By: Carter Hemion, Peak Associate

Here’s the skinny of it: incoming students for the online Fall 2020 semester are getting off too easy. They get to wake up at 8:29 a.m. for their 8:30 a.m. lectures, go to class without pants, and munch on a family-sized bag of Doritos without the ensuing glares from their professor. Quite frankly, it’s not fair and it really ticks me off. They haven’t had to work for their SFU experience the same way us veterans had to!

When I started at SFU, I had to trek 10 minutes from my dorm to my morning lecture, relearn the dense campus labyrinth along the way, and dodge small talk with my kooky neighbour who’s always fishing for compliments! And all this for what? Just to sit in the most uncomfortable chairs while the drilling sounds of my professor and those outside just drone on?

These newbies will never know the struggle of pushing against a traffic jam of kiddies more obsessed with their Snapchats than the safety of others just trying to get to class. What’s worse is when you’re late leaving because your last professor in WMC wouldn’t stop talking about their breakfast burritos. We couldn’t just click a little “Leave Meeting” button and see them on the flip side. No, we had to sit through the entire lecture and we couldn’t just turn off a camera and audio when we had to go to the bathroom. I bet these whiny, Canvas-only, video-chatting teens were too lazy to even learn cursive.

Don’t even get me started on living on a mountain. These little squirts are missing out living in their cute little climate controlled rooms in their cute little stable WiFi houses! I once ran into a coyote outside Technology and Science Complex 2 when I was walking to the store at night, and the little devil just started trotting my way. I was just trying to go to Nesters for my organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, diet white grape juice. 

We, the real students, got stuck on campus in the snow and ice when buses couldn’t make it all the way up. I felt about ready to become Jack Torrance from The Shining, stuck in my dorm with a 10-page paper trapped on a snowy mountain with no escape in sight. That’s the real SFU experience. And all the first-years these days are too busy being wet rags and sitting on their phones instead of getting out and smelling the fresh mountain air!These wussies are just starting degrees, not having to work for it at all. No student athlete cults, no construction waking them up, no searching for the AQ 4th floor classrooms, no real hard work. We really paved the way just to watch them through a grainy Zoom call as they sit in bed with their computer notes and home brewed coffee. Stop dipping in my Kool-Aid and do something productive for once!