“Adapt, react, readapt, apt.” That’s Michael Scott’s second rule of business. Always be prepared for change. Say what you will about the man, but he’s got a point. Sure, the main protagonist of NBC’s The Office may not be the sharpest tool in the shed at times, but he is a good businessman, as proven time and time again throughout the show’s running.
Now why do I quote the great Michael Scott to start a reflection on my own journey to Ivey? Well, not only do I love The Office as a TV show, but this random line from a random Season 2 episode describes the journey I went on to end up here. Because this wasn’t how I had planned it to happen. If you had asked me last year where I was going to go to school, the answer wouldn’t have been here.
I could lie to you and tell you a story of a teenager so intrigued by the business world that he sought out the Ivey ambassadors at his local university fair so that he could learn more about the program he had been dreaming of. I could make up a tale of a student engrossed in the world of economics and finance. I could even fabricate a persona that knew that this was his calling all along.
But I won’t lie. That’s not my story. That’s not how I got here.
I’ve always had a special kind of love for numbers and patterns. While my peers grew up playing with toy cars and dolls, I spent my toddler years organizing recyclables or arranging the potatoes from our kitchen. School was no different - math and science were always my strong suits, subjects I could understand easily and enjoyed doing. Numerical data made sense to me, and I liked knowing that there was always a right answer at the end of the road. Things were either right or they were wrong; there was no grey area in between. I liked that certainty.
So naturally, when it came time to select my own courses in high school, I gravitated towards the quantitative fields of maths and science, leaving behind the reading and writing based courses I have always struggled with. It gave me comfort knowing that in school, there was always a right answer. There was always a definitive right way of doing things, and if I followed that formula, I would succeed. So why do I find myself here, in a business program?
To say I’m here by complete chance wouldn’t be that far from the truth. When it came time for me to apply to university, I had many options. I knew I liked maths and science, and I wanted to stay in that field. But in what regard, I had no clue. Engineering? Definitely a possibility. Medicine? I could see myself doing that. Kinesiology? Seems like a logical next step. Unlike what I had come to expect with my life, there was no right answer. This was an equation that didn’t have a solution, at least not a clearly defined one.
But there was another variable in the equation - an unforeseen complication that changed my outlook on the whole decision. And that variable was Ivey. In fact, I didn’t discover the program until a November university fair at my high school, where a single conversation with a representative opened up a whole new world of possibilities. The whole entire concept of a dual degree broke the mathematical model I’d been building in my brain.
So why did I choose Ivey?
For an undecided grade 12 student trying to make sense of the world, choosing what school to attend for the next four years of my life was no easy feat. I had at least 5 different viable options for programs I could choose. The rejection letters, although they hurt, at least helped narrow down my options.
In the end, it was between here and McGill. I made lists, comparisons, anything you could think of to separate the two; nothing helped break the deadlock. Until one day I woke up and I decided, on an impulse, that the dual degree was the move for me. I don’t know what caused it to happen - divine intervention perhaps, or maybe I just woke up on the right side of the bed. But whatever it was, it brought me here, to a place I never would have imagined being a year ago.
In the end, as hard as I tried, there was no formula to help me decide on the next steps in my life. Any attempts at formulating such equations just resulted in me going in circles, procrastinating one of the biggest choices of my life. There was no way of knowing what the right decision was.
There’s a part of me that will continue to look for the patterns and solutions to problems I encounter daily - that’s who I am, and that’s how I will always be. Equations make sense to me, impulsiveness, not so much. But choosing Ivey wasn’t the result of any equation I tried to formulate. Rather, it was the unpredictability of life that pointed me here and set me on this path.
I don’t know what next year will bring. I don’t know if Ivey will be the right program for me, and I won’t know that until I’m sitting there in class and experiencing it for myself. I can try and prepare all I want for it, equations and all, but life isn't some great big mystery you can ever expect to solve. There isn't a blueprint that spells out all the answers. It's the unpredictability of the journey here that makes it worth taking.
Anyways, isn’t that kind of the point?