For my entire life I have considered the University of Alberta to be my second home. I was born on campus, at the University of Alberta hospital… the result of my parents coming to Edmonton to be students here. Ever since my life has been woven with threads of the U of A in so many different ways, throughout my childhood, my youth, and my adulthood. I’ve had opportunity to write about it before in New Trail, our alumni magazine, a few years back (page 55 in this pdf of the Winter 2017 issue).

But what has long been my happiest time of year… the start of the new academic year, the fall weather, the green and gold foliage from whence came the U of A’s official colours… arrives with a bittersweet tinge this year.

I did a wander of campus yesterday, the weekend before the start of the fall term. The tents for Week of Welcome were up, masked tours of campus already running, some of the usual signs of the new school year starting to show.

But it was far from normal.

I don’t think it’s just me. I don’t think it’s just the pandemic. And I don’t think it necessarily shows through some of the pretty facades being built these days, both literal and figurative. But my beloved campus, my beloved university, is hurting. Deeply.

It is difficult watching one’s home falling into disrepair and potential collapse, undermined not only through negligence and poor management but deliberate and malicious intent.

So as I wandered the campus, I tried to focus on what I was still fighting for, the things that still represented the university that I knew and believed in, to claim what was my truth and proclaim it. It was hard, it was at moments disheartening, but it was good. I even managed to grab a few photos as I walked around.

For the past three and a half years, I have worked for Engineering at Alberta in their marketing, communications, and reputation unit. It’s been one of the best places I have ever worked, and one of the places where I’ve been able to do some of my best work. It is one place that still embodies so much of the best of the history and traditions and ideals of the U of A.

Not only has the branding work been strategic and high level, the service component of my job resulted in my first ever academic publication: “Learning, experiences, and actions towards advancing gender equity in engineering as aspiring men's allyship group” in the Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering.

But this is only one of my current connections to my U.

Of course I had to make at least a symbolic stop at one of my favourite places in the world, the Bruce Peel Special Collections in Rutherford Library. Although the collection remains closed to the public because of the pandemic, I went by the doors just to be in the presence of the treasures that lay within.

This library and this collection connect my two English degrees from my first act to the latest challenge in my third: working towards my Master of Library and Information Studies.

Tomorrow is orientation for my program, and the first time I will get to meet in person some of my classmates with whom I’ve been studying for the past year. I hope meeting them, and members of the new cohort, will give me some measure of the positive start-of-the-year feelings and energy otherwise missing so far this year.

And one final photo before I headed back home.

A few different threads of my life combined to form this more recent connection to my university, not the only spiritual one I have but perhaps the most explicitly so. More things coming home.

Body, mind, and soul, the University of Alberta has meant so much to me. It formed me. It is a part of me. And for that, I am grateful.

But as I step into this next, latest chapter in my life on campus, I hope it continues to be a place outside of me as well, to continue being a set and stage for my life, and not just a memory of what it once was, of a place where I had once been.

I have enough things to grieve.

#QuaecumqueVera #WhatsoeverThingsAreTrue