You may know me as an academic weapon — and you’d be absolutely correct. I’ve made lots of close friends over my academic career, and none more so than the interface, the myth, the legend: Canvas. “bCourses,” as its friends call it, has been my ride-or-die. Since day one, bCourses has been present for my glorious triumphs, epic fails, and 11:59 PM turn-ins.
But I’m not here to brag about the Canvas we all know. I’m here to tell you about the Canvas you’ve never seen: Canvas at its truest loyalty. You see, true to my academic “beast status,” as Canvas refers to it, I was turning in my Stat 20 assignment 40 days late. Even though the late work policy of my professor was completely unsympathetic, I showed up with grit and did the assignment anyway. I couldn’t just take the F. I needed that sweet, sweet C minus. Through it all, every single friend I had doubted me. They thought I couldn’t find the standard deviation line of a dataset without selling my soul to Quizlet and ChatGPT. Only one computer program was there for me, from my hesitant start to the dejected finish. It was like it was right there next to me, holding my left hand… while my right hand tried to find out what the fuck a “correlation coefficient” was.
And at the very end, after holding my breath, I clicked the ‘Submit’ button. “0/50,” read the bold letters on the interface, and the confetti rained down in a glorious display of how well I had done. The rager exploded in full swing. Canvas was doing body shots off of the other computer tabs. I didn’t know it could go so hard to my Lofi 50-10 Pomodoro video, or how it was going so hard, but it did. By the end of the night, at exactly 11:59 PM, we were all passed out in the club (on my desk, in a heap of stress tears). Without my bestie bCourses, I know I would have missed a night to remember.