Rethinking, Social Media, and Eye of the Tiger: My SLC Experience

The UBC Student Leadership Conference is a signature event of UBC, bringing together over 1300 students to a day filled with leadership opportunities and the chance to meet with industry professionals and UBC student leaders. I had the lucky chance to dedicate 9 months of my life for this year’s conference and had a fantastic, fun, memorable, laugh-out-loud time with a group of the best people around.

SLC has definitely been my favourite volunteer experience ever. I’ve met great people, learned a lot of great skills, and had an experience of a lifetime. I sometimes can’t fathom that it was over 2 months ago that all our blood (literally for me), sweat and tears came together on one Saturday in January. SLC 2011 had great reviews from everyone and I’m extremely happy they had a great time.

But what was most memorable for me was the process of making the conference happen. At our midterm retreat, one of our advisors, Shannon, said that she could pull off SLC by herself and that it would be a lot less trouble. Well, Shannon, if SLC was like that it would have been a lot less fun and I bet she doesn’t regret putting up with us

Call me an oldie, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to remember everything that’s happened in a span of 9 months. So in honour of the UBC SLC 2011 and the planning committee, I’ve written everything down that was most memorable for me because, really, if I included everything, it’ll be a few thousand words. So I’ll focus on the most memorable aspects during my time at SLC and cap it off at (I won’t tell you the number because you might not reading it )

Joining or not – yeah, I’m joining.

The idea of not joining the SLC crossed my mind for a few minutes back in May when I was offered my position. I had originally applied for Volunteer Coordinator because I wanted to work with volunteers and I’ve had that kind of experience before. But I had been offered Media Coordinator, not that it was a bad position (it ended up being awesome). I wanted to step out my comfort zone a bit, which in hindsight was actually the opposite because I’ve done more volunteer-related extracurriculars, so I didn’t accept the position right away. At the end of the day, literally, I accepted the job the next day because it was on my mind for months after the 2010 conference and I would have regretted it incredibly if I did not join.

Sometimes things don’t go your way and it turns out to be for the best. Sometimes, silver linings do exist. And they turn out to be bright pink and blue and a whole lot of awesome.

Wiggio

Oh god, Wiggio. For those who don’t know, Wiggio is an online application meant to make group collaboration more efficient and easier, and a lot of student development programs use it. Think of it as an upgrade to the Facebook Group with calendars, ability to conduct polls and file sharing. Well, it didn’t live up to the hype, the thing caused more frustration than without it. People would upload files, but no one could find it. We had profiles which everyone was supposed to upload their photo, which of course 5 people of our 25-person group did.  We would get notifications that the calendar changed, but no idea which part of it did. We were supposed to upload timelines in May, which only a few people did again (less of Wiggio’s fault I guess). Polls would be conducted, but not everyone would/could vote. Updates would be posted on Wiggio, but we have our SLC e-mail accounts, which are with Google so we have Google calendars, docs, and everything, so why couldn’t we send a full-team update there? Everyone ended up casually ignoring Wiggio by the end.

Life at IKBLC: a Survivor’s Tale

In short, my life’s been:

1. spending 12+ hours inside IKBLC everyday since December 4th.
2. coordinating with friends where and when to meet to bus home.
3. knowing that all spots at IKBLC except for Ike’s is full around 10 am.
4. avoiding all nighters are IKBLC after last term’s memorable experience.
5. learning that leaving your laptop or phone unattended means hilarious times of Facebook statuses and texts.
6. watching people prey on others leaving IKBLC and pouncing once/before the table space is empty.
7. becoming too familiar with the people who are at IKBLC all the time, me included.
8. appreciating friends, food, and sleep that help you survive exams season and it’s shit without them.

My exams end on the 15th and then it’s party time from there on out: iPhone 4, sushi, casino, downtown, trip to the states, hanging out with friends, and endless good times. Also on my list: STAYING THE HELL OUT OF IKBLC.

Good luck, drink lots of water, get some sleep, and don’t leave your laptop open with your friends around unless you want a good laugh when you get back.

City Chase vs. 9%

Currently: debating on doing some pre-reading or going to bed.

