Written by: Gemma Lee, Peak Associate

Being a student is being the character in a horror movie stumbling screaming through a haunted house, endlessly making the worst decisions but having no idea how it’ll affect the outcome of your life. Here are the worst “oh shit!” moments of any student career, moments that make academic life feel like a horror movie about an endless dark pit of debt and insanity. 

• Having a grand time at a party when your stomach flips and your instincts tell you to check your deadlines again. FUCK. You have a discussion post due on canvas at 11:59 p.m. on Judith Butler’s feminist theory. It’s 11:46 p.m., you’re wasted, and you have a 30-minute transit ride home. The real horror starts when you pull out your phone and type in “canvas sfu” because your stubbornness just told you that you’re sober enough to do this.

• Going on StudentAid BC to apply for next semester’s student loans and seeing your total student loan so far as a rapidly increasing five-digit number and having a panic attack. How are you gonna pay this?! You’re an English major with two years of school left and you’ve been taking your sweet-ass time with this degree.

• Running into a Tinder ex on campus.  

• Running into a Tinder ex at an on-campus event who is dating one of your exes. Both of them turn out to be in your tutorial later. Is this what queer theory is? 

• Missing last week’s seminar because you were sick, then showing up to this week’s lecture only to see that on the board it says “TEST 3 SEATING” and there are deadly exam vibes in the air. “The Fuck?” is your answer to most of the fill-in-the-blanks.

• Walking across the AQ pond on that “aesthetically pleasing” cement walkway way too sleep-deprived. So tired you have to slow down and carefully shuffle across because you feel like you have no centre of gravity and you don’t want to join the fish in the suspicious-looking water.

• Accidentally making a series of self-deprecating jokes at office hours and having your professor’s eyebrows start to knit together in a look that can only be described as deeply concerned. Have you no shame?

• Having nightmares about getting lost in the AQ during construction, missing your final exam for your online course, and failing another goddamn WQB requirement, which means you have to take another goddamn WQB requirement next semester.

• Spotting a bear at SFU and have to decide whether to run like hell or just let the wilderness take you.