
Personally, online courses were probably the pinnacle of ineptitude. While I can appreciate the convenience of watching all my lectures in the room I sleep, the limited socialization opportunities, the abundance of micro-assignments, and the often deplorable wording of multiple-choice exam questions more than forfeits any positives of zoomiversity.
As a friend so eloquently states, “If I only had an hour left to live, I’d spend it in tutorial, because every time I join it feels like a lifetime.”
People often ask me why I traveled all the way to Canada just to live in another lockdown. And, to be honest, I’d planned my trip when the status quo was to still have a few in-person courses. Perhaps that makes me the biggest clown in the world to spend the year in my dorm room shopping for cute posters and waiting for my Quercus quiz to load. Opportunities were limited, people were scarce, and the food from the Canada Room wasn’t particularly welcoming.
I will say I probably had it better than most. Trudging through high school as an overly sociable person, I took the time to look for what limited opportunities there were—I was elected to my house council, I tried student government, I dabbled in a fair amount of clubs, and I even joined an a cappella group (shoutout to SurroundSound!) to fulfill my dreams of reenacting scenes from Pitch Perfect.
The worst part of lockdown is the repetition of daily habits. The worst part of lockdown at university is the endless cramming of course material, desperately churning out assignment after assignment in hopes of optimizing some strange division of marks. Many courses also had the strangest testing schedules in addition to a mess of other work. In the first semester, I had a course with a midterm in the second week. I had simply thought they weren’t very appropriately named; it wasn’t until much later that I realized midterms usually referred to a test that was actually in the middle of the term.
It’s saddening—but not very surprising—when you realize just how many first years thought the same.
Everything past November felt like even more of a blur, as if my confusion was accelerating with every day that passed. I remember the sadness of not travelling home for the holidays, the stress of finals, and the idle boredom of waiting for an end to a year that seemed everlasting. The second semester felt like Groundhog Day—a reminder that nothing had changed.
I’m living now with the acute knowledge that nothing will change next year either. But if this year has taught me anything, it’s that knowledge can be wrong. Maybe I did go into my first year anticipating a train wreck, and instead I ended up at a foreign station. It wasn’t quite wonderland, but I’m always wonderstruck at how much worse it could’ve been.
I’ve learned that things are never as bad as they seem.
If the pandemic were like a fulcrum, changing the way the world turned, then I still had many levers to pull within myself. So, to my depressed first-year self: you’re gonna have your levers pulled. And, you’re gonna find many levers left to pull.
Life is much a balancing act, and there’s three more years to figure it out.
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