Your first year at U of T has the potential to be the worst year of your life. You might start university and, after a month of classes, start spending all of your time feeling sorry for yourself because, if you had only gone to Carleton, you’d be getting grades that are 20% higher with half the effort.

That being said, your first year at U of T also has the potential to be the best year of your life.

I’ve complied a list of cool stories about my life things you should try to do during your first year to make it the best year ever.: (more…)

That special time of year is just around the corner and for first-year students (and all other students, for that matter), it’s a pretty important time that always requires some planning. Yep, it’s course selection time.

Starting off, first year courses are pretty important. They may not be the most interesting, but we all have face the unbearable one day and first year can be exactly that. For your first year, just have an idea as to what general field you want to get into. For example: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, English, and so on. You’ve got to have a general idea because that determines what kind of courses you have to take to start working towards your Subject POSt/degree. Having to switch part-way through would be frustrating since you’ve already put in so much effort working towards your first choice. So choose wisely in order to avoid such a tragedy. And I mean that. Seriously.

You’ve also got to look into whether a slightly ‘harder’ version of a course is recommended or needed. What I mean by this is that there can be multiple courses that count towards the same thing. However, certain majors require/recommend one over the other. Let’s take Physics, for example. If you’re taking Physics in first year, you essentially have 2 choices: PHY131/PHY132 and PHY151/PHY152. Both are a set of 2 half-year courses. From what I know (don’t quote me on this), Physics programs recommend PHY151/PHY152 while other Science programs (excluding Computer Science) allow you to pick between either. So if you’re keen and into Physics and want to do a Science program, you can go ahead and pick PHY151/PHY152. The only downside, if it even is a downside, is that not a lot of people in the same program take the ‘higher’ and ‘harder’ (note the quotes = not literally) courses. PHY151 and PHY152 are ‘harder’ and more in-depth than PHY131 and PHy132. So yeah. That’s pretty much the main thing you have to watch out for. Usually, though, the majority of people are indecisive when it comes to what they want to do, so it’s nothing to get too uptight about. Just keep some ideas in the back of your head.

Lastly, even though it’s a minor thing, is deciding whether you want to do a specialist, major, or a minor. Specialists are more in-depth versions of majors. And minors are… well, you get the point. Of course, there are pros and cons for each one. In my opinion, majors are more flexible and allow you to do more than one thing. So, if you want to focus on two things, a double major might be best for you. Specialists are for people who are seriously interested in only one subject matter and want to take a lot of courses centered around just that discipline.

Hopefully this helps you out if you needed help on this whole course selection thing. If it did, I’m glad I could help. Until next time!

Click here to see this year’s course calendar.

You’ve just received your offer of admission from the University of Toronto. Congrats! While you may feel excited and hopeful now, there’s still time for you to encounter the dread and anxiety experienced by most students about to start university. You might even be missing high school already. Never fear! U of T knows just how to handle this – let me introduce to you… the seminar course.

I see you.

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Once upon a time, you decided you were going to go to U of T. Maybe your parents took you to an information evening, and you briefly heard the speaker mention how your 90 average was probably going to plummet, but you were distracted uploading a picture to Facebook of you in your new, complimentary U of T baseball cap. Maybe your guidance counsellor warned you that U of T was a really tough school, and you really considered what they said, and decided you could handle it. You’re a good student. Sure, your marks might drop a bit. But you’ll get back up there.

So, you went to U of T. It was great. The classes were really stimulating, you made lots of friends. Or maybe you hated all your classes and completely overhauled your schedule. Either way, some time in late October or early November, it was time for your first set of midterms.

You were going to be fine. You studied for hours in Robarts. You could practically give the lectures for this course.

Fast forward to today, two weeks later. The midterm marks are up on Blackboard and you’re making a safe bet on an 80. But guess what foreign number greets you when you turn on your screen: 60.

Huh. Never seen that grade before. It’s kind of nice. Very… round.

First year students (with the exception of geniuses, which there are many of at U of T), it is my distinct honour and pleasure to welcome you to the First Midterm Reality Check Club! Yes, it’s true, your 90s have literally FLIPPED OVER into a fabulous new number!

As you embark on the new and exciting numeric journey that is your first midterm grades, I would like to offer you a few reasons why you should NOT panic:

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Upon my arrival to Toronto at the beginning of September, suffice to say, I was a wreck.  With classes looming on the near horizon, I was already pondering whether I should start my readings, what classes I should drop, and why I ever thought moving to Toronto was a good idea in the first place.  Further to my horror, my frosh leaders thronged my car and led me the basement of Whitney Hall, which strikingly resembles the set of a crime show murder scene.

