I’m from Medicine Hat. A smaller city in south-east Alberta with just over 63,000 people. Not a painfully small town, but it is at least a three-hour drive from anything more significant than it. This makes Medicine Hat feel very secluded and lonely but also very quaint and peaceful. Medicine Hat isn’t just small in population, it is also small in terms of the skyline, as in it doesn’t have one. If you google the tallest buildings in Medicine Hat, the first link is the “20 tallest buildings,” and there are two on the list. One is a 12 story apartment complex, and the other is a 6 story office building, and from the top of either of them, you can see the entire city.
Fast forward to my first day at the University of Alberta. I had to work on my new student orientation day, so I got my partner at the time to show me around beforehand. He grew up in Edmonton, so he thought it’d be a great idea to show me all of the pedways in every building and how to get to my classes while staying completley indoors. If you have ever been so lost that you were almost in tears because you couldn’t find any landmarks or familiar faces, then you’ve been in my position. The easiest way to make me cry is to get me overwhelmed or frustrated, and being able to fit 2/3 of Medicine Hat into 150 buildings in Edmonton makes me feel like a repairman on the titanic. Now imagine being in that headspace and still trying to impress a new partner.
Cue the tears.
Of course, my partner at the time was very understanding and felt really bad about making me cry, but he didn’t understand precisely why I was so overwhelmed. He grew up in Edmonton, so he’s never experienced precisely what I was going through. I just remember crying my eyes out in the elevator in SUB after walking around campus for 3 hours.
If you have ever been in this kind of scenario, you are not alone. The campus is massive and scary and overwhelming, but I’ve never had a single regret moving here. Things get hard and terrifying, but in the end, it is all worth it.