Today, I had to make the choice between participating in City Chase @ UBC, a Vancouver-wide scavenger hunt on October 15th, or losing 9% from my PSYC217 course grade because I will miss the mandatory lab session and presentation of my group’s experiment. What did I, a student who said “academics > pretty much everything else,” do? I chose not losing almost 1/10 of my course mark instead of doing something really fun and exciting that would make my university experience a whole lot better.

Of all days, WHY DID THEY HAVE TO HAPPEN ON THE EXACT SAME DAY!?

There’ll be a lot more things that I will miss because academics are more important. Hopefully not too many. Here’s hoping the classes I have on City Chase next year are not mandatory.

On a lighter note, check out this fantastic Student Leadership Conference (SLC) Vlog that is the brain child of me and the SLC Communications and Promotions team! I’m also on camera, awkwardly talking about coffee and fumbling with the video camera I used for the first time. Just what everyone needs: evidence of one’s awkwardness.

While you’re at it, check out the Facebook Fan Page, Twitter and website. The first 2 are pretty much completely run by me, so if you’re my friend on Facebook, all the spam rethinking discharges you receive are by me. It’s actually my job requirement to do this, so haters to the left.

Signup deadline for City Chase is October 8th! Don’t miss out on this awesome opportunity to explore the city. People in my class: 9% or fun times?

UBC 101 – Physical Education

UBC 101 – Physical Education is one of the most important courses of the UBC 101 series. Exercise is so often neglected that I feel the need to bold it, make it red and add a few asterisks. Read through, because it’ll be great for your academics, social life, and health.

1. P.E.? I thought that was only in high school…

As the course name “Physical Education” suggests, this course is about physical activity. The whole (I’m taking an educated guess there) idea behind P.E. in elementary and high school is to get people to exercise and have a healthy and fit body. It’s so that children do not become obese and also to have some fun.

University is no different and I believe that exercising is as important as ever for us. We sit through lectures all day, go to study, eat, grab the bus home, and sleep. Save for parties or nights out with friends, the general trend is that.

But most students do not even think about going for a run, working out at the gym, or join a team sport, one that they might have been on the school team in high school. It’s because we’re consumed by our courses, most evident for First Years, that the thought of doing something not academically-related is blasphemy.

I’m here to tell you today that P.E. didn’t end in high school. It’s just isn’t mandatory anymore, which makes it harder for you to get some. Exercising requires motivation, self  or otherwise. Before motivation, however, you’ll need some convincing, which is why this blog post is dedicated to physical exercise.

UBC 101 – Irving All Nighters 109

UBC 101 - Irving All Nighters 109 is the result of a personal experience and several attempted experiences. I hope that you never have to pull an all nighter, a.k.a not sleeping all night, at Irivng K. Barber Learning Center (Irving as I call it). It’s not fun, but it’s bearable and doable, especially in such a nice place like Irving.

1. What’s this “Irving” that we’re pulling an all nighter at?

Lots of new students to UBC might not know where or what Irving is, so it’s appropriate to start here.

Irving is the main library of UBC. It is across from the Hennings building and diagonally across the SUB (the red rectangle in the map below):

Irving is arguably second most beautiful building at UBC, with the Chan Centre taking the title.

Someone on Overheard at UBC says a visitor mistook it for a church. I don’t blame them.

Some basic specs: 4 floors including the basement; a small deli called Ike’s Cafe that sells sandwiches, salads, fruit and other things; the Chapman Learning Commons which has many computers, a printer/scanner, some Mac computers’ and big comfy couches; and many tables and rooms close to plugs, which are in constant need among students.

I’ve studied at Irving all the time, perhaps only a few times in Walter C. Koerner Library, the second largest library at UBC.

In comparison with Koerner Library, Irving is closer to the SUB and bus loop which is great for getting food and when going home at night. It’s also brighter and has more open space, but therefore having less quiet areas to study which is the main benefit of Koerner. Irving has 3 rooms that are “silent rooms”: on the fourth floor, there is one at the end of the hallway (Nass Reading Room 459) and one half-way in the hall-way (Musqueam Room 455), and one in the third floor, at the back of the book stacks that lots of people call the “Harry Potter Room” (Ridington Room 321). It really does look like something out of Harry Potter. If you prefer a quiet area to study, these places are for you. However, the first 2 rooms tend to become warm and stuffed up because of the lack of air flow, and all of them are in frequent demand during exam times.