Frosh Week passed in a blur of brightly-coloured t-shirts, face-paint, bandanas, gratuitous cheers, and new faces, many of which I would never recognize again.  For the first half of the week, I attempted to convince myself to cheer and attend all the activities on the schedule, intent that the first one I missed would be the best one, which bonded everyone unshakably and exclusively for the next four years.

This brings me to my first piece of sage wisdom: Everyone should give frosh week a chance.  If you are into cheering, spirit, jazz-hands, etc., this week may in fact be “the highlight of your U of T experience”, as your frosh leaders will tell you it will be.  For those of you like me, however, who tend towards a more composed temperament, I recommend giving Frosh Week a chance to entertain you; and if/when it doesn’t, don’t be afraid to do your own thing. People will still want to make friends after Frosh Week.  I can promise you that no activity will live up to the hype if none has by the middle of the week for you.  They will continue to all follow the same pattern of running around Toronto, cheering (despite that you are out of breath from running around Toronto), and being generally unsure of your objective. (more…)

When I was eight years old I loved everything about summer. That is, until those “back-to-school” commercials started popping up everywhere (why they air those commercials as soon as we have our first taste of summer, I’ll never know.) As soon as I saw those advertisements, I was reminded of the horrors of going back to school—but that was before my education included lectures about movies and playing beer pong.  So, for those of us lucky enough to go to UofT, seeing a “back-to-school” advertisement no longer needs to fill us with mortal dread. Instead, we can embrace this time;  September is reborn as a time for Toga parties, being reunited with old friends, and even making new ones.

While many readers will have already passed Freshman year, I’m sure there are those of you who are still a bit nervous about heading off into the direction of academia. For those lucky few, I have prepared the following crash-course on how to spend your first few weeks at UofT.

1.Don’t freak out.

You’ve signed up for your classes. You’ve paid your tuition (hopefully!). You know where you are going to live.  Beyond that,  don’t worry over anything just yet. Just because the anti-calendar says your class is going to suck, doesn’t mean it actually will.  Just because you don’t know anyone in your class, doesn’t mean you can’t make some new friends– or at least meet someone to share notes with.  Don’t listen to people when they tell you to just “turn back while you can!”. You obviously did well enough in High School to get into Uni, so there is no reason you can’t succeed once you get there.

2. Seriously, don’t freak out.

All of those things you are worried about—making friends, tests, term papers, parties, getting lost—they haven’t happened yet.

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Just three weeks before the end of the fall semester, I have come to the realization that I haven’t done any productive work outside of school since the start of classes.

As a first-year student, I naturally had many plans to do extra-curricular activities over the summer. French Club. The Varsity newspaper. Engineering Toastmasters. Engineers Without Borders. The Blue & Gold Committee (a spirit group for engineers). The Engineering Society, Academic Committee. The Engineering LEGO Club.

Tons of plans, but they’ve fallen through due to:

1. Time commitments. Toastmasters ends at 10pm on Thursdays, when I am often staying up late completing PHY180 lab write-ups. I also have limited time to begin with because the commute eats up 3 hours each day. LEGO Club… well, meetings are also on Thursdays, and I guess doing error analysis calculations is more feasible than constructing a house made of LEGO bricks.
2. Lack of response from group executives. I’m serious – I signed up for a gazillion clubs during the UTSU and Engineering Clubs’ Fairs, but have only been e-mailed by a handful. And some have only e-mailed once, and never again. The only French Club meeting I’ve been to was their introductory brunch, which, incidentally, was delicious.
3. Laziness. I signed up for blogUT, knew I was going to blog the second I had something to say, and… kind of forgot about it.
4. In my defence, it was partly also due to shyness and decision-making. I was trying to come up with something interesting to talk about. Whatever was remotely related to engineering, I stuck the blog entry into the Online Design Journal I’m required to keep in preparation for one of my final exams.

Considering that all of my friends here at U of T are first-years in engineering, I haven’t been doing non-scientifically-related writing for a while now, and I am slowly losing my French skills, my inactivity is clearly something I should deal with.

Fortunately, I kept the last e-mail I got from blogUT, in my Inbox where I could easily see it. And I discovered that not only was the founder a former EngSci graduate, but there were posts, personal ones (i.e. not just artsy reviews or school events!) that could resemble what I’d write in any blog.

I decided not to write for the Arts section of the Varsity when I realized that they didn’t publish book reviews (plus my  reviews are generally outdated – a few months after the book’s release), and didn’t write for the Science section because they seem to expect up-to-date news from research conducted right at the U of T. The Cannon, the engineering newspaper, has never e-mailed me since I wrote my contact information on the sign-up sheet.

So much for trying to be connected to student life. I guess that’s how blogUT started, because it sure feels good to be blogging and just… doing something aside from problem sets and whatnot.