Bringing Back the Blog

August 18, 2019

Bringing Back the Blog

UBC's Rose Garden...and the view!!

Well hello, everyone! It has now been over a year since I have posted anything on this blog, so I'm assuming no one was expecting the rebirth that I have had in mind for the past few months. In the time since I last wrote, a lot has changed. I am now a high school graduate, and am about to head off to college. My senior year was definitely an eventful one, and while I didn't feel the need to capture it all in detail on the blog, I think having written record of my freshman year of college will be great fun for me in the future, and hopefully for some of my past blog-readers. With that said, I know a lot of the people who were regular readers may not know where I am going to college. After spending some of high school abroad, I decided to apply to a few schools in other countries for university as well. Despite applying to a number of American schools, I have decided to spend the next few years at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada! I'm stoked about this next chapter of my life, and about moving to the place that is about to become yet another home.

I'm putting this post out now because it is officially my last Sunday at home! I fly out to Vancouver on Friday, then move in on Saturday to start UBC's week-long orientation program, Jump Start. You can expect posts coming soon about the move-in process and my experience at Jump Start! I haven't quite figured out what my plan for the blog is, but I suspect that in the first few weeks I will get an idea of how often I can post. I would love to post every Sunday like before, but I'm not sure that is totally realistic. I'm definitely going to need to spend a lot more of my time on schoolwork than I did in Norway, but hopefully I'll still be able to get posts out regularly.

As this year has been a crazy one, I'm not going to try to condense it all into what would end up being a LOT of paragraphs. Instead, I'm going to give a little preview of what's to come this first semester, then bombard you with pictures from the past 12-13 months.

So, I will be in UBC's faculty of science with the hopes of studying cognitive systems. I want to focus on how the brain learns language, but am interested in the fields of neuroscience/cognitive science/linguistics as a whole as well! This first semester, I will be taking biology, chemistry, physics, and computer science. A whole lot of science, but all things I am interested in learning about. I will be living in a connected single, which means that I have my own room, but share a bathroom with another girl who has her own room on the other side of the bathroom. I should also add that I am attending UBC's Vancouver campus, but they do have a campus in the Okanagan Valley. My campus is the larger of the two, with more than 50,000 students. It's a HUGE school, definitely larger than I thought I wanted, but I loved it when I visited and am excited to make it home.

I'm so excited to be back writing, and can't wait to share this upcoming year with you! I'm going into this with as few expectations as possible, because I found that having few expectations for Norway really helped me to make the most of everything and to see everything in a positive light. I'm so glad to have already spent that time abroad, not because it'll make me feel this new change any less, but because I know I have the knowledge and tools I need to get through the transition. Feel free to send this along to any people you know that may be interested in hearing about my experience at a Canadian university, or those who had followed my blog in the past. Here we go (again)!