Ashley Chow dot Com

Well, FINALLY something interesting during my Spring Break.

As you can probably tell in the title, I went to UBC today. On this dreadful, rainy, bitter cold Wednesday in the middle of March. I went there solely for 1 purpose: to get a degree—in one day! Haha, no. I went for an event called “UBC Degree in a Day”, where you start the day walking for 2 hours around different parts of campus, and then have lunch probably in the SUB (Student Union Building), which is mega jammed with people with nowhere to sit, and then there are 2 sessions in which you got to choose at the beginning of the day.

I got up bright and early (more like groggily and early) in the morning to take the bus all the way to UBC, which is a ~ 45 minute bus ride for me. And that’s taking the Express bus too. I had a map of UBC all printed out and ready to go, and thank goodness I brought it with me. As soon as I got off the bus, I couldn’t tell North from South. I was like a blind person in the middle of campus, just stumbling around trying to find out where in the world Brock Hall was. I decided to stop at Starbucks to take a look at my map, turning it around and around until I found out where I was.

After finally finding Brock Hall, I also found my friend sitting on a couch reading a book. We proceeded to sign in and also, to sign up for our 2 sessions in the afternoon. We chose for Session #1 to go to a Student Panel (which was insanely boring), and for Session #2, we went to an information session with a student recruiter-advisor (more interesting). But before all of that happened, we had a 2-hour tour of campus.

We went to a lot of places, including (off the top of my head): the SUB, Place Vanier (we went into a dorm and looked inside a double-room too!), the Chemistry Building, Angus High, the UBC Bookstore, the Aquatic Center, the Longhouse, the Botanical Garden, the Walter C. Koerner Library, and much, much more. Our tour guide also told us lots of interesting tidbits; for example, she told that the Chem Building is Lex Luthor’s mansion (in Smallville, I guess)! Probably just the outside, I’m thinking.

After a brutal 2 hours, most of which was spent outside in the freezing cold, holding an umbrella with iced-up hands, we finally got a break and were able to go to the SUB and whatnot to eat some lunch. What bad timing. All of the students of UBC were at the SUB eating their lunch and doing homework on their laptops and whatnot, which meant insane lineups and trouble finding a place to sit. My friend and I spent half an hour lining up for food and then finding a table to sit and eat. That basically only left us 15 minutes to eat and then scramble and rush to look for the Buchanan Building, where we had our 1st session.

Our 2 sessions were basically just sitting there listening to people talk about UBC and what it has to offer and this and that. I was falling asleep during the Student Panel but the 2nd session was fairly interesting, and more “intimate”, considering there were only 10 people in the room. And our recruiter-advisor spoke really fast and never uttered an “um”, so that made it much more interesting.

Since my 2nd session was in Brock Hall, we simply had to walk back downstairs to end off the day with our “graduation ceremony”. We all got certificates with our names printed on it saying that we completed UBC Degree in a Day, a magnet with words that you can peel off and scramble on your refrigerator, and one of those university banner-flag type things that has the UBC logo and says University of British Columbia on it. My motivator! The second I got home, I pinned it up onto my cork board in hopes of making me work harder. (Work experience and Spring Break aren’t very good motivators. )

So that was basically my day. Tomorrow will be another grueling 8.5 hours of work and the day after that will be my one day to just ENJOY Spring Break! Hope you’re having an awesome March break as well!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 9:10 pm and is filed under Ramblings, Reviews, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.