As yesterday’s graduation proceedings began, I braced myself for boredom. With my foolish high school hubris at heart, never had I felt the “been there, done that” mantra resonate more pungently within me. Awards were won, grades were announced, and “business was as usual”. Fittingly childish were those thoughts.

Post-IB exams I decided to join Bitmaker Labs, a nine-week web development bootcamp in Toronto. Carrying my haughty Bayview gait into the Lab on the first day, I naively awaited my rise to the top of another class. But now, four weeks later, the ‘rise’ has yet to come. Despite my high school accomplishments, Bitmaker brought about a callous introduction to the unfathomable ‘real world’ — an abstraction whose existence I’d doubted all my life. Bayview was a sandbox, and I’d adapted to exploit the heck out of it. By conseqeuence, even at the age of 18, all I know is the extrinsic motivation of a report card.

In this new world, there is no ‘syllabus’, no ‘learning goal’, and no ‘untestable’ ‘supplementary’ material. Question banks don’t exist. Sucking up doesn’t work the same way anymore. Dangling carrots cease to be percentages and class ranks. In essence, it’s hopelessly comical how we juxtapose high school and ‘real life’ to be one continuous progression.

At Bayview, I was rewarded for retaining knowledge only so long as a fistful of sand remains in grasp. And with brutal honesty, that skill will never have consequence again. Yes, I worked hard to ‘carry the broom’ at commencement, but to what relevance are those awards? At Bitmaker, I’m surrounded by university drop-outs and recent lay-offs who are now topping the class. They found their niche where it actually mattered, and they’re exploiting (the heck out of) it too.

Patterns in this new world aren’t obvious to me, but I’m confident they exist. Bitmaker Labs, like anything in life, is just another sandbox I’ll have to learn to play within. It’s time to hop from one paradigm to the next, and bridge one sandbox with a larger, more daunting one.