When I walked into 190 University Avenue on May 1 and saw my name on the office door, I burst into tears.

In light of the spread of Coronavirus cutting this semester short, The Journal put out a call to students graduating in 2020, asking them to submit a final message to Queen’s.

At the end of my third year of undergrad, I was diagnosed with vulvodynia, a form of sexual dysfunction which makes vaginal penetration extremely painful.

I’ve been overweight for most of my life.

When I was in my final year of high school at a diverse school, I remember telling my friends I was planning to accept my offer to Queen’s.

My dad died when I was 16 years old.

“I just wish they were dead.” To this day, I can’t believe I had ever been at such a point of darkness that I was able to speak such words about my abusers.

University usually marks the first time that teens move away from their home and their parents, and when they really start developing into independent young adults.

A cruel and unaddressed racist rhetoric in South Asian communities means that we might just take the trophy for self-righteous anti-blackness.

As a Film and Media minor, I knew entering university that I wanted to get involved in extracurricular activities that fostered my interest in making videos. Little did I know that, now, as a third-year student, I’d be the video editor at The Queen’s Journal.

When the clock struck midnight this New Year’s Eve, the world not only said goodbye to the past year, but to the past decade.

When November rolls around, many people are left wondering what Movember is and why a bunch of guys are trying to grow mustaches (even though sometimes, they can’t).

Last year, as I walked home to West Campus in the dark after a three-hour lab, wishing I was doing anything else, it dawned on me that maybe a science degree wasn’t for me. 

Feeling exhausted in my second year of university coping with schoolwork and Kingston’s long winter, I decided to apply for exchange and escape my daily routines to explore the world during my third year.

I’m worried that my generation is forgetting the importance of Remembrance Day. As we move further away from World Wars I and II, I fear the sacrifice of Canadian soldiers and veterans will soon become meaningless, or worse, forgotten.  

There’s something to be said for living in a free, democratic society, where voicing your opinion isn’t repressed, but is welcomed. 

I’ve always had an interest in the supernatural. I used to hope that one day I’d see a ghost, or that some unexplainable thing would happen to me. Luckily, I got my chance when I worked as a tour guide for Canada’s most notorious prison: the Kingston Penitentiary. 

I will never meet my grandfather. His death in 1978 makes that impossible. But I would be grossly mistaken—and I was—to think that means I’d never have a relationship with him.

During my first year at Queen’s, I was relatively uninvolved.

I arrived at Queen’s with many things: clothes, my great-aunt’s old mini fridge, a box of books, and a lot of bad preconceptions about university. By the time I carried that same box of books back down the residence stairs to my mom’s car, I’d accumulated a few more misguided ideas.