Campus Life
Not-so-perfect strangers
How to deal with a roommate who’s the polar opposite
Photo by Chad Hipolito
From the Maclean’s Student Issue—on sale now. Story by Rosemary Counter.
A decade ago, which might as well be a century in technology years, Michelle Titus was like many first-year university students: away from home, stuck in a “teeny tiny, horrible” room, and living with a complete stranger she couldn’t stand.
In her defence, it was a bad match from the start. Titus was popular and outgoing, the soon-to-be relationship columnist at the University of Waterloo’s student paper. Her roommate was an introvert who’d wishfully described herself on her application as a “social butterfly.” “On paper, we should have been the best of friends,” says Titus, now 30. In real life, following some drama worthy of Mean Girls, they were estranged by the end of the year.
Studying abroad? You’ll want to read this.
Returning can be fraught with bureaucratic hurdles
From the Maclean’s Student Issue, on sale now.
Story by Ian Bethune.
Two years ago, as a 21-year-old fine arts student at York University, I embarked on one of the great times of my life, a third-year overseas exchange at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. I went into this concentrating on the expected hurdles—booking flights, arranging lodging, selecting classes, finding my footing on the other side of the world—and discovered the really hard part took place long before I stepped on the plane. Wandering wide-eyed about Adelaide was nothing compared with the uncoordinated demands of two Byzantine university bureaucracies.
But I survived the existential struggle with the paperwork and thrived on the exchange, an unforgettable experience I’d recommend to anyone. I also developed the laughable idea that going home would be—new Australian phrase I learned—“a piece of piss.” After all, what could be difficult about returning to my home and familiar native land?
Canada’s first gay fraternity faces critics
You won’t guess who’s upset
The crest of gay fraternity Delta Lambda Phi
McGill University has a new fraternity and it’s facing criticism from a surprising corner.
On Saturday, Delta Lambda Phi (DLP) became the first Greek society in Canada that markets itself to “gay, bisexual, and progressive men.”
But while the members report no homophobia toward them, they told the Toronto Star that they’ve faced criticism from activist group Queer McGill. Elyse Lewis of Queer McGill says that by reserving itself only for “men and those who identify as men,” the fraternity implies that transgender men aren’t real men.
Continue reading Canada’s first gay fraternity faces critics
The many regrets of a fourth-year student
What Scott Dobson-Mitchell would tell his Freshman Self
Assuming I couldn’t accidentally cause some sort of butterfly effect that would prevent me being born, I wish I could travel back in time and tell my Freshman Self a few things about university. Considering I’ve already forgotten the answers to every exam, this is what I’d tell the younger me.
1) Plan ahead. WAY ahead.
It happens to every semester. Searching through the course calendar, I find the perfect class. It sounds interesting, it fits perfectly into my schedule and it fulfills my upper-year science requirement. The prof has checks out on RateMyProfessors and the course has a high score on Bird Courses. But I don’t have one of the prerequisites! If I’d been smart enough to plan, I would have that first year zoology credit that’s mandatory for nearly everything. Instead, I’m stuck with Phytochemical Biosystems.
2) You’re richer than you think.
Or at least, you’re less broke than you think. There are plenty of ways to get money beyond student loans—scholarships, bursaries, and work study programs that not only get you some cash, but also valuable work experience. The Ontario Work Study Program is one example. If you’re receiving student loans, then you’re probably eligible. Also be sure to check out the Maclean’s Scholarship finder.
3) It’s going to get easier.
The first year is the worst year. It’s sort of like the first 20 minutes of the movie Inception, when you have no idea what the hell is going on. But if you hang in there, things will start making sense. You’ll realize that university isn’t impossibly more difficult than high school. In fact, once you’ve acclimatized, it’s easier in some ways. And it’s only gets better. Once some of those nasty prerequisites are out of the way, you can take courses that truly interest you. My interests happen to coincide with those listed on Bird Courses.
