My Top Tip for the Best UVIC Life

There will be a time where you’ll be so focused on assignments, due dates, quizzes, or midterms and finals. You’ll feel like a juiced lemon and though you make your profs happy with your sweet lemonade, you’ll feel a little deflated.

The University of Victoria’s Secret is that you need to interact with people during your studies as a university student.

1. It’s more fun to study

Studying with others can be beneficial because little moments of leisure (baby breaks) are easy while you’re still able to be productive (hopefully). If you make the other person take your phone so it’s not a distraction that helps too.

Just having another person in the room makes us feel a little less lonely, makes the learning experience more enjoyable, and connected to the UVIC community.

2. It opens us up for empathy and support

School can get stressful. Especially while a pandemic is on the loose, adapting to a new lifestyle, and dealing with fluctuating human emotions.

By sharing and relating personal emotions and pressures that you are overcoming during university with other UVIC students, empathy can create closer relationships.

Overall, friends are here to celebrate your accomplishments and support your struggles.

3. It can boost that serotonin (happiness)

If you aren’t content with your environment or people in your life, there is an extra stress in your life. By making socializing and human connection a priority we become happier people.

Just by eating a meal, studying, or going for a walk with someone, our ability to focus can improve without the haunting loneliness and longing for connection.

4. People are made to connect

Whether you’re in university juicing your brain to make lemonade, working a 9 to 5 job at Thrifty Foods, or raising six kids in your Dodge Grand Caravan, you are human. If you are reading this right now, you are human.

Humans thrive off of love and connection. We are not made to be robots who can recite every number of Pi or wait for people to yell “hey Siri!” in our faces. We are made to give and receive love. We are here to make human connections.

There is no reason you should be locked out of Heaven (like Bruno Mars likes to sing it). You are a human who lives in a world with pain and pleasure, fun and funk, happy and sad. The key is to balance your life when you’re struggling in this fluctuating world.  This means to use your human superpower to love; to connect.

I have learned that human connection is crucial for my most rewarding and enjoyable UVIC life. Even with a pandemic, UVIC has many opportunities to meet new people online.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to new friends you make here, chances are, they need connection just as much as you. We need people to keep us connected to the world; most importantly, to ourselves.