-Welcome Back

 

The OP is the place to be

The Other Press a great place for new students to meet their college community

By Chloé Bach, Assistant Editor

bout two years ago I stepped off an airplane
A: YVR from Edmonton to begin my post-

secondary education here in the Lower
Mainland. As a bartender, making friends was pretty
much my job and so I was leaving behind a major social
network as well as the city I knew and had lived in my
entire life. On top of this, I was going to be away from
my family for a lot longer than just a one week vacation
in Cuba. Granted, flying home would only take about an
hour I was still embarking on a pretty big adventure.

Now, as much as I love Vancouver I have to admit

that some of the people here aren’t all that welcoming.
The bar scene is clique-y and finding a social niche can

be tough when you know hardly anyone. I was in the
midst of learning all this when I received an email from
The Other Press inviting all the students to come out to
a meeting to learn about contributing and even possibly
of becoming a section editor. With nothing to lose and a

passion for writing I made my way to that meeting and a

couple weeks later I was the new arts and entertainment
editor.

Over the past year and a half or so I have made
some great friends being a part of The OP. We meet up
weekly to go over our last copy and plan the next, but
it’s not all business it’s a time socialize and joke around.
We even get together for staff pub nights or dinners
where we get the opportunity to further socialize and
have some fun.

Obviously we take pride in the quality of our
paper and work very hard to ensure that but we like
to have fun while we’re at it too. I have really found a
great community of people here at the newspaper and
now have some familiar faces on campus. I have even
acquired a cat-sitter in our lovely sports editor!

I feel like now it’s my turn to extend the invite, so
come meet us! With the opportunity to make a few new
friends and get paid to contribute what’s stopping you?
We get together on Mondays at 6 p.m. and whether you
want to contribute or just check it out you’ ll be sure to
find a friendly, laid back group of people. I really wasn’t
kidding, The OP is the place to be!

 

Good luck,
dude!

 

 

Procrastinating your way to success

Sharon Twiss, a 2001 graduate of Douglas’ Print Futures program, offers advice on how to stay focused when a course load has you down

By Sharon Twiss

riving down Royal Avenue, past the College,
D: longed to be back in school —learning
about the latest issues in my field, debating
ideas with my colleagues, sliding in one more piece
into the puzzle that is my brain—until I saw a guy,
oblivious to everything around him, reading a book
while walking down the sidewalk. Poof! My yearning
evaporated as quickly as it arrived. There are things
I like about not being in school: J like taking all
of a weekend afternoon to struggle with the Globe
& Mail crossword. I like being able to think about
mundane things while I load the dishwasher. I like
tossing a book across the room the moment after
it becomes boring. Most of all—and this is what
walking-reading guy reminded me of—]I like not
having stuff hanging over my head, stuff like a
research paper or some assignment or ten articles to
annotate. Yeah, I liked school, but I sure don’t miss the
stress.

Ah, but I did it, managed the anxiety along with
the excitement. You too can avoid being overwhelmed
by school work so that you can absorb every penny’s
worth of your college education.

Trick your “inner procrastinator” into working for
you instead of against you

I’m going to get all my work done right away, all the
time. Those should be the words to a September song,
the same words that you will try desperately to whip
yourself with after Thanksgiving. Why is that? You
can’t change anybody’s nature, including your own.
Accept yourself as you are, right now, and work with
what you’ve got. If you’re a procrastinator, then get
that working for you.

“Structured Procrastination” is Stanford
professor, John Perry’s, answer. Professor Perry is
an admitted procrastinator, has a long list of “very
important projects” that have deadlines, and has a
reputation as someone who gets shit done. What he
gets done is not the top item in his priority list. No,
he’s a procrastinator. What he gets done are a lot of the
items lower down on the list, while he’s in the process
of procrastinating completing the top item.

Amass such a list of “very important projects” for
yourself as soon as you can, then procrastinate doing
any of the items on this list by getting all your school
work done instead: If a Stanford professor can trick
himself, so can you.

Start your homework the day it’s assigned, no
matter what

Hey, but what about procrastinating? It says start,
not finish, and besides, this technique works for
procrastinators as well as for you other two. Here’s

how it works: you get an assignment, then after class
during the first available free half hour, start working
on it. That’s it. And it’s magic.

Of course you’re not going to finish the
assignment, that’s the beauty of it. Leave it until the
night before and you will have to finish it, but not
right now. Experience the calm, anxiety-free, almost-
pleasure you experience working on an assignment
without the pressure of a deadline waiting for you
like a zombie ready to suck your brains out. And
the great thing about this technique, especially for
procrastinators, is that even if you don’t get back to
that assignment until the night before it’s due, you
have already started it! Your monkey mind will believe
that you’re just tying up loose ends, just filling in the
blanks. Say. goodbye to the paralysis of beginning, you
are getting stuff done.

Commit to this no-brainer ritual

Here’s a small action with big results—the easiest
thing to remember—the one thing you could commit
to for your entire college career. From the comments
on Ask.MetaFilter.com, comes this pearl: “Make your
bed every day—as soon as you get up. Something

about that one small thing sets the tone for the rest of

the day: are you going to be lazy, or are you going to
get something done?”