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First week of winter semester is bullshit… here’s how to make it better

First week back, and already you can hear heavy *sighs* of sadness coming from students all across campus. There are no late evenings being spent in beer gardens, no happy people hacky-sacking around Quad, and really no uplifting signs of life anywhere in this desolate winter wasteland. But this doesn’t have to be the case. We have some suggestions for improving all of your lives heading back to school for winter semester.


1. Everyone bring a keg to school

My biggest complaint about the start of winter semester is that nobody is drunk enough. Obviously this is because there’s no beer garden. But a way around the problem is simple: encourage any and every student to bring their own keg to school (BYOK). You could be keg standing in CCIS while your prof lectures about particle physics — suddenly being back at school isn’t so bad.

2. SU Execs give you toboggan rides to class

We’re the reason these people even hold their executive positions. We voted for them, and they are accountable to their constituents. We’ve earned this right and they need to deliver on their promises to make student lives better. Robyn would be my choice.

3. Second language classes should greet people in English so you don’t spend five minutes in French 374 thinking it was the bilingual portion of your Canadian politics seminar

This may or may not have happened to me. It might have been the most embarrassing moment of my university. I may not be able to show my face around any French staff in the arts faculty.


4. Give students an automatic 5 per cent for showing up on syllabus day

Syllabus Week is a drag. At the beginning of every semester we are expected to sit through a mostly useless lecture on what your future lectures will be about. To make syllabus week tolerable, an automatic 5 per cent could be granted with attendance to any of these godless lectures, making it actually worthwhile to be informed about the U of A’s plagiarism policy for the 40th time.

5. Set up kiosks with popular textbooks

You’re a fist year Nursing or PhysEd student, and you’re standing in a line for nine hours in SUB basement, waiting for your chance to drop a couple hundred bucks on an anatomy textbook. What would help this sucky process suck just a little less is if you didn’t have to walk all the way across freezing-ass campus to do it. Just have a kiosk set up in ECHA with the textbooks! Make students happy by making them walk in the cold less.

6. Each class needs a fireplace or a Canadian tire space heater

Winter semester is cold, and not everybody is fortunate enough as I am to have all their classes all accessible without having to go outside. Having to traverse across campus in the harsh unforgiving winter weather is a good enough reason to just not show up. If each classroom had its own fireplace, or at very minimum a Canadian Tire Space Heater™, each classroom would be guaranteed to be a cozy refuge from Edmonton’s cold.

7. Hot chocolate and Baileys garden

This rocks for obvious reasons.

8. Reopen the underground tunnels

We all know they exist, so just reopen the tunnels. We also know the experiments in the now closed dental building were sent down there to be contained and forgotten about. They’re probably dead now so U of A, clean ‘em up and open them back up for student use.

9. Abolish Anti-Freeze

I have no idea what this thing is. All I see are people running around outside with sleds and shit, and there’s a stage in SUB. Please explain this to me.

10. Turn Quad into a hockey rink and have a 3-on-3 tournament

Other than attending Bear’s and Panda’s games, there is an obvious under representation of Canada’s National Winter Sport on campus. Since dodgeball has already become tired and overdone by Winter semester, hosting hockey tournament’s would be a terrific alternative, representing our Canadian roots and an outlet for all that early semester aggression.

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