Posts tagged with students.

From hash pipe to hash tag: how the campus has changed

Jennifer Gardy, November 27, 2009 at 3:45 PM

 

Hello again Dear Readers, and apologies again for my prolonged absence.  Pig flu and all that; you understand.

I'm writing this from the UBC campus again - I'm here for a day of meetings and have managed to squeeze in a few minutes of writing in between talking about neglected global diseases, systems biology, and whether the opera singers should go before or after the orchestra in the annual revue.

I've plugged my laptop into an outlet in the foyer of the Laserre building, known in my time as being a great place to get intimate on campus, as the 2nd floor washroom had a vinyl couch and lockable door. I may venture up there later out of curiosity, but I suspect my investigation will reveal that the couch is gone, the old wooden door has been replaced with some modern frosted glass number, and the 2nd floor bog has been renamed the "Earl and Marion Peterson Family Relief Facility" in the continuing tradition of  academic patronage.

While some things on a campus never change (beer, dissatisfaction with student-led politics, weird food smells), this is a very mutable place and bears little resemblance to the campus I left behind when I got my B.Sc. I was reminded of this a few times recently, taking part in student-led events that demonstrated the marked change in extracurricular activities over the years.

As I wrote some time ago, the beer-drinking and trouble-making of years gone by have been replaced by rather more mature pursuits, like creating associations for networking, communication, activism, putting on conferences, starting charities, and other things that have relevance to the real world and look good on a CV. I've always poked gentle fun at all of this - after all, university's the time to have your fun while you still can and not worry about grown-up business, because once you've graduated you will spend much of your existence running from meeting to meeting as dictated by your Outlook calendar, filling out forms in triplicate to have someone come and move your wastebasket, and having to delay your actual work to deal with crises like an 8-foot freezer that won't fit through a 7-foot door. Gentle needling aside, though, there are some really great student-focused initiatives on campus.

One of the coolest by far is Tedx Terry Talks (http://www.terry.ubc.ca/terrytalks/), or #TedXTt to call it by its hashtag (another campus change I've noticed - if you play word association and say "hash" you get "tag" back and not "pipe"). In its second year, this is a Ted-style conference (if you see "Ted" and think first of your accountant or your brother in law, please go to ted.com and be awed) featuring a few of UBC's most interesting and inspiring students speaking about something important to them. I was delighted to be a part of it this year as the alumni speaker, and came out feeling very warm and fuzzy about our world's future (I then saw peopleofwalmart.com and my belief in the impending doom of our society was suddenly and violently reawakened, but I was doing good for at least a day or two there).

Terry Talks emcee Dave Ng (also founder of the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique - http://www.scq.ubc.ca/sciencescouts/) edited a wonderful series of videos featuring this year's speakers (http://www.terry.ubc.ca/terrytalks/) which I encourage you to check out. Alexander Cannon shared the very personal and engaging story of his transition from female to male, Azim Wazeer took us on a tour of the many places and cultures he experienced growing up, Iris Amuto painted a vivid portrait of Africa's true and beautiful self, Tahira Ibrahim expressed her wish for all of us to just get along, and Camille Israel and her ukulele taught us how to fall in love with our major all over again. The scientists were well-represented too, with Jennifer Kaban encouraging us to keep a sense of wonder in looking at the world, Nadine Qureshi advocating simple measures for malarial prevention, Eric Ma explaining the world of synthetic biology and designing life forms from scratch, and yours truly talking about H1N1, open access, and sequencing poop (note: times may change, campuses may change, poop jokes, though - always funny).

UBC President Stephen Toope is another champion of student achievement. Three years ago, he resurrected the Blue and Gold Revue, which had been a 1950s-1960s-era student talent show with dramatic readings, skits, and polite young men with clean fingernails singing "How Much is That Doggie in the Window" a cappella. The 21st century version of the Revue highlights amazing student achievements, and this year's event, to be held December 2 (http://www.supporting.ubc.ca/revue), has everything from an interdisciplinary student-led clinic in Vancouver's most impoverished neighbourhood to the sixth-best moon-dust-excavating robot in the world.

You've also got great student-led groups like The Student Biotechnology Network (http://www.thesbn.ca/) and Young Women in Business (http://www.ywib.ca) working to prep students for their eventual release into the wild, and cross-organization events like Worlds Aids Day (http://www.terry.ubc.ca/index.php/2009/11/24/cool-event-ubc-world-aids-day-events-dec-1st-3rd/), for which a whole range of student groups have come together to stage a series of events December 1-3 (one of those groups is UBC A Cappella, who I'm pretty sure still have clean fingernails, though they may have dropped "Doggie in the Window" by now).

