On the road again!

Hi there!

I've finally graduated, and I'm off for the summer! In this first post, I wanted to collect a few of my thoughts on why I'm doing what I'm doing this summer.

This year, I graduated from McMaster University with a B.Eng.Society, and a minor in music. The music for me is unrelated to engineering or my career, but was a personal goal to prove to myself that I wouldn't sacrifice my love of the arts for my engineering education.

Additionally, I have been incredibly lucky over the past two summers to work abroad, and by extending these trips to visit family and friends. These experiences were exhilarating, exhausting, inspiring, and thought-provoking. I am so grateful for how they allowed me to see through the eyes of others, and how they live their lives.

The unexpected result, however, was a feeling that I was losing touch with my own country - or if not that, at least a new realization of how much of it I take for granted. There is nothing like being asked to explain whether or not something is 'Canadian' to really put in perspective how large our country is...and, at the same time, how remarkably small a population when compared to other countries. Having lived all of my life in the Golden Horseshoe area I realized how inadequately prepared I felt to speak about Canada as a whole,  and I was simply stopped in my tracks by all the qualifiers I would add when I spoke about my home country.

And so, this summer is a Canada Summer. To celebrate graduation and living together for four years, my housemates and I took a road trip around the Georgian Bay. I'm also visiting Adri, my housemate who I wrote about last summer as well, in Ottawa on the way over to Quebec. And then, to really commit, I'm attending a french immersion course through the government program Explore in Alma, Quebec. The school that I'm attending has a special focus on music in its activities and workshops, and this is why it's such a good match: music and french were the two interests I was most afraid I would lose in the intensity of engineering. It's a perfect way to finish off by returning to them.

So that's my main philosophy for this summer: I want to learn about Canada, and start to understand a little more of this great country than I've been able to see up until now. I hope you enjoy learning about it with me, and please comment if you want to know something specific or have a suggestion for my writing! It makes it much more interesting for me to respond to something, and it also keeps me accountable if I know people are keeping tabs on me!

Happy summer everyone, and all the best. :)
-Robin