The largest appeal of Irving is that it’s the only building at UBC open 24/7, albeit only during finals season. During the rest of the year, it’s open until 1 am. People sleep there….for days…I’ve seen them. It gets nasty.

UBC 101 – Introduction to Cheat Sheets

UBC 101 – Introduction to Cheat Sheets will be a pretty new tutorial for most students coming from high schools. There’s not much to it, but there are some things to know.

1. What are “cheat sheets”?

Cheat sheets are usually 1-sided (sometimes 2-sided) pieces of paper where you can put anything you want and take it to your exam. They are usually only used for science classes such as math, biology, physics, etc.

2. Why’s it important to make/have a cheat sheet?

This is pretty basic, but you want a cheat sheet because you’ll forget something from what you studied and some concepts are too complicated to memorize. Let’s face it, those math equations are pretty minor ideas, but they do have the slightest chance of being on the exam, especially those surface area and volume equations. Also, if you know you’re going to copy something word for word, like a list of all the eons and eras, you don’t have to study for that and study more for other concepts.

For many courses, your prof will give you practice exams. In order to take the practice exam as if it was your real exam, you need your cheat sheet. Everything to make it more like realistic right?

But the biggest benefit to making a cheat sheet is that it’s part of your studying. You read from your notes and textbook, copy it down, and you’ve pretty much memorized it in the process. For my first Biology 121 exam, I only looked at my cheat sheet once, and some of my friends never looked at it at all, partly because of the time constraint.

First Year classes

Just some memorable things from my First Year classes

Arts Studies 150

• Research paper
• Writing Centre
• “Anyone smoke chalk? Can I offer you one?”
• “I don’t like your tie. You’re going to jail!”
• “Is Meltzoff cooking his babies?”
• “What the hell are you doing to my babies!”
• “They’re college undergraduates. How much integrity do they have?”
• “My collegue says he has to sing for his dinner.”
• “Chopsticks and divergence.”
• “I had an entire class on ‘chalk’ in teachers college. But then when I went to teach, there were only whiteboards to write on. I had my roommate check if my writing was okay. I got an A!”
• “Babies know how to point when they do pop out of the…I mean, when they’re born.”
• “What is a person? Roommate on a leash and breed them? Guy or cat?”

Astronomy 100

• Lab reports
• Lecture slides.

Math 102

• Ipshum
• Qualicum

Biology 121

• Cluck clucks
• Group Assignment 3
• TA Hours
• Mastering Biology
• Clicker questions

Sociology 100

• Papers

Psychology 100

• 1 person asked a question in the whole year
• Long-haired guy
• “We tend not to study people beyond death.”
• “My grandchildren infest my house like lice.”
• My prof, Stanley Coren’s, last course of his teaching career.

Biology 155

• Recordings
• Recordings
• Recordings

Putting the Science in Sport

What do you do when you’re sick of university and have 2 weeks to take a break: you go back to elementary school.

And that’s exactly what I did for 3 days this week through participating in a Reading Week Project (RWP). What’s a RWP, you ask? Basically a 3-day volunteering event held every year during Reading Break where UBC students get to work with elementary school students and teach them a variety of things, such as the environment and First Nations art.

The project I volunteered for was called the Science of Sport at Queen Victoria Annex and we (30-ish students) taught the students the relationship between sports and science. The awesome people who organized this project came up with 10 different activities in a variety of topics, such as physics, nutrition, and biology. 2 students teach each activity for the entire day and the rest are chaperones, taking groups of children to the activities in different rooms of the school. We get to teach different activities every day to mix it up, so the same 2 students don’t have to teach the same activity everyday and get to do something different and not get bored as well.

