COOP6 (September - December 2020)
The restless days of lockdown.
As the previous semester came to a close, I was confronted with the decision of where I was going to live in the fall. I had enjoyed my summer back home a lot, but if still fully remote, I wanted to move back to Waterloo to resume my university life there. However, the co-op I had for this semester had indicated their desire to return to the office as soon as provincial guidelines allowed for it. Since the office was not located near Waterloo, it made the most sense to not rent a place in Waterloo and remain in Guelph in the event that I would have to relocate suddenly for the co-op.
As the weather turned colder and COVID cases and restrictions started to spike back up, the positive “dangling carrot” from the summer was gone and I started to get frustrated with my stagnated life. By October, it became clear that COVID was not going anywhere anytime soon and that the co-op would remain entirely online; I totally could have moved back to Waterloo. Around that time, it was announced that the next semester (my final one) was going to be 100% online and that varsity competition would not be happening. As I received this news in my childhood bedroom in Guelph, it finally set in that my university experience as I had known it was over.
To further cement this, the looming cloud of life after graduation approached closer and I started to look and apply for full-time positions. There is much less excitement in job hunting for full-time positions compared to co-op. While it is almost never the case that there isn’t a “next” job, they are often much further away and decisions overall feel more definitive, there’s no “see ya next semester” to your friends going to different cities.
As an outlet for all these complex emotions, the cross country team was still able to hold practices with some restrictions during the fall and I made the drive to go to every practice. Attendance was tiny with the majority of people on the team not in Waterloo or surrounding areas but I still savoured these evenings, it wasn’t much, but enough. There were a few unofficial time trials and those are a few of the highlight days in an otherwise bleak semester. Like mentioned before, I think people are very adaptable and looking back, I don’t think I realized at the time how low spirited I really was. I’d look forward to grocery shopping just for the variety in my life. I didn’t even have the energy to be productive and work on some side hustle. I’d watch a lot of movies, try cooking new foods, and spend too much time reminiscing, a recurring bad habit.
The idea had existed in my head since sometime in third year but I also started looking into grad school. There were a number of factors that convinced me it was something worth pursuing.
The first was that based on my co-op progression, I had not reached the career calibre I envisioned for myself and felt that it was quicker and easier to make those jumps before entering the full-time market (I still believe this, ex. getting a Google internship and converting to full-time is more attainable than starting full-time at a no name company and cold applying to Google afterwards).
The second reason was that the job market was in a downturn and the time in grad school could potentially allow me to “wait out the storm”.
The third and probably the most significant was that I just didn’t feel like I was ready to move on from this phase of life. It probably sounds silly to many and I’m not sure if it was elevated from COVID but simply put, it was hard for me to not see starting a fulltime job as an abrupt end to many personal journeys that I felt were unfinished. That might sound dramatic, after all, 9-5 jobs were not foreign to me with co-op, why couldn’t these personal developments continue out of school? I find it difficult to fully express, it’s not just a matter of time commitments, it’s something more nuanced. The companion read, Crossroads, tries to fully describe this special feeling that being young and in school has.
After submitting my applications to grad schools, I slowed down on applying to jobs and started to visualize the next few years in grad school. That lasted until by some miraculous event, I managed to land a job at a Big N company, something I thought was a long shot at best. I also got into my #1 pick grad school in Switzerland and suddenly I was faced with a very difficult decision, a fortunate problem to have but difficult nonetheless.
It wasn’t hard to come up with reasons why I should choose grad school. Some of my original reasons for grad school (i.e. helping me to get that dream job) clearly no longer applied but the persistent feeling that my student journey was unfinished continued to ring loudly in my head. I was also only 22 and in an extremely fortunate position where the financial pressure to immediately start making money wasn’t there yet. With the rest of my life ahead of me available for work, I felt that in the grand scheme of life, two fewer years of working in return for an experience that is likely to have significant lifelong impact was very worth it. I felt like work would always be there for me whereas this opportunity is one I would be unlikely to revisit if I were to turn it down now.
On the other hand, the “sensible” side in me thought of reasons to take the job. I had struggled for my entire undergrad to crack into Big N just as an intern, now that there’s a full-time offer on the table, how could I decline it. Though I was able to get the job now, I’d come to learn that a lot of interviewing has a degree of luck to it and I wasn’t convinced that it’d necessarily be there for me if I were to try again in a few years, an enormous regret if that were to happen. I also recognized the compounding effects of early success, and that starting my career here at such a young age set me up for a good future.
I also started to question myself, “what I’m chasing a phantom”. When I told myself I wasn’t done with the “university experience”, I actually meant something much more particular than that sounds. I romanticize undergrad as a congregation of eager young people grappling independence, having chance encounters, rapidly going through personal quests and developments, discovering the world, and having fun along the way. Not only is grad school much closer to a job than that, but something that defines that charming lens of university is precisely in its fleetingness. Coming of age means little if one is never willing to actually progress forward.
Time marches on and I was beginning to make peace with the fact that not feeling “finished” is ultimately part of my personal university saga. It’s tempting to fantasize about how things could have gone differently or what could have been if so and so happened, but much like how the negative space in a painting frames it, these unfulfilled branches define a journey’s path.
Under a more optimistic perspective, the idea of what could have been will almost always be more alluring than any realized outcome. Sometimes, it’s more poetic to avoid conclusive endings, rather leave doors slightly ajar, letting their motifs continue to faintly ring through the cracks. I’ve come to appreciate this philosophy in many things in life, what we often value most is not in endings but in the anticipation of one.
Still, I remained extremely undecided and with a few days left in the year and a shaky hand, I opened my computer and accepted the job offer.
Scattered memories:
- Trying to learn piano
- Hamilton Bayfront 5k time trial days
- Evening bike rides
- Weekly cooking challenges
- The Minecraft server saga
Songs:
- Black Water - Reuben And The Dark
- ily (i love you baby) - Surf Mesee ft. Emilee
- When I’m Small - phantomgram
- Real Long Time - White Reaper
- Hero - Weezer
- Infinitesimal - Mother Mother
- Say So - Doja Cat