With the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic behind us, this semester the University of Toronto has resumed full in-person learning, after two years of the hybrid model. Every day, 65,000 students pour onto a bit less than one kilometre squared of the downtown core. Masking is now up to our personal preference, as the multi-racial posters on every door cheerfully tell us. Classes at Convocation Hall are back, baby! 

I’m a health sci kid, which means I see lots of my new classmates up close and personal every day. I spend 3 classes – 9 hours a week – in Con Hall, which has a capacity for 1730 people. The first time I walked in, I heard a thousand conversations taking place at once and it stopped me in my tracks. It was more people than I had seen at one time in more than three years.  

It’s not just me and 64,999 other strangers making up this strange new campus, either. I keep running into people I know on the street! Last year, I texted my friends saying we should meet up and what followed was an in-depth comparison of schedules to figure out which day we would both be downtown and between classes. Now I text them and they say they’re at the library next door to mine, and they tell me to take ten minutes and come see them.  

It helps that the city is never more beautiful than it is for these two weeks in fall, and that in the University College quad those hundred-year-old trees turn gold. It’s still early enough that none of us have fully lost that September optimism which promises us this year is the one we’ll get everything right. I watch the people around me as I rush from class to class, and there’s always something to see. The Lady Godiva Memorial Band marching through campus on some mission only they understand. The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. A group of friends laughing as they sit on a patch of grass, like the stock photos come to life.  

I don’t love it all, though. I find myself wishing for Zoom every time I step into the construction-filled King’s College Circle, especially after the cars that insist on going through the worst roundabout in the city try their best to run me over. And Convocation Hall has become my new nemesis. It has no built-in desks and the bare minimum of padding on its seats. My friends over six feet tall have red marks on their kneecaps after class from being crammed against the chairs in front. My spine has been hurting for five weeks straight, and will probably keep hurting until December. Small wonder that my classes of 1300 have dwindled to half that (my bio course excepted, because Kenneth Yip has a power over health sci students that cannot be underestimated). And my favourite reading spot in Robarts has been stolen by some upstart first-years, now that campus is saturated. I’ve seen some people doing their readings at Bahen sitting on the floor by the garbage cans, since every single seat is filled. 

Many of us entered university at a time when the campus was emptier than it had been in decades. Although this in-person learning – and the classrooms and crowds that come with it – are strange to us, it is what the University of Toronto was built for. We’ve worried about overcrowding since the 1980s and haven’t found a solution yet. Our location means there’s no room to expand out. Even if we were to expand upwards, we can use the King’s College construction job as evidence that nothing will be finished in time to improve our own student experience.  

Like Zoom classes, in-person learning has good parts and bad. Like everything, all you can do is appreciate the good parts and complain about the bad parts until you’re over them. So while there is a permanent knot in my back from those Con Hall classes, I’m trying to see my friends, look around my city, and explore the quieter libraries on campus to find more study spots. Should the other shoe drop and yet another return to hybrid arrive with it, we have this fall. I intend to use it while I have it.  

I won’t tell you my new favourite library, in case another group of upstart first-years take it, but I will tell you my favourite section of Con Hall is L. Take ten minutes and come see me there.