blog. nickxie.ca

This Was University

Stories, thoughts, and learnings from my time in university. A memoir of sorts.

11 Jun 2022

Preface:

Having recently graduated from university, I’ve undoubtedly been reflecting on my experience as a whole. I’ve always subscribed to the idea that real life is much more than a series of connected events but that between the mundanity and routine of the everyday, interesting stories happen. So far in my life, nothing has quite captured this life philosophy as well as my past five years as an undergraduate student.

I don’t think I’m deluded enough to think that my individual experience was all that extraordinary to captivate someone to read this pseudo journal. The primary audience for this is honestly myself. The ability to sincerely capture this period in my life with the profundity I found in it is temporal, it will fade with my memories and as such, I feel this sort of urgency to bottle it up before it’s gone. That being said, I do think that the follow up to this, Crossroads, may relate to a wider audience and so, this post exists publicly partly to provide the background context for it.

To give some overhead info, I went to the University of Waterloo and majored in Computer Science and minored in Music. Waterloo is a medium-sized city of about 115k population and with two universities and a college down the road from each other, it is distinctly a student town. Waterloo seamlessly transitions into the larger city of Kitchener (~250k population) and together, they form the “KW” region.

A huge reason why I chose to go to UW (University of Waterloo) is because of its infamous co-op program. The co-op program consists of six work terms (“term” = four months) interspersed with my eight academic semesters. The school terms are named by halves of each year, (i.e. 3B = second half of third academic year or 6th overall academic semester). The co-op and school terms can alternate in a variety of sequences but the exact sequence I did was as follows:

Chapters

Afterword:

The process of writing this memoir of sorts is a story in itself. It originally started in 3A and was quickly forgotten until the end of 2020 when my graduation suddenly came into sight. From there, life got busy and I lost the emotional focus needed to write with the sincerity that I wanted to give. Memories and thoughts are a funny thing to capture so whenever one popped into my head, I jotted it into the ever growing draft document to be used later when I was ready. Like sifting through a box of old newspaper entries, the process of finally “gluing” everything together was an emotional process. Finishing each section felt like finalizing that semester and period of time into the past, its hanging thread into my present life at last being closed off after all these years.

This project started as a way for me to document this transformative period in life and was initially focused on being a comprehensive record of things that happened. I’ve since come to see memory as a type of selective narrative, we choose to remember the things that fit into our self idea of who we are. Compiled from the writings and chosen memories of my varying previous iterations throughout the years, in a sense, this project has unknowingly become a bit of a self portrait.

Since moving and starting a new life in a new city, my time in Waterloo sometimes feels very away but I still have moments that pull me back. In the back of my desk drawer, I’ll find a stack of Waterloo parking passes accumulated over the years, a physical reminder that it wasn’t all just a dream. Other times, it isn’t a familiar thing or activity but a feeling that harkens back to these years. Although this particular story is over, its profound impact on my life lives on, a gift I cherish as I navigate through whatever comes next in life.

Nick Xie is a 20-something based around Ontario, Canada who writes to make sense of the internal deliberations that arise as he navigates life.