For a lot of my life, I focused on having big events to define who I was: I had to travel the world and go to concerts, have some crazy career after attending some big university. I thought I had to have a big story to tell for me to have meaning. But during quarantine over the summer, when a lot of our ‘big’ events got put on hold, I started to look at the stories I did have instead of the ones I thought I should have, and that’s where the idea behind this project started.

I wanted to prove that there was meaning in the little things. That stopping on a walk to smell a flower had purpose, and that the act of living didn’t have to be something grand.

For this project, we followed the same idea. With a list of student schedules and a random number generator, we asked people a list of unique and slightly unusual questions to tell their story.

We wanted to show that you didn’t have to be a varsity star to be interviewed, but that everyone has a story to tell. Writing these and listening to people talk about their passions and memories was really eye opening, and I hope that through their stories in this project, readers will be able to find their own treasured stories and look at their life with a little more meaning. To read their stories, click here.