My Last Semester at BU

Your final year at Bishop’s can be pretty crazy – in the best way possible. From exams and projects to all the different ways you can get involved on campus, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Rachel McNamara ’19 shares with us how to make the best out of these last moments before Convocation.

Heading into my final year at Bishop’s was pretty crazy – in a good way! Starting with moving back, filling my fridge for the months ahead (thanks mom!), and hosting an O-Week swing dance workshop to meet a bunch of new BU students to performing in three different shows definitely kept me busy! We might be small, but we’re mighty: hiking Mount Pinacle, sending delegations to Model UN, Orange T-shirt Day, performing at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, club meetings, volunteering for Open House, doing weekend trips to Montreal, hot chocolate at Faro with friends, celebrating BU’s 175th anniversary, showing off three different Halloween costumes, and building a snow-fort are just some of the things you can do at Bishop’s during one semester! Of course, there’s some studying in between all of that and welcoming breaks to explore our gorgeous new Library Learning Commons.

This semester I even got to take on my own project and present it during the Drama Department’s New Plays Festival (open to students from all Departments to get involved onstage and off-stage) – I had students from the English, Psychology, Classics, and Education Departments join me in creating our own performance piece in only 17 days of rehearsal: an exhausting but exciting project to begin the semester!

You might think I’m doing a lot, and I am, but you’ll see it’s hard to say no when so many awesome opportunities are available right in front of you! I even had supper with Principal Goldbloom and other recipients of the B.E.S.T. Project Fund to get updated on all the amazing projects BU students took on over the summer.

Fast forward to late October and I’m rehearsing every night for the upcoming drama production of 7 Stories, a dark comedy set in the 1980s, for which I’m also designing all the costumes, hair, and makeup. It was great to be able to get involved in so many of my passions at once, which I find is something very unique to Bishop’s! A few weeks later, we shared our hard work with the Bishop’s community and had many come enjoy the show. It was great to have so many people support what we worked on all semester, and the same can be said of the Bishop’s University Singers choir concert a few weeks later. I got to join the choir for the first time this year! It was a great opportunity to meet students, profs, and community members, as well as improve my singing, and even got filmed by MaTV, which was broadcast across Quebec a few weeks later.

During the last week of Fall Term classes, I also got to meet multiple donors and alumni at a reception for the Eastern Townships. It was great to meet the wonderful people who make all of this possible. I also got to learn video game motion capture with an artist from Montreal who came to give a workshop from the Drama Department, and finally, we all came together for an end of the semester potluck to celebrate our achievements and work over the last four months… and get ready to do it again! After some studying with friends and exams, I’m finally back at home relaxing and printing pictures of all the incredible things I’ve done these past four years.