The big kids had big summers this year. We knew Erin’s would be big. She had been offered a Tanglewood fellowship. This meant spending the summer in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts playing in an amazing orchestra and performing at the Tanglewood Festival alongside (and sometimes with) the Boston Symphony. The fellowship covered all her living costs and allowed her to play under the baton of some of the world’s greatest conductors.

Sophie was still wrapping up choral festivals and performances with the Vancouver Youth Choir when her university exams finished. She was also involved in the UBC Rocket Team, and this became almost a full-time job for her during May and early June. The team travelled to IREC (International Rocketry Engineering Competition) in New Mexico, where their rocket won its division against the big engineering schools in the US and abroad. She returned to Vancouver to do a bit of naval reserves training. She had enlisted in the reserves this spring on the Marine Engineering Systems Operator track. Having passed her medical, her interview and her fitness tests she was not hopeful about getting a Basic Training assignment due to the disarray of the Canadian Forces recruitment system. So she used her Canada150 YouthRail pass to hop trains across the country. And then at the last minute she got word that the military had a spot for her in a Basic Training block in Quebec City. So she headed there on the train and did her three weeks, playing in the bush with rifles and passing weaponry and gas mask tests and eating, we are told, rather well.

Noah had a fairly ordinary summer. He stayed at SFU doing a couple of coding and design courses, partly just killing time hoping that he might get an interview for a co-op job. Then with just a couple of weeks to go, he got two interviews. The first was with a government agency, working more or less as an IT lackey, doing an end run around some platform problems they’d been having. He was offered the job, but it wasn’t really what he wanted, although the pay was pretty decent. Then he got an interview at a Virtual Reality startup, exactly the sort of work he was hoping for. As it turns out they were beginning work on some sort of rhythm-based game and were really excited to have a musician / coder / digital designer apply. When they found out he’d been offered another position, they fast-tracked an offer to him and he accepted. It’s a 4-month placement, with the possibility to extend it to 8 months. In order to earn a Co-op Certificate alongside his BSc, he needs to do at least two placements totalling twelve months. So he’s thrilled, and is well on his way.