2A (September - December 2017)
The rise and grind of student life.
Second year started off quite well, the first couple of weeks consisting mostly of settling into a new routine with our student house off campus and catching up with people. The student neighbourhoods of Waterloo are very lively, with 3 post secondary institutions all on one street together, it makes for a very active environment. I remember my first bus ride to campus and seeing a sea of students along University Ave as we climbed the hill, picking up dozens of students at each stop. It was nice how many people from my year also lived along the same bus route and being able to get in a quick conversation before being dropped off at campus was a nice bonus to start the day.
2A was my first semester taking music studio, meaning that I was taking violin lessons and playing music again regularly. It was such a breath of fresh air in my university routine and became a third “component” in my life (the other two being school/career and running). My violin instructor was great and we had selected two pieces I would be working on for the semester that I was really excited about.
As part of studio requirements, I was also part of a chamber music group which unfortunately was a bit less exciting. One of our members (groups are created by the ensemble coach/instructor) was not quite on the same level of experience as the rest of us which made rehearsal at times quite frustrating. He also showed up to our recital in black Air Jordan’s which kind of sums the whole thing up.
Though at times it felt difficult to muster the mental energy for daily practice, it was exciting to surpass my highschool self in violin. For so many who grow up playing music, the end of high school marks the peak and then their instruments are hardly ever picked up again. I’ve always felt that was such a shame and continuing my music journey just one step further felt like a symbolic gesture to myself that I would keep music in my life for the long haul.
On the CS/Math side of school, the cohort from first year slowly started to disperse with some people choosing to stay in the “advanced” stream exclusively for either computer science or math. I chose to lighten my course load and switched out of advanced for one of my CS classes, CS245 Logic and Computation. The regular offering of this class had multiple sections and I ended up in one taught by a Masters student who was barely older than me. The instructor for the other section had a perfect RateMyProfessors score and had taught the course multiple times. Needless to say, by the second week of the semester, nearly everyone in my class had started attending the other section in hopes of “better” education. It wasn’t uncommon for my lectures to have less than five students, and of them, at least two sleeping. The instructor had a good attitude about the circumstance and joked that my CS245 lectures were essentially tutoring. He must have been a good tutor because that class ended up being my highest mark in university.
On the other end of the spectrum was CS246E, Advanced Object Oriented Programming. The instructor for that course had also taught my CS class in 1B and I remember him being serious, meticulous, and overall, a pretty “hard” prof. From day 1 of 246E, it was clear that this would be the tone of this class as well.
There is a certain tier of courses within university that can single handedly ruin your entire semester. The types of courses where lectures are incredibly stressful because if you look away for even the slightest second, you are completely lost, and it is nigh impossible to get back on track for the rest of the class. These forms of lectures become a sort of game, a question not of “what will I learn today” but “how long will I last today until nothing makes sense”. For the uninitiated, one may fruitlessly try to recover in a lecture after falling off, a veteran knows it’s sometimes better to simply put down the notebook and figure out what parts will have to be self-studied later in the evening.
The assignments for these types of courses are also lethal. They have pitfalls where you can end up spinning endlessly and if you’re not careful and start down the wrong path, your time to completion becomes unbounded. CS246E is not the worst within this category of classes but certainly earns a spot in it. The spectrum of emotions I would feel in nearly every class ranging from optimism, anger, despair, and resignation (often in this order), was unlike anything I had experienced at this point in my university career.
After the midterm, which I had done poorly on, I went to the professor’s office hoping to get some guidance on whether I should grind out the rest of the course or drop down to the regular section (in first year, it was stressed that any point, switching from the advanced to regular section was an option). Right away, he informed me that switching out was not possible. Somehow, the guarantee from first year no longer existed. The professor then pulled up the grade distribution from the midterm to help diagnose the situation. He swivelled his monitor over to show the graph of the class’s midterm marks and then pointed me out on the curve, far on the left tail end, dead last.
I realized in that moment that while I had been around the median in 1A’s advanced classes, the bottom percentage had been continually switching out of the advanced stream with each passing semester and I had subsequently fallen further and further down the percentiles. Clearly seeing the stress in my face and in an awkward way to make me feel better, he said to me:
“doing poorly in this class may mean you might not get your dream co-op but don’t worry, you’ll still get something”
I left this meeting a bit concerned so I decided to talk to my undergraduate advisor. I went online to look up who my advisor was and I’ll never forget the way the picture of my advisor slowly loaded on my phone’s spotty wifi connection. Chunk by chunk, the picture came into view, it was Mr. 246E professor himself. I was stuck.
The saving grace of this class was the study group I was a part of. The many late nights in the math building desperately trying to finish assignments together are some of my favourite memories from this semester. For periods at a time, the assignment would completely consume my life for 3 or 4 days at a time with nearly every hour outside of class dedicated to bashing my head against the screen. There’s no feeling quite like leaving campus at 4am after a full day in the computer lab, little progress having been made, knowing you’ll have to be back before noon.
This culminated with the final project, which was to recreate the command line text editor, vim with C++. The project was to be completed in groups of two and our study group paired off. Over the next few weeks, I spent probably more time at my project partner’s apartment than my own as the enormous scale of this project became increasingly apparent. As the deadline grew closer and it was obvious that we would have to cut many major features, my partner and I agreed that if we put on our best sales person faces during the presentation of our project, maybe we would squeeze a few more points.
The day of the presentation came and immediately we realized this plan would fail. Sitting beside us was our professor with a clipboard and paper filled with checkboxes of features. We were quickly reduced to just a series of “did you implement X” (most of which were answered with a lowered head and a “not quite”). We scored a 50 on this project worth 35% of our grade. Needless to say, CS246E ended up being my lowest mark of university.
The rest of 2A was largely uneventful, when I look back and think of the semester that was the most “normal”, it is 2A. Not that it was boring but it is the semester that felt like it was a true sum of the everyday stories and routines. No major events or external things going on, just me being a pretty regular student going through the trials and tribulations of school.
Running was pretty fun, there was a pretty large incoming group of rookies which made the team a lot bigger. We had a hilarious stats professor who became actually offended when we did well throughout the course before murdering us with a ridiculous final exam. I started to become more familiar with Waterloo as a place outside Ring Road by living off campus. My roommates and I were bested by raccoons who’d throw our garbage bins everywhere each morning. Random campus events here and there, you know, just regular student stuff.
Scattered memories:
- Mini hackathon with brother fuelled by Saucy Fish Co
- 246E VM grind sessions at Lester
- 245 Friday afternoon deadlines on MC 3rd floor
- Photo shoot for campus promotional pictures
- (Unsuccessfully) trying to network for a job at Square
- Startups and Beer event
- Star Wars Battlefront livestreams in background while doing homework
- A Night at the Library
- Eating Sobeys hot food leaning on the hood of my car during sunset at Bridgeport plaza
- Diep.io with Thomas in the 12hrs between exams in SLC upper floor
Classes took:
- MATH247 w/ Ruxandra Moraru
- I asked a question one time and this guy started laughing for how dumb it seemingly was
- CS245 w/ Ifaz Kabir
- CS246e w/ Brad Lushman
- STAT240 w/ Changbao Wu
- He claimed he played in the NBA (non-professional basketball association)
- Music Studio instructed by Lance Oullette
- Such a fulfilling part of the semester
Songs:
- Nigun - Ernest Bloch
- The main piece I worked on for studio