So, yes, the campus has changed, but it's certainly changed for the better if the accomplishments and engagement of its current students are used as a yardstick.  The price of beer hasn't changed much, though, and I can now afford more of it, so with that I'll sign off, as I really must dash off to the Earl and Marion Peterson Family Relief Facility.

Tagged with students, columbia, university, changed, british, ubc, extracurricular | Comments (19) |

A lament for fun

Jennifer Gardy, March 10, 2009 at 9:44 AM

Over the last few years, it seems as if UBC's gradually been losing its sense of fun. Just as the air slowly leaks out of a balloon, so is the joy leaking out of campus life. By my calculations, the fun deficit has reached the point where, in balloon terms, UBC is about to suddenly collapse and go PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTTT as it flies around the room, only to land in a corner, a flaccid, deflated reminder of what once was.

The symptoms began appearing about five years ago, with the steady decline in beer gardens. It used to be that come 4:00pm on a Friday, you'd grab your best plastic beer stein, load up your pocket with change ferreted out from the sofa cushions, and then wander campus in search of the best party. Later that night, you'd wake up under a van or in someone's driveway missing your glasses and wearing someone else's pants .  The festivities did not please The Administration, however, who felt that neither prodigious liver capacity nor the ability to trade pants with someone without taking off your shoes were traits characteristic of the "global citizens" they were trying to mould.  Thus, with the co-operation of the campus RCMP detachment, the number of beer gardens was significantly reduced.

As the veins of students gradually returned to a state of being filled with blood rather than beer, other symptoms appeared.  In 2005, the Radical Beer Faction -  UBC's oldest political party  (emphasis on the "party") - went dormant. Active since 1988, the Science-led RBF never had much of a platform beyond "we like beer" and "hey, let's mess up the elections", but consistently placed not-last in the elections for nearly two decades. (In fact, I ran as one of their candidates in 1999 - the year we ran a traffic cone for Director of Finance - with a moustachioed, dictatorial sock puppet called Generalissimo as my running mate. We placed not-last with a remarkable 19% of the vote, probably thanks to Generalissimo's intimidating penny-eyed stare.)

Two years later, the Arts Undergraduate Society cancelled the Arts County Fair, a concert/beer garden that had, since 1992, marked the last day of classes. While attendance had reached heights of 15,000 in the late 90s, numbers dropped steadily in the events' later years, with students opting to study for finals instead of partaking in the shared euphoria of crowd-surfing, uninhibited dancing, and shuffling from foot to foot trying not to pee while waiting in an hour-long portapotty line.

Even the infamous UBC Engineers are no match for the fun recession. Their clubhouse/den of iniquity, the venerable (some might say venereal) Cheeze Factory, is being razed on account of various health and safety issues, and after the arrest of five students during this year's attempt at hanging a VW Bug from a local bridge, the  long-standing tradition of Bug-dangling may come to an end.

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT. There goes the balloon.

Today's students, while not averse to the odd bit of fun (the RBF did recently rise from the ashes, and the AUS is attempting to revive the ACF in a different form), are devoting more of their extracurricular time to career preparation activities. While it could be argued that during my time we were doing the same thing, assuming our chosen career was barfly, these students are instead organizing things like mentoring and networking events, mini-conferences, and career fairs, and they've replaced beer with baking, cocktails with crudités, and those plastic beer steins with clipboards and name tags.

It may have something to do with value-for-money and the fact that tuition now costs about three times what it did when I was an undergrad. It might be that this generation recognizes that with more of them graduating - undergraduate enrolment has gone from about 26,000 students when I started in 1996 to over 36,000 today - they need to focus not just on their degrees but also their soft skills if they're going to outcompete the others for a job. Or it just might be the natural result of turning off the draught taps and letting the campus' collective liver detox for a few years.

Whatever the explanation, this cynical old campus party girl expects the trend to continue. It's unfortunate really, as having fun in university and enjoying academic and career success are not mutually exclusive, as my friends have proven over the years. The guy that woke up glasses-less in the driveway having traded pants with someone else is now one of the design world's most respected digital artists. The fellow who sought drunken shelter from the rain and napped under a parked van has deployed software projects worth millions of dollars. And the girl that used to sit in the civil engineering building's wind tunnel egging her friends to turn it up higher, she writes some sort of weekly thing for some globecampus.ca website.

And if that's not enough to convince you that a little beer and trouble-making won't doom you to a lifetime of mediocrity, let me leave you with a little UBC trivia. In 1968, someone on campus decided UBC was no fun. He campaigned for the campus' first pub, which began as a beer garden-style event in the Student Union Building ballroom and eventually moved to permanent digs, where it's been serving up beer for over 28 years.  The man that brought 35-cent beer and a much-needed injection of fun to the campus? David Suzuki.

Tagged with beer, partying, students | Comments (55) |