2023 Ubyssey Magazine on stands now!

Finding yourself isn’t easy. In fact, it’s the hardest thing you can do.

As cliché as it sounds, university is a time of growth, change and self-discovery. Your high school teachers told you this. Your parents told you this. And we’re telling you this. But, learning who you are is difficult, especially when you pair that with class, jobs, friends, enemies and everything in between.

And like all great ideas, SELF was created at 2 a.m. over a deep conversation about who we are and who we want to become.

We wanted this year’s magazine to explore what it means to find yourself, lose yourself and be yourself. Inside, we have articles about being a Queer DJ, the experiences of Indigenous athletes, student-led divestment movements and about connecting to your mom through music.

For many of us, university is the first time in our lives where we’re on our own. But in this solitude, we learn who we want to be.

Learning who you are and falling in love with yourself is the essence of living. Growing into the best version of yourself is a lifelong journey. Though it may be difficult, nothing worth having is easy.

To read more visit ubyssey.ca/magazine/self!

— Iman Janmohamed & Mahin E Alam
Editors-in-Chief

‘More like a company than a public establishment’: Grad students speak out on rising tuition costs

By Bea Lehmann

As the cost of higher education increases, so too do feelings of concern, anxiety and frustration — especially for UBC’s international graduate student community. For students who have already invested thousands in their education and work in high-intensity positions that can make additional employment difficult to balance, the pressure of rising costs becomes an all too real burden to carry.

‘I want to know what I’m getting myself into’: Content warnings at UBC

By Tova Gaster

This article contains mention of sexual assault, colonialism and residential schools.

The sentence you just read is a content note, more commonly known as a content warning, sometimes abbreviated to “CW.” It’s a heads-up about potentially traumatic topics to come, including but not limited to abuse, sexual violence, racism, self-harm and suicide.

For The Ubyssey and many others, content warnings are common practice. However, they’ve also been the site of a decade-long firestorm of backlash. In UBC classrooms, they’re an ongoing negotiation.

‘It’s beautiful when I get to practice both’: How Indigenous cultures and sports overlap

By Miriam Celebiler

Heading back to the dugout at the 2017 North American Indigenous Games (NAIG), 16 year-old competitive youth softball player Hunter Lang noticed something she had never seen before. The other team’s pitcher had no protective face mask.

“I can’t imagine being a pitcher and not wearing a face mask at our age,” said Lang. “The ball flies off of those bats, and it’s coming fast. If you get hit in the face, it’s gonna do some damage or knock out some teeth.”

This was her first experience in the Indigenous sports stream.

Keeping the fire going: Overcoming burnout as a student activist

By Colby Payne and Zoe Wagner

UBC has a long history of student activism, starting long before the 2022 protests against food insecurity and tuition increases. Student activists dedicate endless energy in support of their causes — often at the expense of their academics, health and personal lives.

The sheer number of students involved in these movements and their highly-visible presence on campus make acknowledging the burnout they experience crucial.

The Ubyssey spoke with several student activists about how they experience and deal with burnout.

Belonging, food and grief

By Karla Jubaily

Growing up, I had no strong connection to Lebanon. My only true knowledge of the region came from glimpses of Lebanese media on our satellite TV that I didn’t understand and my dad’s reminiscent stories.

These were both overshadowed by North American narratives that associated the region with war and terrorism. When I was a teenager, I shied away from this aspect of my identity, using my racial ambiguity to hide away half of my heritage out of fear of being bullied. I internalized xenophobia and Islamophobia, then masked it as shame and guilt.

Mom music

By Thomas McLeod

During my childhood, my parents played all their music from a five-disc rotating Yamaha compact disc changer. The lineup was as eclectic as they are — Sarah McLachlan ballads led into the metaphysical opening notes of Kid A, which was followed seamlessly by the non-Christmas discography of Burnaby’s favourite son, Michael Bublé. Every song I heard before the age of seven is permanently lodged in my subconscious, only shaken loose by the coincidental “Hey, did you know Michael Bublé has other music?”

More than any other album, k.d. lang’s Hymns of the 49th Parallel was the score of my childhood. Whenever my mother was preparing for thirty relatives to turn up for Christmas or Easter or Thanksgiving, Hymns was the album playing from our ancient wooden speaker towers.

'We can do this together': UBC Engineering strives to increase female enrolment

By Iman Janmohamed

In an attempt to increase female enrolment at UBC, the Faculty of Applied Science committed in 2015 to increase female enrolment to 50 per cent by 2020.

The Ubyssey previously reported, the faculty, in addition to student organizations, intended to create opportunities for young women to discover engineering, with a focus on awareness and early-age outreach.

2022 enrolment remains under the faculty’s 2020 goal. Only 34.5 per cent of engineering undergraduate students identify as women.