Bachelor of Memories: My Degree in Photographs (Part Two)

If you're the sort of person who feverishly checks my blog each week, hoping desperately for a new update, you probably saw last week's post filled with a selection of my academic baby pictures. To stall for time until I have to come up with a fresh idea for post material, please enjoy Part Two of that collection, which brings me from the whimpering neophyte of Fall 2013 to the deluded, semi-functional adult I am today.

Fourth Year

After my whirlwind year as a resident of a cinderblock human zoo in Eastern Canada, I was accepted to the Honours Psychology program at the University of Alberta, and I decided to come back home. Despite having gone to school at the U of A with a dozen of my closest friends just two years before, I knew no one when I returned, and so I promptly went out and joined every club I had a remote interest in. By which I mean I joined two clubs. And hey, it worked out pretty well.

This was the year that we decided one dog was simply not enough, and promptly adopted this 11 lb, 8-week old puppy. Today, this same puppy weighs 110 lbs and can comfortably rest her head on the kitchen table.

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Bachelor of Memories: My Degree in Photographs (Part One)

If you've been following my blog lately, or just hiding out in the bushes outside my house, you know that I recently graduated from university with a BA Honors in Psychology. I'll be moving to New York City in August to start my Master's in Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, but until then, I've got a lot of time on my hands to wax poetic about my undergraduate days. Since I'm busy lately and writing words is difficult, I'll be spending the next two weeks going over my favourite photographs from my time as an undergrad student and stalling for time until I can think of a better topic to blog about.

So until then, enjoy:

First Year

Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of photographic evidence of my first year of university. None of my friends owned a decent camera, and in early 2010, Instagram was still just an idea in somebody's notebook. The average cellphone took monstrous, grainy security camera photos with eight and a half pixels each, and you had to eviscerate your phone with a paperclip to dig out the memory card if you wanted to upload any of them. Technological dark age aside, we just didn't think to take pictures. My friends and I tended to hang out in the same bar every day, like a bad television sitcom, and nobody thought to photograph the place. With that said, my first year wasn't a complete photographic black hole. I did manage to emerge with these:

My eighteenth birthday party. Since no one in the background is blacked out or vomiting, I'm going to go ahead and assume that this was taken early in the evening. 

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The Ten Things I Learned in University

Well, folks, it's all over.

After five years of classes, homework, papers, exams, all-nighters and ill-advised experimentation with alcohol and eyeliner, I finally earned the right combination of credits to finish my degree. In just over a week, I will walk across the stage at the Jubilee Auditorium and collect my Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Psychology from the University of Alberta.

This place.

Now, I'm not one to use the "everything I learned in the classroom was forgettable and meaningless; I learned the real lessons outside of school" cliche. In a couple of years, I'm going to be diagnosing and treating patients based on the information I learned in class, so the world had better hope that I remember that shit. But the fact is, I did learn a lot of great things outside the classroom, and a list of the top ten things I learned inside the classroom wouldn't be terribly interesting to anyone but undergraduate psych students.

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