As VP Students Ainsley Carry and associate VP Students Dale Mullings develop the Student Strategic Plan, I thought I would take this opportunity to suggest a few ideas to improve the student experience at UBC. There are some far-fetched ideas in this article, but some of them just make sense. Ainsley Carry and Dale Mullings, if you’re reading this, please consider the following:
T-shirt cannons
This one goes without saying. Walking to class? Maybe you’ll get hit by a t-shirt. Studying in the library? Loudly interrupted by a t-shirt cannon. The possibilities are endless!
Contractually-mandated in-lecture pep rally
Robert Gateman shuffles to the front of the lecture hall to fulfill his bi-weekly contractual obligation.
“Instead of learning about NAFTA, today we will be…” He sighs, and presses a button to lower the lights. “...raising the roof’ to show your school spirit.”
“WAP” blasts over the loudspeakers, and Thunder, the UBC Thunderbirds mascot, bursts through the door waving a flag and firing a T-shirt cannon into the crowd. You rise to your feet. Life is hell.
Give me more healthcare!
My editor has a broken tooth that would like to have a word with the current dental insurance plan. It’ll meet you behind the Alison Road Staples on Monday after school.
If your residence goes one month without a fire alarm, we’ll pull it anyway
It can’t truly be the student experience if you’re not shuffled outside at 4 a.m. with a blistering hangover and the rain crashing down around you, the sound of the fire alarm still imprinted on your brain, where the only people in the world who truly understand your pain are Marisha and Utkarsh, the two people on your floor that you sometimes see in the communal bathroom with whom you now feel a kinship like that of the warriors in the Illiad.
Vast connected Co–Star student network to create the most annoying university experience of all time
All the Geminis will have to drop out when no one wants them for group projects. Virgos will be required to lead said projects. Pisces will be the glue of the group that says, “No, we should leave their name on the project, even if they didn’t contribute a single word.”
Make The Pit more disgusting
It is frankly unbelievable that a bar called “The Pit” is not caked with beer stains and cigarette ashes. It’s essentially spotless every night, except the one night a week they happen to be open. The Pit should be open until 3 a.m. and have the energy of a Manitoba roadhouse — beer flowing like Valhalla and a jukebox that stops abruptly whenever an SFU student walks in.
The other on-campus bars and pubs are too respectable. There is no bar for the denizens of the university, the post-midterm burnouts, the sea-shanty singers, the friend from UVic that got separated from their group and needs a $6 sour. The options are to drink in the Ivory Tower panopticon of The Gallery or the Film Major Hemingway fanboy corner at Koerner’s. For the sake of the school, bring back the old days of a bar free of judgement, where we are all equal under the reign of the tap.
We need a goddamn school song
I humbly suggest:
- “We Built This City” by Jefferson Starship
- “745 sticky” by 100 gecs
- “Go Hard (La.La.La)” by Kreayshawn
- “Self Control” by Frank Ocean so incoming students know exactly what kind of depression they’re getting themselves into
Ban the word “networking” until it’s actually being used in a professional setting — you’re allowed to just make friends.
This may seem targeted to one faculty in particular and that’s because it is.
Maybe, like, a big wall you put outside the Nest...
...and people can sign up with their friends to climb it, and you can set up railings around campus to redirect traffic, and it can metastasize and grow larger year after year until there’s no part of campus where you’re safe from getting run over by a guy in leg-warmers, and maybe it can get more and more corporatized every year and all your friends will say for exactly three days that you’ll make a team (and no one ever believes it, not even them), and we can spend a week running a Bobcat outside the Nest to put down wood chips and then COVID-19 happens and the wood chips end up sitting there for weeks as a feeble reminder of the marginal former glory of the school spirit of the University of British Columbia, and the scent of dank rotting wood drifts across the pavilion to create a sort of bastardized homage to the most ill-advised construction project in school history that stretches across the bricks like a Tartarean crack in the ground, visible only from space and in the minds of the credulous masses.
Keep giving away free plants
I liked that one, do more of that.