BISC SOAR

I guess most of my friends and anyone else who talks to me, is already pretty sick of my going on and on about the castle and England, and Europe in general from me. But I'm pretty darn excited!

So on Saturday, July 20th (yes I'm sorry I have not updated my blog in over a week), I went to Kingston for the Bader International Study Centre's Summer Orientation to Academics and Resources, aka BISC SOAR.


It was from 9am to 4(ish)pm, and provided me with an opportunity to meet some of the people I would be spending my first year of university with and get more information about what I'd need to do before the summer ended.

Since the sessions were split up into a Friday session and a Saturday session, there were a lot of people. 29 students (if I remember correctly) and their +1 were at the Saturday sessions, including me. We started off with light breakfast and then went into an introduction session. Then we were split off into parents and students, with the parents going to the Academic session and the students going to the Student Life session! We learned about the location of the castle, the general rules, curfews, etc. They talked to us about extracurricular life at the castle, and how they compensated by the lack of things to do in the small village they're located in by having student-run activities people would want to participate in (i.e karaoke night? haha). The Academic session was an intro to the courses, the difference between a major, a major/minor, medials, the terms and reading weeks (which are actually our midterm trips for a week).

After the two sessions (and a nice lunch break in between), we had our academic advising appointments! This was where we'd meet with an advisor and talk about what major we'd like to pursue and what courses we wanted to take when we got to the castle. I decided on "Canada and the Third World" (Development), Politics, Psychology, English, Social History of Popular Music, and Art History & Architecture in Europe from c1700 to now.

All in all, even though I had to wake up at 5am to get to Kingston by 9am... I really did enjoy my day! It was lovely to meet some of the people I'd be going to class with! (The 80/20 girl to guy ratio is pretty ridiculous); it was a little unsettling realizing that I'm actually off to university really quite soon! But I'm excited super duper excited.

I suppose before I finish this post, I should talk about my choice of clothing. I wanted to wear something that would be pretty enough to give off a good impression, but not too outlandish that people would remember me only by the clothes I wore. I thought this dress had a fairly interesting print, and I really love this dress shirt. Unfortunately, I could not find a picture I liked where my eyes were open... Oh well!

Sorry for the lateness of this post, and I will definitely try to post more regularly!