Herleena

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.