Second Year

The Survivors

In my third semester, I could say that Cat and Irene were my friends but I still kinda hoped I had an establish friend group I could hang out with. During this semester, I had a coding class that as the semester continued, I began to have a few issues with. So I joined a study group that had been formed for us to help each other out. There were some attendees that were consistent with showing up. We began getting a lot more comfortable hanging out with each other. Study sessions would begin to end in some small gaming sessions and just general hang outs.

BFA Portfolio

It was during a Survivor hang out session that we got emails about having to apply to the BFA program by submitting a portfolio of works of ours. This caught some of us off guard. So now, we were making use of the study group for coding class purposes but also for setting up our individual portfolios. After a lot of work put into them, we all got our portfolios submitted on Halloween night. Now it was just a waiting game to see if we'd get accepted. We were worried about the situation if some of us got into the program but some didn't. We had some vague plan of announcing it to each other. But then, 6 weeks later, one of us Survivors messaged the others that the email had been sent out while some of us were walking home. We all rapidly opened our emails, ignoring any planning we had made of announcing it to each other under the sudden rush of adrenaline. We checked our emails and we had all passed. We definitely had a celebratory party at our next 'study session'. After having got through the BFA Portfolio review and reached the end of the coding class, we truly thought of ourselves as Survivors having got through that semester.

The Bumasses

At the same time of The Survivors coming together, another group had been forming. That group was The Digital Media Freaks a.k.a DMF. Some members of The Survivors were part of DMF but then, in the following semester, the two groups became one through watching 'A Minecraft Movie', the first of many large hang out sessions to come. We've since referred to this as The Bumasses' 'Nexus Event', nexus being the creation of something great by combining multiple things, in this case the multiple things being the groups of friends. With these people, these friends, I had never been as comfortable with a group of people as I am with them. They were truly the family away from home that I needed.