4A (January - April 2020)
In full swing.
For this semester back in Waterloo, I moved out of the house I had been living in for second and third year and subletted from one of my friends in a house full of track team members. This was always something I wanted to be a part of, this type of “track shack” was nothing new but I had only been a guest in them before, not a resident. Aside from the convenience of having easy run partners a few metres away, at this point in University, track was my most significant social circle so just living with my closest friends was a lot of fun. Whether it be the evenings with everybody in the small kitchen trying to cook around each other, the countless Catan nights, the hours gossiping while playing Mario Kart, that time that we lost heating in the peak of winter, that other time we had water leaking in the basement, or the week we thought we had a bed bug infestation, the semester in this house came with a lot of cherished memories.
As for the track season itself, it was a major disappointment. Near the end of December, I had a minor injury that never fully left all season. Add in two bouts of a bad flu in January and I was physically too behind to make anything special happen this season, no matter how badly I wanted it. Despite the letdown of so much anticipation, there were still cheerful moments and having good teammates around makes everything so much more enjoyable.
A cool feature of my degree is that near the end, the number of compulsory courses dramatically reduces, leaving room for personal customization and focus. I was already minoring in music but I decided to tie it closer with my major by taking DAC203 (Designing with Digital Sound) and CS489 (Special Topics - Computational Audio), two classes concerned with sound and technology, the former on the artistic side and the latter from the technical. DAC203 was a very cool experience since it was my first time in a project focused arts class (I guess music studio could broadly fit this category but that “class” isn’t really a class since it’s individual). It had been years at this point since I had taken a class with so much discussion and peer to peer interaction. I had a bit of imposter syndrome since I think there was maybe only one other person in the class who was not majoring in some arts degree (this class was restricted to arts students and I had to beg in an email to get let in so this makes sense).
I felt like a fish out of water even just walking to the classroom, located in a part of campus I had never even known about. In this building, there were student art galleries hung up and rooms where nude model sketching occurred. Eventually, I grew more comfortable and the bulk of the course involved writing, subjective interpretations of art, and creative brainstorming, all things that I enjoyed but hadn’t done much since high school English. I know a lot of people tend to view these types of classes as “bullshit” courses but I think you really get what you put into it, and for me, I feel like I came away with a greater appreciation for sound as an artistic medium beyond just music. There was a slightly more technical component too with learning how to equalize sound along with other basic editing tools. One of the audio art pieces I created in this class actually ended up playing on local radio, you can listen here.
Though originally intended as a technical mirror, CS489 ended up being quite different from DAC203. The majority of the course revolved around a self picked project that the instructor would check up and give guidance on. Lecture content had some math but mostly was on understanding what audio in a digital form really is and how things like pitch, overtones, harmonics, timbre, loudness, etc are represented. Assignments involved using code to generate audio with particular constraints. This class is another example of its value being directly correlated to effort put in and I think I could have tried a bit harder to dig deeper. In the end, my project was unsuccessful but it was a great learning experience, you can read more about it here.
The rest of the semester was rounded with a music class on jazz, a computer science class on security, and a political science class that followed up on the previous one I had taken. None were that notable aside from the PoliSci class being a major letdown from its predecessor (largely from a change in instructor).
The “4A effect” is a term that refers to the sudden upswing in interest from companies during the co-op job search that sometimes happens in the 4A semester. This occurs from a combination of accumulating enough past experience to build an attractive resume and also companies hoping to quickly turn interns into full-time employees. For me, the effect was strong and I suddenly had interviews from companies I used to assume instantly threw my resume in the trash. Things were looking great and it seemed like I had finally secured a job in the Bay Area, the gem of any Waterloo CS student. Then I started to hear more about this virus from China and…
If the date of this semester didn’t cast a looming cloud over this whole section, here’s a reminder that COVID-19 stormed through the world in the winter of 2020. Having heard about it from extended family in China as early as December of 2019, it was maybe less of a sudden presence for me as it was for so many others. I remember in early February, already having worn an N-95 to class to the confused looks of my classmates. As a result, during my co-op interview cycles, I would ask each one what their backup plan was in case COVID-19 were to take hold of North America as it had in China and I got varied responses. By the time it came to pick a company to work at, in my eyes, the chances of lockdown seemed significant and with a bit of hesitation, I didn’t choose the Bay Area company out of a lack of clarity on a potential remote internship. When the lockdown eventually came, in a weird way, I was relieved that my decision was ultimately the correct one. Another relief that came with COVID were my grades. Each class did something differently but since everything was so rushed in the switch to online learning, a few assignments or tests were dropped and suddenly this semester ended up with my average being significantly higher than any previous term.
I vividly remember those first few days of lockdown and even in the moment I said to my roommates, “you think we’ll be telling our kids about this?”. As the coronavirus became increasingly recurring in the daily headlines, there were a few key milestones I remember.
First, it was that somebody in Toronto was taken to a hospital with the first confirmed case in Canada.
Then, there were rumours that somebody in Waterloo had contracted it and there were pictures circulating around the school subreddit of ambulances parked by the campus plaza bubble tea shop.
Then, the NBA announced that the rest of the season would be cancelled and this is when things started feeling seismic.
Not long after, one of the other universities in Ontario announced they would be shutting down their campus. That day, in CS489, the professor came up and gave a rousing speech about the university failing to take action and that despite what Waterloo would officially announce, he would be moving the class online. I left campus that day buzzing, it felt like a scene out of a movie. That ended up being my last normal day of university.
Once Waterloo officially announced that everything would be paused for a week to give time for administration to adjust to and create a plan going forward, many students were kind of excited actually, it was like a second spring break! We stocked up at the grocery store and then bunkered in, starting up movie nights together and playing lots of board games. My favourite part was our destination runs. With not much else to do, the highlights of our days were driving to the remote countryside towns not far from Waterloo and going for a group run or workout in the scenic dirt paths and trails. I really enjoyed spending time in the countryside.
In Waterloo itself, understandably, it was a ghost town, at most, we would go for a walk to the local playground and do some pull-ups and other body weight exercises until the city closed those down too. After about a week and with still so much uncertainty in the world, I decided that I would move back to Guelph with my parents. Looking back, I slightly regret this, that week with my roommates was a great experience and it would have been wonderful to continue that until the end of the semester but at the time, it was impossible to know what was going to happen next and if things got worse, I knew I would want to be with my family.
Scattered memories:
- Competitive AYCE sushi after long run
- Movie nights w/ Lazar (saw all but one of the Best Picture nominees in theatres)
- Post meet games and takeout at the house
- Chinese New Year dinner in Toronto
- Mario Kart in hotel at Michigan track meet
- Reading week w/ high school friends
- Fish n Chips after Hal Brown
- Making snowballs in the CIF parking lot on the first blizzard
- Taking interviews from the Grebel library
- Boomer Line run
Classes took:
- CS489 (Special Topics - Computational Audio) w/ Richard Mann
- I could write a whole blog post on Richard Mann stories, such an eccentric character
- CS458 w/ Sergey Gorbunov
- MUSIC256 w/ Laura Gray
- PSCI226 w/ Anna Drake
- DAC203 w/ Henry Svec
Songs:
- First Love/Late Spring - Mitski
- Mr. Rager - Kid Cudi
- Great Catan background song
- The News - July Talk
- Great countryside driving song
- Tyler - Toadies