I went through the onboarding slides yesterday. There’s a lot of things that are sealed away from me as a result of me not being a student of the University of Alberta. These are some NDAs I’m not covered by, the lack of a CCID, or anything in the system that I need to be put on payroll. It’ll take a few emails and bureaucratic hurdles before I’m formally an employee here. Apparently, I’ll get a CCID and @ualberta.ca email. I have complicated feelings about that. For years, I’ve gotten around the UofA campus by loophole and surreptition. I feel as if I were a rat in a castle.
Let me be dramatic, and a little unduly morose for a moment. When you come from MacEwan University, you understand immediately when you take a walk on the University of Alberta.
There are people, with different qualities, according to separate criteria, that are more worthwhile to invest in than you. Society agrees as a whole that if they give these students money, build a facility for them, let these students lead their field in research, let them travel abroad, then society would benefit more if I give it all to them, rather than to you.
You have to live with that! It makes for turbulent internal feelings, but you have to live with that. You have to do your best to hold on to those ambitions that deserve more attention than they’ve been given. You have to hold yourself to a standard that dwarves your peers’. You can’t let the results of those around you shape what you believe you deserve. Most importantly, you have to work hard to avoid showing your contempt for the ones who prosper under the auspices of those who chose them, and not you.
In any case, it’s not that I believe everyone at my community college to be a dullard. I’m proud to have found some very intellectually curious people at MacEwan. In fact, there appears to be a similar proportion of uncurious students at the UofA. If you want curious people, you find them at clubs like AlbertaSat. Mind, MacEwan does not support clubs at all. So while I’m here, I’ll put a lot of effort into supporting the growth of the volunteers. LinkedIn poetry describes a staff engineer as a force multiplier. I think I’ll try some of that, this time.