4) It’s easier to keep up than to catch up.
As a seasoned procrastinator, I can say with experience and authority that procrastination is not a good idea. Especially when you leave multiple things to the last minute. Here’s what I finally realized: there comes a point where writing an essay is less difficult than NOT writing an essay. After you’ve checked your email, looked at your Facebook notifications, watched a bunch of mindless videos on YouTube and then read some random Wikipedia articles, procrastinating actually becomes more difficult than finishing your work. A better option? Keep those pages closed.
Scott Dobson-Mitchell studies at the University of Waterloo. Follow @ScottyDobson on Twitter.
Sexually transmitted infections rise in N.S.
What’s behind the increase?
Photo by ♪ Brigitte...Meh ♫ on Flickr
Health officials in Halifax aren’t sure why they’ve seen a rise in sexually transmitted infections like chlamydia and syphilis. Are people having riskier sex? Is testing catching more cases?
Chlamydia cases reported in Halifax climbed 20 per cent over the past five years and rates in the city are 30 per cent higher than the national average, CBC News reported last year.
On Wednesday, Todd Hatchette, an infectious diseases expert with Dalhousie University, told The Chronicle Herald that better testing could simply be catching more chlamydia.
Continue reading Sexually transmitted infections rise in N.S.
Weird ways Canadians are coping with exams
Don’t end up like the angry library girl at California State
Studying at Waterloo. By Colin O'Connor
We all know exams cause stress. That explains the reaction of this student in a noisy library at California State University, Northridge.
Personally, I’m with the angry girl.
But that level of stress is better avoided. Last week, we offered readers 10 ways to study stay sane while studying. It was a pretty traditional list. But students across Canada have found a few more creative ways to procrastinate, ahem, study. I thought I’d share them with you.
At McGill University last week, hundreds of students showed up for pet therapy with animals from Therapeutic Paws of Canada. This may sound bizarre to the uninitiated, but there’s reason to believe it works. Petting dogs releases oxytocin in humans. Oxytocin, the so-called “love drug,” reduces anxiety and engenders calm.
At the University of Windsor, Bernarda “Bernie” Doctor, the 78-year-old director of the Organization of Part-Time University Students, offered peers surprise “cookie therapy,” handing out 360 sugar rushes. It’s not the healthiest snack, but Bernie knows how to study: she’s been doing it 50 years.
Leave it to Canada’s computer science mecca, the University of Waterloo, to offer a virtual snowman building game as a study tool. Students can build and share their own Mr. or Mrs. Frosty while snowflakes fall gently down their computer screens. By the way, try typing “let it snow” into Google.
Finally, the award for the weirdest—and smartest—way to cope with exam stress goes to Uytae Lee, a first-year student at Dalhousie University. Lee turned his boredom while studying for a Sustainability 1000 exam into a stop-motion music video with a soothing soundtrack based on his study notes. That’s more fun than traditional studying—and I bet he did well on the exam too.
Surviving exam season
10 ways to study effectively without falling apart
Photo courtesy of comedy_nose on Flickr
Exams, assignments and anxiety: for university students, the end of classes in December is just the beginning. Fortunately, there are ways to make it through without sacrificing your well-being. Here, in no particular order, are 10 tips for surviving and thriving during exam season.
1. Embrace list making. Jot down your exam schedule, assignment due dates and important reminders on a calendar. Make a study schedule and stick to it, but don’t forget to pencil in breaks.
2. Find the right study space. Whether you prefer a bustling coffee shop or the library’s silent floor, find a proper chair and pick a well-lit space. Steer clear of the ultimate temptations: television and chatty roommates.
3. Triage. Let’s face it: you can’t properly analyze an entire Shakespeare anthology in three days. Time is limited, so study the hard subjects first (when you’re most alert) and prioritize material based on urgency and relevance.
Date rape drug shows up in Nanaimo, B.C.
