Herleena
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My name is Herleena. I'm in my fifth
year and I am from Brampton, Ontario.
A week was the beginning, right?
So you kind of come in with all these
expectations of meeting all these people
and finding like
your crew right away,
and because I was an off campus student,
I knew that I had to put myself out there
just to begin with, so I
wasn't too afraid to do that,
but I thought it would be a
lot easier than it actually was.
Being off campus, you're not really
introduced to a whole bunch of people.
I felt like I didn't really fit in
to like the campus life right away.
I was off campus, so
it was a little isolating,
especially because in res,
you're always with people
and you're always just like hanging out or
having a good time partying and all of that stuff.
I didn't really like that scene, which is why
I chose to live off campus in the first place,
but at the same time I also wanted to
make sure I wasn't isolating myself
because at the end of the day, it's not the greatest
thing for your mental health to consistently feel lonely.
To kind of start fitting into campus life,
I started hanging out with people that I did know
previously from high school because
they were also in a similar situation.
A lot of them were also off campus, so it was
just, I know them, we can kind of band together
and kind of go out there and
kind of just see what there is.
I was open to finding
a club and being in it.
I was open to just randomly
communicating with people in class.
I didn't hold myself back
when it came to things like that.
So OCUS is basically an
off campus kind of like club,
so it's people
who are off campus.
OCUS stands for Off
Campus University Students.
I was introduced to them in O week.
It was like any other group like all the other res',
so we were OCUS and we did the pep rally
and we did all these different events together,
and through that, I also met people
that were in my major at the time,
so it was nice to kind of like just see other people
that okay, these people are all off campus too,
and I have an opportunity
to go hang out with them.
So in my culture, I feel like
a lot of kids are off campus.
I just notice that there were a lot of
Punjabi kids that were just off campus kids,
so SSA was a place were
we could just all hang out together.
We all had similar beliefs, similar
religious values and cultures,
and we kind of just all came
together and kind of discussed that,
so it was nice to have people from your
own community to just kind of hang out with.