Why you should choose UWaterloo: A thousand blames but a million thanks

I stared in blankness out the colossal-sized window filling the sandwich between my condo’s floor and ceiling.

On a typical work or school-packed day, I’m usually found at the nearby table working away, giving hardly 10 cents of my time reflecting how my past decisions have shaped my current life. It always seemed like the time lapse for every single new day that passed by was an inch faster than the last. Ironically, the only days I sat to deeply reflect were days I suffered from boredom and tints of loneliness — it was almost like a subtle coping mechanism. Such days emerged here and there; it was probably most prevalent during times when I had opportunities to be productive instead.

Today, it’s a tad different.

Today, I’m only a day away from my last final of my senior year — and hence my degree from the University of Waterloo, a school that I have a thousand things to blame on and a million things to thank.

And thus— today, I’d like to write bittersweetly about it. The following is for anyone who may find value in understanding why Waterloo was a school that left me more sentimental than I’ve ever anticipated.

Waterloo, with both its good and bad elements (as with all schools), can almost be described with the use of oxymorons: The suffering induced from attaining good employment. The vibrant, meandering path to lecture halls. The cold, yet warm winter moments. Even a dull, yet memorable campus. Despite all these descriptions, there’s still more sustenance to add. The school was never one that forced me to think: ‘what if I went somewhere else — would my life be better?’

Like Schrödinger’s cat, my other paths in life, had I (or my peers) not attended Waterloo, drops to the depths of imagination for anyone to envisage what could’ve happened. However, I will say this: as a young adult whose priorities have now shifted to more important aspects of life, Waterloo was nothing short of a major net positive.

Here’s why.

First, I’d like to list out the simple values that I’ve come to realize, albeit belatedly, are important for a high-achieving career and thus life:

• Depth & breadth of knowledge
• Good habits
• Future career prospects

And while this does read as common sense, I felt that this idea to relate back to these various aspects can help elucidate Waterloo’s impact more-so. Let’s dive into each category individually.

Depth & Breadth of Knowledge

It’s easy to state that with a keen and consistent focus in one specific area of study, one can become incredibly skilled in terms of depth. We all know how important depth is for our careers. Many mentors and folks we look up to having honed their specific craft to become experts in just one niche area. While not going against the grain, there’s a confined aspect of breadth I’d like to discuss, in which I feel is equally as important as depth. Next, I’ll explain how Waterloo brought the opportunity for this discovery.

It’s incredibly hard to undermine just how important Waterloo’s renowned co-op program was for my peers and I. Likened to Pareto’s Principle, I’ll even go as far as to say that at least 80% of my future work will be built on foundations I’ve commanded throughout my work experiences. This is all despite 20% of my time in undergrad having been spent on co-op. These experiences, coupled with the opportunity to compete against a mass pool of students to earn a placement, were challenging but rewarding. While having provided a few lines to fill on a resume, they also widened our entire skillset in a job market where a balanced combination of soft and technical skills can arguably be most ideal.

As a student, being a part of the system was perplexing and stressful at times — days featuring both interviews and midterms/quizzes were surprisingly not uncommon. However, what many of us here at Waterloo eventually noticed is just how confident and skilled we became in being able to handle and digest all these requirements. Each one of us alleviated our circumstances by throwing various amounts of effort into interview preparation, practice on behaviour interview answers, and even the ability to shift between work and school. These eventual skills all initially seemed obscure, but mattered substantially in the end. Our abilities to prioritize, make critical decisions, and even transition between dynamic settings requiring different skills— they will carry us through the most unfathomable moments. In life-past-school when we’re all surrounded by ambiguous environments, whether immersing ourselves in the workplace or trying to optimize our lives at home, such subtle qualities can bring immense yet concealed value.

Additionally, co-op itself made it almost impossible for us to not realize which skills were worth developing and which weren’t. To exemplify, from my own experiences, I’ve realized that some skills, whether being assimilated in the classroom or at work, were simply just more important or more related than other skills which were being more visibly developed. At Blackberry(a large corporation I interned at), I realized just how important the broad skill of data analytics would be for me in my career path. Once I made this gradual discovery, I made sure to find every opportunity that Waterloo provided me to work on these skills, whether it was related to my degree or not. Going back to my main overall point, co-op, as well as other extracurriculars, helped me both discover and build the most important skills that pertained to my career. I applied this concept of discovery (something I can attribute to a mindset focused on breadth) to every internship that followed. This ultimately helped me understand which skills were more important than others to actually develop (depth).

And thus came the idea that a balanced development of depth and breadth was nothing short of vast value. Every student from co-op gained everlasting skills and knowledge for breadth, but also knew which ones employers valued the most for depth. Many of us also learned one critical thing: the importance of handling dynamics, and how to seek opportunities to build such skills with high employer value.

Good Habits

In an odd and peculiar fashion, Waterloo provided an environment that imposed good habits, rather forcefully, on many people down long periods throughout their time at the school.

It is without a doubt that almost everyone can agree that a consistent application of healthy habits can compound to amazing effects later down the road. While this is true and widely accepted, I would argue that this idea is often seldom applied, and those who “get ahead of the crowd” are ones who actually kept consistent with the most important habits that related to their career aspirations. It’s simply due to the plain unawareness of how important these habits are in the long-run, since we don’t get initial visibility of the results.

I’ll explain.

For many Waterloo folks that I’ve talked to who have reached or are experiencing (at least) moderate success for their post-graduate job prospects, there’s always one key aspect: a primary habit that keeps itself consistent.

These fall under a broad umbrella, but can include an hour or two a day of leet-coding, revising a resume, reading Medium articles related to work, reading on interview prep articles or productive books, building side projects, or spending time on relevant extracurriculars.

