There’s no doubt that every student at UTM—or any university for that matter—can’t wait to graduate. Whether you’re reaching that milestone this year or four years from now doesn’t matter; the last test, the last exam, the last lecture and the last time you’ll ever have to spend money to go to school are circled on our calendars. When the day finally comes, however, what will you look back on and regret not doing? Maybe you’ll wish you had tried out for more sports teams, ran for student council or acted on a crush you had from afar for the last four years.
We all plan on leaving UTM with no regrets, and for that reason, I present you this list of things we have all thought about doing but never followed through on. Think of it less as an elderly Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, and more The Buried Life of your undergraduate career. I’ll use this as my checklist while I still can, while the rest of you can use it as motivation to get off your asses and make the most of your time here.
• Conduct a study to find out the exact time it takes the average student to travel the Five Minute Walk and have it properly renamed the “6-Minute-37-Second Walk.”
• Spend a night alone in the basement of South Building with a camera and a voice recorder. This has nothing to do with loving the building or wanting to spend more time at school, but has everything to do with verifying what we all know: the South Building is haunted. I’m scared for my life when I’m walking to my locker in the middle of the day.
• Push all the tables on the fourth floor of the library together and have the world’s largest group study session. Subsequently, partake in the largest group plea as we beg the security guard not to kick us out.
• Buy an Argo’s jersey and sneak into a practice. I might not make it out alive, but at least I’d die knowing the Argos are actually capable of playing rough football.
• Organize a campus-wide game of manhunt involving the entire student body, designating all the professors as “it.” Not only would it be fun, but it would give our professors the chance to see how stressful it is searching for us all over campus.
• Sit down and have a hot dog with Mike the hot dog guy. Discuss the ins and outs of the hot dog business and finally see how he moves the trailer. The myth is that he drags it with his teeth.
• Demolish the North Building to ensure no future students ever have to endure a university lecture in a high school classroom. With the dim lighting, lack of windows and its seclusion on the north side of campus, students should be getting paid to attend their classes there.
• Play ice hockey on one of the two giant ponds on campus. People already do it, but with the way global warming has changed our weather, it may never be frozen again.
• Buy an HB number one pencil and use it on a University of Toronto scantron just to see if they really do make a difference. I’ll save this one for my last test, so it won’t really matter if I fail.
• Befriend one of the many deer on campus and ride it like a horse for my own personal form of transportation. When the animal rights activists get angry, the environmentalists will support me because my transportation emits no emissions.
• Gather 499 Leafs fans and watch a playoff game in CCT 1080. This one is farfetched, not because we can’t get into the lecture hall, but because the Leafs may never again make the playoffs.
Some of these may apply to you and many of them might not, but the point is that we should all take our time here. We all want to graduate and move on with our lives, but when the day comes, do you want to look back and wish you had taken it slower? I don’t. So make your list and enjoy being young and stupid while you still can.
