a bit about uwaterloo

I’ve been thinking a bit about my alma mater recently. There’s been a lot of buzz about University of Waterloo on Twitter and I’ve seen a lot of great comments on why Waterloo engineers are great and wanted to contribute with some of my thoughts. Some commonly discussed benefits include having two years of work experience and a hacking culture.

My opinion is that Waterloo does the best job in the world at unlocking every students’ potential. There’s three reasons why I believe in this.

If you had six tries to find your best Super Smash character, you’d play better than if you only had two tries.

What environment do we thrive in? What kind of work are we interested in? What kind of work exhausts us? Throughout our co-ops, we discover the answer to these questions and identify how we can do our best work.

Finding work that aligns with your passion, interests and goals is synonymous with unlocking potential. Waterloo’s co-op program gives students the chance to maximize their career trajectory both by providing job mobility with a great resume and by finding the work that aligns best with their interests and skills.

Alignment can often be the make or break for a talented individual. For example, if we look at one of the most public professions with high job mobility (NBA), Jalen Brunson went from being a disgruntled second option to accomplishing Hall of Fame worthy records after switching teams and coaches.

Waterloo’s done a great job at baking in breadth as a part of its co-op program. However, career exploration is obviously not limited to Waterloo. Many students take it upon themselves to explore all sorts of facets in life, both professional and non-professional. Waterloo happens to be opinionated on what kind of breadth students should explore to get their degree.

Onboarding only happens at the beginning of something new. Six internships means you’re starting a new job six times and go through onboarding six times. The amount of time spent onboarding throughout six internships is significantly more than the amount of time spent onboarding as a full time employee.

Although the full time employee delivered more business value in two years, the serial intern has absorbed a breadth of knowledge across many different environments. If you ask someone who only has a pencil to highlight something, they’ll circle the phrase. If you ask someone with a pencil case to highlight something, they’ll use a highlighter to highlight the phrase.

A key benefit of working across many environments is the perspective of what works and doesn’t work per situation. To see only one way of doing things is to only know one way of doing things. To see many ways of doing things is to know what’s the right tool for the job. Exposure to six different teams, cultures, managers, codebases, etc. is inevitably going to build good intuition.

The intensity in Waterloo was palpable. In our engineering programs, we were emailed which decile we ranked in the class every semester. We had an interview building filled with rooms tense with interviewers and interviewees and a waiting room with the loudest silence of tension. Having interviews and midterms in the same week was the norm as opposed to an outlier.

On the flip side, there’s a fantastic complementary system. In our engineering programs, we’re grouped into small cohorts per program, a recipe for community. We take almost the exact same classes, same schedule for the first three years, meaning we walk to the same classes, do the same assignments, and prepare for the same exams. The faculty is also extremely supportive of students’ goals and endeavors.

Throughout the program, you either realize it’s not for you or stay long enough to prove that you love it more than you hate it. This is a great polarizer to filter out folks who have passions outside of building technology. If the program was less polarizing, there would be more inertia and less likelihood of changing paths, meaning their time could have been spent on something better aligned with their interests.

Finding work that you love is a form of superpower. It allows you to do your best work. But to find that alignment involves trying something new and there’s a cost to that search. Everyone’s passion vector can move and so it’s important to constantly realign with that vector. All the more reason to be a lifelong learner :)

Also, constant changes in environment are great but they come at a cost. For example, I love my routine and it’s what gives me the mental capacity to try new things (new jobs! new hobbies! new friends!). The experience that comes after the honeymoon of an experience is a new experience in itself. In the case of adulthood, it’s the health of a good routine. In the case of work, it’s the increased scope, difficulty and complexity of the work.

Lastly, I miss the intensity of Waterloo. I’ve come to that realization after working at Codeium and feeling the complementary combination of camaraderie and intensity. Things are in constant motion and I always feel like there’s more that I can do. The team, product and company are evolving at a rate that’s hard to keep up with and I bet it’s pushing everyone to bring their best foot forward, a familiar feeling from my time at Waterloo.

Speaking of intensity, April 2024 brought along a generous amount of intensity. Notably, a chaotic work trip to Miami, a marathon-like engagement party, meeting new people, and finally breaking 20 minutes in a 5k! April was great, hoping to keep it up. Thankful for the old and new friends for making it a great month.