It’s one thing to pursue the initiation of these activities, but often times, many of these activities, which are supposed to compound, die off into the sun as peoples’ priorities pivot. I feel that for those whom I’ve learned from the most, they focused on just a few key areas that were career-focused, and implemented small-yet-effective positive habits into their daily lives that drove these areas. For example, one of my personal friends epitomized the effect of these habits by successfully transitioning from a non-tech background to a software engineer. He always had a unique habit of reading up on technology and business trends, as he was generally passionate for the space.

This eventually made him realize what skills were most valuable, as well as how fast he needed to build them to obtain job market value as a potential worker. This quickly cascaded down to actions of taking initiative to join relevant events, side projects, and clubs, all done just through a combination of his original habit, as well as the atmospheric pressure of Waterloo. Subsequently, these other areas built habits for him to explore new relevant technologies, build small projects with friends, and review his resume, time-and-time again. What originally seemed like a stretch to many, going from a biotechnology/business background to software engineering, suddenly resulted in success within a blink of an eye, due to the effects of small habits compounded over time. To emphasize again, these are subtle activities that didn’t necessarily take substantial time away from relaxation. Even incorporating a few hours a week, as long as one is consistent for multiple weeks at a time, can have drastic effects.

To cap it off and tie this back to how Waterloo peculiarly enforced these habits, It’s simple: a pressuring and competitive environment full of ambitious, high-achieving students who push each other to build good habits. People aren’t aware, until the final result, of how important their habits were in the past. Often times, there are critically missed opportunities for habit-forming. Waterloo, interestingly enough, brought a certain atmospheric (and per circle of friends) pressure to students that squeezed just a bit more dedicated effort out of them than usual. Additionally, this pressure kept many of them consistent at their habits until they’ve achieved something satisfying that they can pat themselves on the back for. Many may have been unaware of these habits gradually forming due to the environment around them, until reflecting back.

It’s obvious that being constantly surrounded by these types of individuals around you can have side-effects of stress, anxiety and feelings of inferiority. However, I truly believe that if people can build up the confidence to look past such feelings and believe in their capabilities, being pressured to build good habits is a blessing in disguise.

Future Career Prospects

I define the job prospects of an individual based on how much market value they can offer in terms of their skillset.

Explaining how Waterloo improved the job prospects of a graduating student is incredibly easy: internships/co-ops, the atmospheric pressure (as mentioned before) to improve one’s skills, and the school brand — these all enhance our attractiveness when we’re hopping into new grad jobs.

However, if we dig a little bit deeper, there’s one aspect I want to touch on: a deep network that Waterloo provides.

I personally don’t think this is overlooked, but because of the various co-ops, extracurriculars and friend circles Waterloo grads are exposed to, it can alleviate the difficulties of job search in many aspects. These include those we can reach out to for referrals, former managers who are can keep a lookout for openings, friends who can message recruiters for us, and so much more. That’s not to say many students here will be fortunate or lucky enough to have the same level of access as others. However, I do believe that there are opportunities for everyone on-campus to expand their network, as long as they take the initiatives to do so. This is another area where Waterloo comes in handy: our larger student body, with a keen, strategic focus on employability and extracurriculars, always provides opportunities every term for our students (or their peers) to join something — just one thing to kickstart it all.

And finally, another important aspect I wanted to mention is the constant constructive feedback loops (and the network we have to obtain such feedback) available at this school. Waterloo provides 2 things to students eminently well in this area: 1) opportunities to receive feedback, and 2) the confidence and thick skin to be receptive to such feedback, once provided.

With an environment containing a pool of students always constantly trying to improve themselves comes a culture of feedback loops. Over the years, my peers and I have become more receptive and welcoming of critical feedback of our deliverables. This corresponded with the realization that our growth is significantly hindered without it, much more than we initially thought. The opportunities to request for feedback are often taken for-granted. Many of us have access to former or current managers at a co-op, a professor, mentors, and other peers met in various extracurriculars. Those graduating from Waterloo who have taken advantage of this culture are ones who potentially have made the most noticeable improvements to themselves, both personally and professionally.

Waving Goodbye

For the sake of brevity, I’m going to conclude my writings here; way too many openings to ramble on about the good (and the bad) to upkeep the readability of my story.

I know I’ve been incredibly optimistic in my reasoning, perhaps due to the tint of sentiment that still subsists. The environment, pressure, opportunities, and people have all constituted a large change in identity and personality for me, and one for the better. I’ve grown to adapt better, gained critical skills, identified what was most important to me, learned to prioritize and manage dynamics, and grew to be independent as a cherry on top.

This brings me (and the plot of this story) to summarize the above abilities that Waterloo taught me (and my peers):

• Adjusting and adapting to different priorities.
• Digesting and managing through dynamic environments.
• Strengthening good habits.
• Utilizing a proper network.
• Acceptance of competitiveness and intake of critical feedback.

That’s not to undersell my (and everyone else's) times of difficulty; some even unique to just Waterloo. Yet fundamentally, it’s always going to be a net positive. I hope the remnants of my learnings will appear ubiquitously throughout my entire working life.

Like other schools, Waterloo may not initially seem engrossing and captivating to some who prioritize other needs when school-searching. To be honest, this was similar to my own experience: my priorities were unclear and unthoughtful in the beginning. All I cared about was the easiness of various courses required to finish a degree, as well as a fun student body who knew how to relax. Looking back, I’m glad I’ve adopted different priorities. Just luckily stumbling upon this school and sending in an application was all it took to ensure that my life is locked in a good direction for the future.

A million thanks, Waterloo!