By Premila D’Sa
I was supposed to be at Yale.
It wasn’t just some phase, I really wanted to go to Yale. I got myself tested for an academically-advanced program straight out of middle school, without my parents. I went around everywhere saying, “I’m going to Yale, I’m going to be a journalist, it has nothing to do with Rory from Gilmore Girls.”
I’m in my fourth-year at Ryerson. This place is definitely not Yale. Thank fucking god.
For better or worse, I’ve really come to like Rye High—maybe it’s the chill understanding between students that we’re not the University of Toronto and don’t need to try that hard, or maybe it’s the distinct but comforting smell of Gould Street.
People have been asking me over the past few months what the “Life” issue even is. For a while I couldn’t give anyone an answer that wasn’t “It’s, like, about our lives.”
But this issue is about our lives. It’s about the stuff we go through on a daily basis at Ryerson. The things we don’t have time to stop and really think about because we’re too busy studying for midterms or looking at memes or whatever.
This issue isn’t a love letter to Ryerson. First of all, ugh, as if. There’s a lot about this university experience that is pretty fucked up, and we’ve included that too.
I spent a lot of time in the archives with old Ryerson yearbooks or with our dusty old copies of The Eyeopener. Anyone who spends even a couple hours flipping through the years would see it—we have the same experiences over and over again.
The Rye kids of the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s dealt with shitty faculty, sketchy academics, bad politics, problems with buildings on campus and relationships.
They just had worse haircuts.
I wanted to know, why? Why did these experiences keep on recurring year after year in some form or another? People will say that these things happen at every university, but they really don’t happen over here the same way.
A lot of this issue involves looking back in time, and if you read it (please do. If you plan on just using it as wrapping paper, use it to protect something important, like a good butternut squash) you’ll realize that Ryerson’s been a weird place since it came up.
I don’t think we realize that until we bring our friends over from other universities and they scream at our thick, vicious Ryerson rats (that’s the rational response). I hope years from now another student or disgruntled Eye editor looking for content looks through the archives and comes across this issue. The stories here should explain our experiences, our lives, and why Ryerson doesn’t belong to one era or one type of person, because theses things—good or bad—will happen again.
So I hope this issue helps with understanding why. Anyways, I’m glad I didn’t go to Yale—I’d take Ryerson skaters over those fucking yuppies anyday.
Also, OSAP doesn’t cover Yale.
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