If all goes well, my four-year stint at U of T will effectively come to an end in 2007. The past three years went by so quickly. But if someone were to ask me to summarize each year that I spent at this school, one point would stand out.
Instead of living on campus, I commuted from Scarberia. I disliked that aspect very much.
To begin with, first year was a ho-hum and unstimulating affair. To put it bluntly, I despised it. I am a social animal, and coming straight out of high school I was, perhaps naively, expecting university to be a similar experience.
Boy, was I ever wrong. Classes were huge, professors were mean-with the exception of the stellar Nick Mount of ENG 140-and I was bored. Not only bored, but depressed and alone. Therefore, I remember first year, but definitely not fondly.
Second year started off in the same vein. Classes were somewhat smaller and more interesting, but the whole social aspect was lacking. How can one make lasting friends at this school? You go to class, take notes, and say hi to some different random person each time. Or sometimes you might even be blessed with a person sitting beside you who won’t even acknowledge your presence.
A few months into second year, thankfully, my desperate existence ended. I joined the Telefund Call Centre. I was low on cash and happened to run into a friend who worked there. Since starting work there, I’ve made many friends whom I’ve come to love. Because of my campus job, coming to school began to help instead of hinder my emotional and social well-being.
This article is a heads-up, especially for those of you who are just starting out here. University is supposed to an experience that should do more than challenge you intellectually. This experience should help you make friends with whom you hang out and engage in conversation. This is a really crucial aspect to commuters’ well-being, for I can testify to the fact that not interacting with another human being during a six-hour break, week after week, can make you go crazy.
Like elementary and high school, university should be a time when you can make meaningful friends. That did not happen to me immediately. Like thousands of other students enrolled at the university, I never lived on campus, and this distance definitely caused me to feel alienated.
But the difference between me and someone else who started off university in a similar way is that I seized an opportunity. Even though this came in a form of a job on campus, getting involved really helped me feel integrated in the whole-usually exclusive-U of T environment.
I would like to change that environment. I’ve learned that the onus lies on you to find ways to get involved, whether through joining clubs, playing intramural sports, working on campus, or whatever. By getting involved in things like these, I began to feel as though I belonged.
My college, Victoria, has an Off-Campusers Commuters’ Association, and I’m sure that other colleges have similar clubs that cater specifically to commuters. Joining such clubs is an excellent way for commuters to expand their social life and foster university friendships that will last.
So next time you go to class, take a few seconds and say hi to the person sitting next to you. Trust me: they will want to talk, especially if they happen to be a commuter. You’ll connect to another human, and you might just get a new friend out of it. After all, as the Beatles put it so eloquently, “All you need is love.”