Day 1

My day started at 7.30am when I woke up in order to get to the school by 8.30am. The trip to the school was very easy because it was only a few blocks away from Commercial/Broadway Station. I met a lot of UBC students, none of them that I knew before, and had a few ice breakers to get to know each other. My favourite game was Bang Off (I don’t know if they made up the name). Due to communication errors, the school actually thought we were going to be there the following week and weren’t ready for us to have a tour of the school. Therefore, we settled for having a lot of preparation time for the activities. I was chaperone for the day, so me and all the other chaperones basically sat around and talked for a good hour and then we went to our group of kids.

The first activity I brought the kids to was called Exploring Motion, where they got to build luges. The activity was kind of disorganized because the activity sheet describing the activity didn’t explain how they children were going to build luges from cardboard tubes and tape. Therefore, we settled for decorating the tubes and racing marbles down the tubes, the result being flying marbles all over the lunch room. I heard back from the activity leaders that the sessions were better after the first test-run.

The next activity was about friction, and the kids (you guessed it) learned about friction. They were split up into 2 teams and built ramps with wooden blocks to race mini-cars with. After that, they compared whether the cars raced faster down the side of the ramp with a towel on it or the side without. Friction was also tested with different sized books to see whether surface area plays a role in friction, and then bringing it all back to friction in Olympic sports, such as speed skating and snowboarding. The kids were pretty good at the activity, but while they were building the towers, a bit of competition resulted, each group wanting to build the tallest tower.

UBC Student Leadership Conference 2010

The Student Leadership Conference (SLC) is an annual conference that invites over 1100 delegates to expand their leadership qualities through workshops and networking with future and current leaders. This year, I had the opportunity to attend the largest student-led conference in all of North America (as the spokespersons gladly reminded us several times) and it was a truly inspiring experience!

I had initially never planned on going to SLC 2010. Although I had heard about it since September, I had no general interest in it. I have attended conferences before and was extremely bored by them. It wasn’t until a friend of mine wanted to attend but could not because of prior commitments that I looked into the SLC program. I discovered that there were many workshops and aspects that I am very interested in and want to explore, and signed myself up immediately.

My day started at 5:45 am. Due to the fact that I am part of the VP Students Emerging Leaders Program, everyone attending SLC 2010 met at 7:30 am at the Centre for Student Involvement (CSI: I think the name was on purpose) for breakfast and to pick up our schedules. The night before I was contemplating whether to go to SLC or not, mostly influenced by the 7:30 am meeting, on a Saturday no less! In the end, I decided it was worth it (and boy was it!) and woke up at said 5:45 am to catch the 6:15 am Skytrain. Surprisingly, I wasn’t very tired, even with the 4 hours sleep I had.

When I got to CSI, the second surprise of the day occurred: there was a lot of people there! I didn’t think there would be a huge turnout due to the early breakfast and I was wrong (again, for anyone’s counting). The breakfast was very good: pancakes, fruit, yogurt, muffins, and even whip cream for the pancakes. Because I registered for SLC only 3 days before the conference, my name tag and schedule were not at the CSI, but at Chan Centre. This caused some problems with comparing schedules with other delegates. We did some socializing until 8:30ish and headed to Chan Centre for the opening ceremony.

I had been to the Chan Centre before to attend some concerts, but Chan Centre looked very different from what I remembered. Perhaps it’s because the times I went there was forced and so I could not appreciate just how awesome Chan Centre actually is. Although the exterior is grey and mundane, the interior is modern and very beautiful, something I had never noticed before. A Third Year Arts student told me Chan Centre is in the shape of a cello which was an interesting fact (but I don’t see the shape myself).

The opening ceremony was a great way to start the conference. The main reason was because of Shane Koyczan! Who is he? I wondered that myself. Shane Koyczan is an award-winning Canadian slam poet from the Northwest Territories and he is damn funny. He performed several of his hilarious poetry for us and he caused uproar of laughter and cheer. An extremely enjoyable presentation and I certainly want to hear more of his poetry.

The first presenter I attended was a Canadian author (forgot his name). He is very well accomplished, having published many books and also a baby book that all 2009 newborns in BC receive. Like Boyczan, he was raised in the Northwest Territories and the culture of the First Nations is a key part in his writing. It was interesting to hear him speak, but it was not inspiring I’d have to say.

