Advice for new students: make your degree work for you and form friendships beyond classrooms
The Medium executives share their advice on choosing electives and making friends outside of your program
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Make your degree work for you
By Mashiyat Ahmed
Throughout the past four years at UTM, I’ve switched up my double minor of choice an astounding three times. Yes, you can call me indecisive. Maybe I am just another victim of how stressful and confusing academic planning can be at the U of T, where it seems that everyone around me is riding the blissful train of certainty, while I am still trying to Google Maps my way to the station.
With my graduation around the corner, I am finishing my degree with a specialist in neuroscience paired with a double minor in philosophy of science and women, gender, and sexuality studies. Before this, I was “settled” on professional writing. Before that, biology, and even before that, anthropology!
When it comes to academic planning and, clearly, our career outlook, there’s a sad yet unsurprising level of gatekeeping and myopic thinking that contaminates how students are taught to build and imagine our professional lives. A result of that rigid thinking is the idea that one’s specialist or major of choice is the more important part of the degree. In thinking so, minors and electives are often cast aside as less central to one’s professional life.
I have known many students—including myself, who initially decided to minor in something with the borrowed thought that doing so would help bolster their “actual” degree. For me, pairing a biology minor with neuroscience felt like the right choice. The natural choice, even.
By now, I’ve taken enough courses across wildly different and unrelated departments to know that sometimes, making bold choices and taking risks—even if it means being unable to explain to others what your degree combination is about—can be incredibly fulfilling both personally and professionally.
We as students need to reframe unconventional program combinations not as signs of indecision or randomness, but as key stepping stones towards exercising the muscle of an intersectional and interdisciplinary intellect.
Learning about feminist politics helped me understand how and why neuroscientific data sets and research methods marginalize women’s bodies and brains. Concepts from philosophy of science, cognitive ethics, and bioethics taught me to question the fundamental assumptions which drive research and “pop science.” My atypical program combination is now part of the reasons why I feel more empowered to pursue a non-traditional career in science journalism amongst other professional side quests.
As a fifth-year, I have the luxury of perspective. It’s only something that comes with time and experience, but if I could share a kernel of wisdom with all the first-years and returning students, it would be this: make your degree work for you. Make bold choices, take unconventional electives, change up your programs as many times as you need to. Don’t settle for a passion that you aren’t even sure belongs to you in the first place.
Dear first-years: What you might be overlooking in friendships
By Rameen Hashimi
Dear first-years,
While classes only began about a week ago, I imagine you have been straining to remember everyone you meet and everything you see. Rest assured, it is an important component of a beautiful university experience. After all, learning to remember and retrieve names is important when you get to form many new connections each day.
Recently, you may have bonded with a new friend during an orientation event or simply introduced yourselves before the beginning of a lecture. Perhaps as you exchanged your social media tags, a realization hit: your programs are substantially different. Trust me, I know the initial worry that your paths won’t cross again—has a friendship ended before it could even begin? But please, also trust me in reflecting on why this is not necessarily the case.
Firstly, I encourage you not to limit yourselves to friendships within your program and courses. Sometimes it may take extra effort to arrange hangouts with friends in other programs, but you can still nurture supportive relationships. However, even if time or circumstances drift you apart, know that the connection was not wasted. You never know when your paths might cross again!
I’ll illustrate this with a personal story: my recent experience planning The Medium’s orientation event as an Outreach Coordinator was a full-circle moment. My teammate Rojin Hajiabbasali and I met as participants in the same UTMSU orientation event a year ago. Flash forward to meeting and bonding again at The Medium was super exciting. And now, we get to bond over our outreach efforts and beyond!
Overall, this is a brilliant time to connect with others and engage in the community on campus! While it can most certainly be challenging, don’t be shy about initiating a conversation, even if it’s just for five minutes. After all, it can be the beginning of a friendship!
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Opinion Editor (Volume 51); Associate Opinion Editor (Volume 50) — Mashiyat (Mash) is a third-year student studying Neuroscience and Professional Writing and Communication (PWC). As this year’s Opinion Editor, Mash hopes to use her writing, editorial, and leadership skills in supporting student journalism in the essential role it plays in fostering intellectual freedom and artistic expression on campuses. When she’s not writing or slaving away at school, Mash uses her free time cooking cultural dishes, striking up conversations with strangers, and being anxious about her nebulous career plans. You can connect with Mash on her LinkedIn.
