This semester will be different (and other lies I tell myself at UTM)
Welcome to the UTM experience: Navigating campus, surviving each semester and convincing yourself you’ll be more organized this time.
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Every September, I make the same promise: this school year will be different. I’ll stay ahead of my readings, review every lecture regularly, start assignments early, and become one of the mythical students who finishes everything a week before it’s due. Four years later, I’m still trying to make my promise come true.
Then I remembered the drama film, The Karate Kid. Protagonist Daniel LaRusso spent weeks painting fences, sanding floors, and waxing cars. He wondered why he was doing chores instead of learning karate. By the end of the movie, you realize those boring tasks were part of his training.
For first-year UTM students, your training started in July.
Long before your first lecture, you stared at ACORN and waited for your enrolment window like it was the countdown to the biggest event of the summer. You refresh the page. Then refresh it again. And once more. Somehow, getting into your required courses felt more stressful than getting accepted into university. Eventually, your timetable comes together and you breathe a sigh of relief. Congratulations! That was just the warm-up.
September arrived, and six course syllabi landed in your inbox before you’ve even finished your first coffee. You log into Quercus to check the syllabus, jump over to ACORN because you’re suddenly questioning the information for one of your tutorials, then head back to Quercus because you’ve already forgotten where the lecture slides are. Before long, opening browser tabs became a habit.
Then comes the campus map. Your timetable says your lecture is in the Instructional Centre (IB). You ask someone where it is, they smile and say, “Just walk past DV, and cut through CCT.”
Perfect. Now you have three buildings to Google instead of one. By the second week, you’ve mastered the art of looking like you know exactly where you’re going while checking your phone every thirty seconds.
Just when you think you’ve figured campus out, midterm season arrives. Finding a seat in the library then becomes its own elective. Every table seems occupied by a laptop, a water bottle, and a backpack whose owner has not been seen.
Somewhere between refreshing ACORN, decoding building abbreviations, hunting for a library seat, and convincing myself that I would stay ahead this semester, I realized maybe this was the training montage. It just looked a little different than I expected.
There is no dramatic music or crane kick to start your university experience. It’s just Quercus notifications, coffee, deadlines, and the annual promise many UTM students make: this semester will be different.
Four years later… I’m still pretty sure I mean it this time.
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