The other side of the hill
The last time I clicked the "Published" button on this blog, I was sitting in a scorching hot room, with the sky still crispy blue outside. Now here I am, typing these words on a dark rainy night in December, where the closest I could see outside of my bedroom window was the white Christmas lights dangling in my neighbour's garage. The past four months have been an absolute whirlwind, sweeping away nothing but every bit of my breathe. In retrospect, thinking that I would have time to ramble here in the past four months was just an item on a list of naive thoughts I had at the start of second year - and there seems to be no sign that the list will end anytime soon...
September started with a whirlwind - from Imagine Day (my school's grand orientation and clubs day) to new classes, I could never survive a weekday without sipping iced coffee on the 49 every morning. I spent one of the few last days before school started waking up at 6 AM to attend a training session for my role as an Orientation Leader (OL) for incoming Science students. Before the chaotic Vancouver morning rush hour even started, I was already on campus breathing the crisp early autumn air, enjoying the school's rare tranquility without thousands of students sprinting across the campus to get to class on time. Everything around me - the lush weeping willow swaying its leaves by the Chemistry building, the staccato songs from the chickadees singing inside the azalea bushes on Main Mall - was brimming with life on that late summer morning. At 8:30 AM, I settled down the vast hall inside the building, sleepily munching a granola bar for breakfast when the training session started. The morning slumber quickly disappeared as the training session was peppered with small speeches and discussion questions about creating a welcoming atmosphere for new students. Before I could realize it, I was chatting with my fellow OL group, who I had only met on Zoom that summer through awkward icebreakers, like old friends since the beginning of time. We spent the rest of the day breathlessly completing the training activities: channeling our artistic talents when making group signs from cardboard, rambling about our favorite and least favorite buildings on practice campus tours, and trying to navigate the labyrinthine entrances for the Thunderbird Stadium for the Imagine Day assembly.
But the preparations could never prepare me enough for the big day. By 8 AM that morning, we were huddling in the cold air below the row of oak trees at the Bosque, waiting for the first-year students in our assigned groups to arrive. Soon enough, the campus was filled with the chatter of newly arrived first years, whose eyes were shining with hope and excitement. It was hard to grasp that just only a year before, I was just like them, if not a little bit more lost as I fumbled around my classes scattered all around campus). After some icebreakers and introductions, I led my group on a tour around campus, showing them campus attractions and the buildings where core Science courses would be held and answer any questions along the way (of course without recounting not-so-happy memories about midterms in that one musty building on Main Mall). We had lunch under the cool shades of the trees near the Nest, with the students asking incredibly thoughtful questions about first year while I shared my brutally honest advice and stories, which hopefully helped dispel some of their worries :)
When lunch was over, we barely made our way through the swarms of students from all faculties heading to their faculty's welcome event, where the exact same playlist from last year blasted through the rusty bleachers. Then came the pep rally, the day's main event, where all first-year students tried to find a seat while their OLs struggled to find the correct entrances or lose some of the students in the group. Thankfully, everything settled down as we listened through the countless speeches and listened to the faculty chants (Science recovered this year finally!), with the first-
years radiating endless energy. After wishing each other all the best for the school year, my group parted ways for the Club Fairs, with their exhausted but cheerful leader running back to the main campus area to booth for a club - but not without chirping a "Long time no see!" every other second along the way. What a start!
After the excitement of Imagine Day, the rhythmic routine of classes returned, this time much more gently as I became more familiar with the pace of university. My first class was genetics, where the first few classes felt like in a language that I have never seen before. However, with my two awesome professors, I slowly became enamored with the content, despite my resistance after the first midterm (the class average was 54%). The next class was Portuguese, which was one of my favorite classes ever. After wrapping my head around three-point crosses with Drosophila, conjugating verbs and learning about the regions of Brazil was such a fresh air. Never had my random bits of knowledge about punk carioca and coxinhas come into real use until that class. Then came Microbiology, when I had to run all the way back to the first class and wrestled with immunology concepts, but eventually rejoiced in virology. Last but not least, the infamous second-year organic chemistry, where things ramped up even more quickly than how my eyelids drooped. The only thing that saved my last bit of love for the subject was the lab. Despite my innate clumsiness around chemistry labs, from attaching the condenser to the wrong side to spilling water on the hot plate when not bugging my ever patient TA with silly questions, I still somehow pulled through without breaking any glassware and getting half-decent technique marks. After all of that, they still say second year is easier than first year?
Sometimes, to escape the deep end of midterms in October, I found solace in nature - the rare beam of lights coming out of the thick clouds, the burning crimson shade of the sun setting down beyond the viewpoint at the Pacific Spirit Regional Park, and the rain tapping soothingly on the roof every other night to lull me into sleep after a long day. One evening in late October, after my chemistry midterm, I stepped down of the train station from campus seeing groups of people pointing their phones toward the sky. It turned out that the rare aurora was coming that night, and I knew in a heartbeat not to miss such a magical chance. As soon as I got home, my family went to the riverside trail nearby, where few remnants of city lights could touch the dark sky. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but it wasn't long before I let out a loud gasp. Under the vast sky, with clusters of stars twinkling afar, the clouds began to swirl, with streaks of faint neon green and red ondulating like colors flowing on a gigantic canvas. As the streams of light were dancing above, I suddenly felt so little amid something inexplicably bigger, holding my arms to sway in the eternal rhythm of the universe.
When the aurora ended, I returned to the harsh reality of the second round of midterms in November and finals in December. As the last exam wave was over, which I thankfully did not suffer much, I was more than happy to recover some sleep, enjoy too much homemade matcha latte, or even finish the entire trilogy of The Hunger Games. To remind myself that the grind isn't over yet, I tried to stay productive by finishing the degree proposal for my major (while debating whether I should graduate in 3 years by spending another summer term toiling off) or getting some tasks done for work. At times, indulging in all the comforts of winter break at home, I suddenly miss one cloudy afternoon, going home from work and a midterm in the morning. Walking down the hill to the train station with a steaming London Fog in hand. I could feel my heart skipping a beat. Before my eyes were the last autumn leaves falling on the moss-covered chimney of a small house inside an alley, the downtown buildings glimmering in the golden sunset, and the majestic snow-capped North Shore peaks beyond the azure sea.
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