Student may have been sexually assaulted and drugged
Photo by Robert S. Donovan on Flickr
Vancouver Island University is warning students via Twitter to guard their drinks. A woman who was sexually assaulted in Nanaimo recently may have been given the date-rape drug GHB.
Another young woman says her doctor confirmed she was given the drug in October. CTV Vancouver Island reports that the woman was found by a friend in a parkade around 3 a.m. after attending a nightclub. She had no recollection of the evening, but her friend says a stranger had shared her drink earlier that night.
V.I.U. has been using custom drink coasters to warn students about how easy it is for people to slip odourless and colourless GHB into their drinks, reports Canada.com.
Professors get some bizarre gifts
Pettrigrew’s guide to thanking professors appropriately
Venison photo by Collin Anderson on Flickr
The other day, in the hallway outside my door, something unusual happened: a student offered his history professor a large amount of venison. The student had recently taken up bow-hunting and had, apparently, become pretty good at it, because he had plenty of deer meat to give away.
The prof graciously turned it down.
That particular gift may have been odd, but it’s not at all uncommon for students to offer gifts. I have a mug adorned with Shakespearean insults on my desk to attest to that fact, and a hand-carved Malaysian pencil in my drawer as further evidence. Student gifts range from the tasteful and understated—I once received a lovely metal bookmark with my initials engraved on it—to the downright bizarre.
A colleague (the same one who turned down the venison) reports being given, among other things, a gavel, a Satan bobble-head, and the right to consider himself some kind of Viking prince. One instructor told me ruefully that all her students had ever given her were “headaches and angst.”
Which students work hardest?
Business? Engineering? Arts? You may be surprised.
Courtesy of NSSE. Click to enlarge.
Engineering students have been known to curse friends in other majors. That’s because they often spend hours sitting in their residence rooms sweating over near impossible differential equations while their non-engineering roommates leisurely read a couple chapters and then head out to party.
Then again, ask an arts major how hard they’re working and they’ll start rattling off the number of essays they have due.
But finally, it’s settled. Engineering students study more. The new release of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) shows that North American Engineering students spend 19 hours per week, on average, preparing for class. Arts, humanities and biology majors study 17 hours per week. Social science and business students study only 14 hours.
But don’t assume all non-engineers are slacking. Business students study the least, but they aren’t socializing any more. Instead, they work seven hours more per week at paying jobs. In fact, if you add jobs and study together, business students work the most—30 hours per week. Social sciences students work the least overall (27 hours). Engineering students are in the middle (28 hours).
NSSE, considered the gold standard of student surveys, involved polling of senior year students at 683 U.S. and 68 Canadian institutions in 2011. It had a response rate of 33 per cent.
If you leave me, can I come, too?
How one mother coped when her daughter left for school
Photo illustration by Taylor Shute.
From the Maclean’s University Rankings—on newsstands now. Story by Ellen Vanstone.
I wasn’t actually planning to attend college with my daughter Eliza when her acceptance letter arrived in the mail last spring. That would be creepy—like the mother in that Robert Munsch book who stalked her grown-up son, breaking into his house to cuddle him while he slept. I am perfectly aware that the parentally appropriate, non-crazy thing to do when your child leaves home is to let them go and have their own life.
And yet, I still felt there should be some kind of special dispensation in my case—since the school that accepted my child was the Savannah College of Art and Design, on the Savannah River, in Savannah, Ga.
Cheers to the Science Pub
Café lectures trend grows
The University of Regina is offering free general interest lectures served alongside pints of beer.
It’s part of a growing trend in university towns where students are proving they’re interested in learning for the sake of learning—so long as they can simultaneously eat snacks and drink beer.
The Science Pub series was created by Bev Robertson, a professor emeritus who now owns the Bushwakker Brewpub where the monthly event is held. He told the Leader-Post that he got the idea after hearing about similar events further west.
What’s on your mind?