The next part of SLC is the concurrent workshop. It was here that I became inspired. The workshop was called Community Wellness and the main topic of the workshop is the start of a new club at UBC called Students for Mental Wellness (SFMWUBC). The purpose of the club is to promote mental wellness in UBC students. Physical health, such as healthy diets and sufficient exercise, is important, but many do not pay attention to mental health which is the same if not more important than physical health. I have always been very interested in mental health, I’m going into psychology after all, and this club was the first club I was genuinely inspired to join. The club has not officially started yet and is in its planning stage. I have already signed up myself to organize this club and I encourage everyone to too! I am very excited with what this club can bring to UBC. More information (although the current site has no information except for contact information) can be found here.

Next up was a Quick Fire Case Competition. Basically, small teams are given a case study (problem) and must come up with the best solution and present it. The mini-competition was about a charity program and we had to solve the problem of funding and/or lack of committed volunteers. My group decided to tackle the problem of funding and came up with some ideas, such as getting sponsorships and joining other UBC clubs. The game was pretty fun and something I haven’t done before. The situation we had to deal with is very common with clubs, I’ve seen it in clubs I have been in. A solution is easy to come up with, but a solution that is the most efficient and can produce the best results is difficult.

Lunch was provided (a friend I met at the breakfast forgot to sign up for a session to have lunch, but got it in the end) and there were volunteer booths for us to look at.

Then came the perhaps the most surprisingly important session I attended. It was called Purpose and Passion, and the goal of the workshop was to help us find what we are most passionate about and in doing so, discover what career we would best fit in, or purpose. Nobody likes doing something they don’t like, and a career is something very important and is a long-term job. Through a variety of exercises, I think I have discovered what I want to do in life. I say ‘think’ because at this point nothing is ever for certain. The career field I realized is something I have thought about before and it definitely connects to psychology. Psychology is my favourite course. Although the current psychology course I am taking is not the most interesting because I have learned the material already from Psych AP, but I have a real passion for psychology. Everything from mental health to therapy, I am interested. Coupled with the mental wellness workshop, I see myself as being in the therapeutic field, whether its counseling or as a clinical psychologist, I do not know for the moment. But I definitely know therapy, psychology and helping others is what I want to do with my life.

After the workshop came the second presenter of the day. The presenter was a recent UBC graduate (at only 18 years old) and had already started his own company. He talked about the importance of networking, hard work, and getting little sleep to maximize the day. Although I am not interested in being an entrepreneur, I am very impressed with the presenter and wish to one day have a one-on-one talk with this very interesting person.

The closing ceremony was the end of the conference, obviously. The closing speaker was Lieutenant-General Roméo A. Dallaire, a retired soldier, best known for being commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda and current politician.  After hearing who he was, I started to fall asleep. It wasn’t that the speech was boring, in fact it was extremely inspirational, but the 4 hours of sleep was finally taking a toll on me. Through the in-between-sleep-attacks, I heard and remembered, he talked about what a leader is, humanitarianism, the invisible leader within all of us and to tell us to take initiative in solving problems of the world. Then came some final words of recognition to the organizers of the event and SLC 2010 came to a close.

Deciding and ending up attending SLC 2010 is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I have found that after going to conferences about volunteerism, I always feel a wave of energy to get involved and volunteer. SLC 2010 had the same impact. First Term was too hectic for me to actually become involved in UBC activities. I had signed up for many clubs and had no time to attend their events. Through SLC, I have renewed, for however long, my passion to volunteer. Perhaps the thought of getting recognition is a reason for my refueled passion, but the joy of working with people for a common goal for the benefit of others is my biggest motivator.

The biggest reward I have gotten from SLC 2010 is realizing what I want to do with my life: helping others. I thank SLC and all the members that have made this year’s conference such a success. I am sure I will take the opportunity to organize this fantastic event next year and encourage everyone to attend it if they haven’t this year and to come back for next year again! This will not be the last time I’ll be at SLC. SLC 2011: I can’t wait!