A Look Back After CS @ U of T
Today was supposed to be the day of my convocation. While the virtual convocation was a nice effort by the University of Toronto administration, it felt a little bit like the tail end of movie credits (like after the pop music and animations end and you move into the instrumental score). The names scrolled by so quickly that I had to pause the YouTube stream to take a picture with my homemade paper graduation cap, U of T sweater, and pyjama pants.
It got me thinking about how I would explain this situation to first-year me and what advice I would give myself for university. If I were to go back and tell that nervous child about university, I would have a few things to say:
· The university brochures were correct! You too will experience the thrill of laughing on the quad of some Gothic U of T building with your diverse group of friends (all while wearing U of T™️ merchandise)!
· Remember that frosh week frat party you didn’t go to because you figured you would have at least 4 more years to go to one? Well you never did, and you never regretted it. If there’s anything you learn in university, it’s that you don’t have to pretend to like things.
· Don’t pay attention to the arrogant guys who try to correct the professor in your Intro to Programming classes. They’re just overcompensating for their own insecurities and repeating what they saw on some r/programming thread.
· I know CS PoSt is scary, but you’ll make it through! :’) Just focus on the two classes you need and do practice tests religiously.
· Don’t be scared about not finding an internship during the summer after your first year. It’s hard for everybody and the research project you ended up doing instead was awesome! Also, the blazer is too much for a first-year student who still has their high school art award on their resume.
· Leetcode is NOT life. Companies want candidates with skills that they can apply on the job, not somebody can just regurgitate code to flip a binary tree.
· You’ll fail interviews even after preparing and that’s okay. In one spectacular failure, the interviewer asked which parts of software engineering you were least interested in and you answered honestly. He then explained that he and his team worked on the things you mentioned every day. At the time, you wanted to melt through the wall and crawl back to Toronto from Seattle, but now you just occasionally cringe at the memory.
· Your skills are worth more than you think! If your company asks you to work overtime without compensation or tries to pay you in nothing but shares of the start-up, don’t fall for it!
· There’s always going to be that little voice in your head that says you don’t actually know what you’re doing, and somebody is going to find out. That’s classic impostor syndrome and no matter how many times you read Lean In, it doesn’t completely go away. You’ll keep on accomplishing things to prove that voice wrong and you’ll find out that a lot of the successful people you know have the same fears.
· Having friends in CS will be the key to getting through your program and actually enjoying it. You’re all going to start off intimidated by each other, but eventually you’re going to find a group of amazing people to share CS memes with. These are the people who will take snack breaks with you while your neural network trains and share your frustration when you return a half-hour later to find that it still hasn’t finished. They’re going through the same things as you and it’s just nice having a sense of community in a school as big as U of T. Seeing your friends all the time is the one thing that you’ll miss the most when you graduate.
· Get involved in extracurriculars but not to the point that you neglect your schoolwork. Leading organizations that focus on the things you care about is going to be one of the most rewarding parts of undergrad but it also takes up a lot of time!
· Your eyesight may be 20/400 but hindsight is 20/20. You’ll always have regrets but there’s nothing you can do about them except learn from them and then convert them into a blog post after you graduate.
· I shouldn’t give any more spoilers for your undergraduate career, but things are going to turn out even better than you can imagine right now. The world is going to go through some turbulent times at the end of your degree, and you may end up graduating in your pyjama pants, but you’ll really treasure the friends and memories you have from your time at U of T.
