School’s for sum­mer — not for­ever since I seem to be a life­long student.

After attend­ing three uni­ver­sity ses­sions in a row (sum­mer, fall and win­ter), I’m tak­ing a lit­tle break. Trust me, I need it.

Since sum­mer 2009, I took four classes, includ­ing the very use­ful French as a sec­ond lan­guage course I was forced to take (remem­ber, being French is not a proof that I can speak French). It doesn’t seem much like that but I’m work­ing full-time in a very demand­ing job, and since I already have a uni­ver­sity degree, school is not my priority.

Mind you, I’m a good stu­dent: two A– and one A+, plus my beau­ti­ful bilin­gual­ism cer­tifi­cate. I didn’t do to bad for some­one who attend classes and sit exams after an 8 hour-long workday.

On one side, my expe­ri­ence with uni­ver­sity in Canada is pretty good. First, I hope that even­tu­ally I will be able to com­plete a Cana­dian degree, even if the goal seems to be very far away. Sec­ond, it helps me keep a bal­ance with my crazy work envi­ron­ment. Cul­tur­ally speak­ing, it is also inter­est­ing to see how things are taught on this side of the Atlantic Ocean: per­spec­tives, espe­cially on eco­nom­ics, his­tory and pol­i­tics are quite dif­fer­ent from Europe’s. Stu­dents behave dif­fer­ently too.

How­ever, I won’t prob­a­bly go back to school full-time. I toyed with the idea for a while last year as I had always wanted to expe­ri­ence the North Amer­i­can uni­ver­sity rite of pas­sage. But I real­ize now that I’m prob­a­bly too old, too cyn­i­cal and too expe­ri­enced for that. I’m sure it’s dif­fer­ent at a post­grad level, but I’m stuck in under­grad (remem­ber, my French uni­ver­sity degree is not rec­og­nized here). I feel miles away from most of my class­mates who live the stu­dent life: a bach­e­lor pad on cam­pus, busy nights par­ty­ing and drink­ing, days cram­ming knowl­edge and updat­ing Face­book sta­tus, a cer­tainty that they can change the world… Once you’ve seen the world and started work­ing, it’s just hard to fit in. I feel like an alien most of the time.

This is a set of pic­tures I took at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto, for a change. They have a super nice cam­pus too!

You can see the full set of the pic­tures taken in Toronto here.

Toronto Sky­line from the University

Tower

Bla­zon of the Arms	Orange Bike
Pump­kin Build­ing (WTF?)	Hall­way
Dome and CN Tower	Entrance to Courtyard

Related arti­cles:

1. On Cam­pus (Part II)
2. The Alien Student
3. From Teacher To Student
4. Pic­ture of the Week: Chalk
5. On Cam­pus (Part I)
6. On Cam­pus (Part III)