How your still-developing brain puts you at risk
Illustration by Ian Phillips and Taylor Shute.
From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings—on sale now.
Heading off to university is a time-worn rite of passage, one that marks the transition from teen years to adulthood. Despite the new relationships, responsibilities and independence that come with leaving home, however, in our late teens and early twenties, we’re still not fully mature. Our brains keep developing well into these years.
When puberty hits, brain regions responsible for reward and pleasure kick into high gear, according to Temple University psychology professor Laurence Steinberg, author of You and Your Adolescent. But other regions, involved in decision-making and impulse control, are slower to develop—and don’t mature until our mid-twenties. “The accelerator is activated before there’s a good braking system in place,” he says. Teens in mid-to-late adolescence are prone to risky decisions, seeking rewards without weighing the consequences. Starting a new life on campus, these brain changes affect students’ lives in all sorts of ways—maybe pushing them to stay out drinking all night, sign up for a semester abroad in Europe, sleep right through class, or ask their crush out on a date.
A look inside gamers’ clubs on campus
Why study when you can kill goblins?
Pathfinder capture by Olivia Hotshot on Flickr
A few months ago, I was having dinner with a group of colleagues from a hiring committee, including the student representative. This student happened to be one I know fairly well. At one point during the meal she looked at me a little bashfully and said, “You know there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while.” It made me nervous. I could tell something personal was coming.
“What kind of character do you play in D&D?” she asked. It turned out she had just started playing and had learned that I played in a game with other faculty members, so she became curious (answer at the time: Gnomish Paladin; answer now: Half-Orc Monk; oh, and, strictly speaking, its Pathfinder, not D&D).
Gaming of various sorts—board, video, role-playing—seems to have always been popular on campus. I remember hearing about gaming groups at the University of Waterloo when I was still in high school. It’s not surprising, given the number of nerds (I use the term affectionately) who tend to end up in higher education—including advanced nerds like me who end up in the faculty. Indeed, a quick survey of university websites finds gaming groups across the country. At the University of Victoria it’s merged with “tech.” Clubs are active at the University of Guelph and Trent too. Not surprisingly, given the imaginations of game enthusiasts, some clubs play games with their names. The Club at the University Regina—the Gaming Fellowship—gives a nod to Tolkien. Others revel in playful acronyms like the Association of Ryerson Role-Players and Gamers (ARRG!).
Drunk student paralyzed by fall from bed
Sues university for negligence
An American student who fell asleep drunk and woke up paralyzed after falling more than a metre from his dorm room bunk bed is now suing his school, Fordham University in the Bronx. Kei Usami, 20, smashed his head so hard that he fractured his spine, according to a the New York Post. His suit alleges the university was negligent for failing to put guardrails on the bed. The former tennis player is now in a wheelchair. He says his goal is to walk again by the time he graduates in 2013.
Dick and Jane go potty… together
The perils of co-ed washrooms
Co-ed bathroom photo by Andrew Tolson
From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings. Get your copy today!
Some call it “the can,” others, the final frontier of gender equality: It’s the public washroom and it’s gone co-ed. Even though single-sex facilities are still the norm on the majority of Canadian university campuses, you’d be hard-pressed to find a school that doesn’t have at least one co-ed washroom—and it usually includes shower stalls. McGill, York University, the University of Toronto, Dalhousie, Mount Allison and the University of British Columbia are just a few of the “progressive” (or backwards, depending on your lavatorial leanings) co-ed washroom providers, earning the approval of campus feminists who view mixed facilities as a positive step towards full gender equality. Others, however, are not convinced. One 18-year-old Queen’s University psychology major says she was relieved to live in an all-girls dormitory solely because of the same- sex bathroom factor. Co-ed washrooms struck her as “grosser because boys used them,” says Jessica, now in her second year and living off-campus with a washroom of her own. “The girls’ ones were generally very clean.” Jessica would regularly make the five-minute walk back to her all-girls dorm from the co-ed dorm where many of her girlfriends lived, simply to avoid using the washrooms there. “It just smelled so much worse,” she says, before conceding, “maybe I just have bathroom phobia.”
