With the upcoming long weekend, Youth Central’s Mayor’s Youth Council has an exciting opportunity for youth artists and writers alike! This year, the Calgary’s MYC is organizing the first annual Youth Art and Writing Contest. Why join? If you’re passionate about art/writing already, you can submit one of your previously created pieces or make a…
If you know me personally, you might already know that I’m into coding. I’m no expert at coding my any means; in fact, it’s been a while since I last coded anything in Python. Over the long weekend, I was inspired to start learning something I’ve set aside for years, and that’s, as you may…
The Question: These days, I rarely get receipts shorter than a 30cm ruler for purchasing a bag of chips at just about any store. It’s totally absurd so I wanted to find out why do stores did this. Before researching this shower thought, I wanted to list out a few of my own reasons for…
Some may know him from his 11th Hour Documentary, others know him as the host of the CBC TV program The Nature of Things. A Canadian scientist, environmentalist, and broadcaster, David Suzuki is a world leader in sustainable ecology. He is best recognized for his successful efforts to educate the public about climate change and…
Dedicated to SHAD Western Fellows of 2017, Program Directors and Assistants and everyone who made my summer SHAD experience possible. You can find a few accounts of SHAD Fellows’ experiences here on Youth Are Awesome, and from each of them you can easily deduce that SHAD is certainly a summer of a lifetime. I can…
What would happen if we never changed ourselves? Our ways, our mindsets, our outlooks… It seems that we’re always either trapped within a cycle or travelling along an upwards spiral. With the former, we put ourselves into a stagnant position, where nothing terribly bad or terribly great ever happens. It’s always a desirable place to…
When browsing for books at the public library, it’s not uncommon for me to wander into the Teens Fiction Novels section and pick up a book that’s marked with New York Times Bestseller at the top of the front cover. Several years of reading these “bestseller” books later, I only recently came to wonder: what…
Is it that we can’t help it? Or perhaps an unconscious spoken decision? Whatever the case, it’s well known that we humans make excuses – all of us. Now, I don’t mean to frame this in an accusing way as not all excuses are harmful. In fact, some excuses are reasons to make us motivated.…
1. World’s most expensive hyphen: NASA In 1962, NASA prepared to launch the Mariner 1, America’s first interplanetary probe. The mission was meant to get a close up image of Venus. The absence of a single hyphen in the coding of this probe made the mission blast off – into pieces. The dashed mistake cost…
Nothing beats reminiscing about fun past memories, whether than be your childhood, school days, or any other fun times. I had a humanities teacher one-time ask my class: if your house was burning down and you could choose to save one thing, what would it be? Sure it was one of those generic, icebreaker questions…
1. Velcro: The story goes: Swiss engineer George de Mestral had gone on a hunting trip with his trusty dog. Out in the wilderness, Mestral kept noticing the troublesome tendency of burrs sticking to his dog’s fur (and his own socks). A scan under a microscope later on revealed what seemed to be these minuscule…
I’m a night owl and it’s not so practical… Although being either an early bird or night owl can have its benefits, we’re often discouraged from being night owls. Not, in fact, for health reasons but because being a night owl isn’t quite practical in terms of how many of our daily lives function. We…
Passionate about health and sciences? Come out to Catalyst 2017 this Saturday – an event hosted by Project Pulse. Project Pulse offers yearly conventions throughout Canada that seek to enrich and enlighten youth on the field of health sciences. This organization holds conferences to help high school students create a valuable network with health professionals…
Rethinking. They say that you’re an over thinker- that you pick and choose every word you say, that you never know how to make decisions, that you’re continuously wrought with anxiety. As cruel as their words may seem, it’s so easy to believe them. And now, only their words matter. No amount of comfort from…
It’s always fun to learn neat things every once in awhile. In the past year, I pushed myself to learn how to knit, solve a rubik’s cube and whistle. Morse code has always been one of those things where it’d be cool to learn but: 1. It’s not exactly applicable to my daily life and,…