ONE AMONG MANY

August 27th. A day of the year previously innocuous to me, it now means my first day at John Abbott. After many days of stressful preparation and anxiety, it was strange to enter the Herzberg main hall and find so many people calm and happy. The environment sure was not (you can thank me and the countless other lost students on their first day for that), but every time I looked into any group of people twice as tall and thrice as experienced as me, I found that they were just as human. They laughed about that one time they got wasted, complained about the lack of parking, rushed to buy their books and tried their best to avoid that one guy they broke up with last year.

After spending five years at a french-speaking secondary school about two hours away from Abbott, it was a surreal experience to see so many people fluently speaking the same language as me and having a lot of the same interests. In my first hour alone, I spotted a girl wearing an Aggretsuko pin, a guy with a Houston Outlaws shirt (personally I cheer for NYXL), and another watching Zero Punctuation on a break. Besides recognizing fellow fans, I was also ecstatic to see so many people interested in subjects that, up until then, were my private obsessions because they were considered too “nerdy” or “boring”. The prime example of this was when I walked into the first Bandersnatch meeting to meet a room full of people that were just as passionate about writing as me. Here’s to a wonderful first year!

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Sebastian Socorro
Office Manager

Originally Published in Bandersnatch Vol. 48 Issue 1 on September 12, 2018