That’s the spirit
Canadian schools have crazy fans and community too
Nipissing University maniacs. By Cole Garside.
From the Maclean’s University Rankings—on newsstands now. Story by Alex Ballingall.
We’ve all seen it: the near-ubiquitous image of the spirited American college student chanting a school slogan, streaking across campus or slogging back a beer from a Dixie cup in a stadium parking lot. It’s the sort of paint-your-body zealotry often depicted in Hollywood movies.
Doesn’t seem very Canadian, does it?
Certainly not according to the 2010 edition of The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, a yearly publication out of Yale University that documents the strengths and weaknesses of North American universities. “One aspect of college life that Canada fails to offer is school spirit,” the guide stipulates. “Their attachment to their schools is not as strong as in the United States.”
Saskatchewan installs bike repair station
Total cost: $4,868
The University of Saskatchewan is the first Canadian school to install a new type of unmanned bike repair station, which has taken off in the U.S., reports The Sheaf. Students can use the outdoor Dero Fixit station to pump up tires, tighten screws and more. The University of Saskatchewan Students’ Union and the Arts and Science Students’ Union split the $1,868 cost of the unit itself. The Office of Sustainability paid $3,000 for the construction of its concrete foundation. Many other schools in Canada have indoor bike repair shops, which are often staffed by volunteers.
Click to read about Canada’s best cycling schools. From the Maclean’s University Rankings.
Canada’s best cycling schools
Two-wheel transport speeds ahead on campus
Cyclist at Dalhousie. By Andrew Tolson.
From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings—on newsstands now. Story by Jason McBride.
If you were to design the perfect bicycling environment, it would include safe, well-maintained and lit streets. It would have almost no car traffic, dedicated bike paths and ample secure parking and storage. It might even have showers purpose-built for sweaty commuters and a well-equipped repair shop where cyclists can get help fixing a flat tire. In short, it would look quite a bit like the campus of McMaster University.
McMaster is located in blue-collar, largely car-centric Hamilton, Ont.—an unlikely champion of the bicycle. But in the past two years, the city has been in the vanguard of sustainable travel, expanding cycling infrastructure, improving regional transit and adding carpooling programs. Municipal support has, in turn, emboldened the university, and encouraged both students and faculty to take up, in great numbers, alternative modes of transportation. According to Kate Whalen, manager of McMaster’s office of sustainability, a 2010 campus survey revealed that 37 per cent of students walked or cycled to school. “We have a very engaged population,” she says. And the university is very responsive to the needs of that population. Just one example: after a civil engineering student did a systematic geographic information survey of the use of university bike racks, underutilized racks were relocated to more optimal spots on campus. Ten additional racks are installed each year, Whalen says.
The university’s war on the automobile
The new political cause on campus? More parking, please.
Photo courtesy of Kevin Krejci on Flickr
From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings issue. Get your copy from newsstands now.
Watching Tommy Douglass on YouTube, one can’t help but recall Matthew Broderick’s legendary rendering of a spoiled but highly resourceful high school student in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Douglass, a fourth-year University of Regina student, has a boyish face and a sleek businessman’s attitude. And he’s on a mission: to redress his school’s parking woes. “Until now, I’ve never had a single complaint. I like my school . . . it’s ideal,” he says in one of several videos he’s used to draw attention to the issue. But, he adds, “we are seriously, seriously messing up parking.”
Against the backdrop of his student bedroom—complete with a laundry basket and a picture of a blond bikini babe tacked to the wall—he shows viewers two of three $65 tickets he recently received for parking in a staff lot. “I am not going to pay a single ticket,” he says defiantly. He’d gladly pay for one of the school’s parking permits, he adds, but the school has already run out.
