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March 5, 2003
From Mayfield to Microsoft: My University Career in a Nutshell
This is a brief summary of my experience attending the University Of Waterloo from September 1997 to December 2002. Sure there are a few things to bitch about... ok, a lot of things, but I had some good times too. I don't expect this account to be a guide for new students, or a nostalgic trip down memory lane for alumni, it's just the story of what one student went though to get a piece of paper with the word "Degree" on it.
September 1997: 1A
The week before classes start in September is called Frosh Week. New students (called Frosh) come to the university and are put into groups based on their area of study. From there they are further divided into teams and perform stupid activities and compete against each other. My team was called Fishbone, and I managed to keep in touch with most of them over my 5 years at Waterloo.
I was living at home in Caledon and commuting to school every day with my girlfriend Angela. Caledon is an hour's drive north-east of Waterloo, and I had 8:30am classes across the board. Needless to say, my performance at school suffered, since I was averaging 5 hours of sleep a night (yes, I realize that many frosh in residence get about that much sleep, but at least they got to party).
I have to admit, coming into university I thought I was some pretty hot shit. I kicked ass in my high school computer science classes and always had good marks. But 1A kicked my ass. I realized that my high school's computer science class didn't adequately prepare me for university CS. For example, at Mayfield, they taught us "C++", but I had no idea what classes or pointers were. This made for a difficult first term.
Waterloo has an excellent Co-op program, and students in Honours Computer Science (like me) were given the opportunity to have 6 co-op terms with whatever employer(s) would hire them. Remember, this was 1997, just before the dot-com bust, so Math majors had a 97% placement rate. I got a job offer from Corel as QA, and I was thrilled.
I didn't get great marks that term, but I managed to avoid academic probation. Some members of Fishbone weren't so lucky, and didn't come back for another term. I vowed to do better next term, and set off to Ottawa.
January 1998: Co-op 1
I moved into my apartment in Ottawa with my boyhood friend Ian, who, although not in school, decided to come up and live with me anyway. This was both of our first experience living on our own, so we made the most of it by staying up late and eating junk food (I put on 15 pounds in those 4 months).
We lived within walking distance of Corel, which was convenient since neither of us had cars. My first week at work I was put on the Asian language team as a tester. I found this odd since I couldn't speak or read any Asian language. I was testing Chinese and Japanese versions of Draw, on a team full of native Asian-language speakers. I didn't realize it at the time, but this was foreshadowing a future co-op job.
A few days later, Ottawa was hit by a huge ice storm, and the city was put in an official state of emergency. Work was cancelled for the rest of the week. Ian and I spent the time exploring the town in its ice-encrusted state.
The next week at work my boss decided it would be best if I switched teams. Apparently there was a Chinese co-op student who could read and write Chinese, who working on another team. We switched, and I became the HTML and Java tester for Corel Ventura 8.
I got an excellent evaluation for my work there, and was invited back in the fall.
May 1998: 1B
Back to school. This time I moved in with Ang, her friend and her friend's boyfriend in a townhouse in Waterloo. This was the first time I had classes in the summer, and I can't say I liked it much. At least campus wasn't too crowded. I did much better marks-wise this term, but it was a struggle. I took a French class, in an effort to restore my once-fluency. I had this Belgian woman as a prof, and she never passed up an opportunity to explain how her French was superior to Canadian French. She even went so far as to claim Belgian French was the "true" French, even truer than France's. Needless to say, I didn't have much respect for her, and she didn't care much for me, either.
Things got a little tense at home too: Ang and I weren't getting along with the couple we were living with, between the girl's whining and the guy's addiction to pornography. Yes, I said pornography. I found boxes of video tapes lying around the house. It felt like we were living at Pete's Porno Warehouse. He even went so far as to ask Ang to use her computer to surf for porn.
At the end of the summer, Ang found a new place, and I went back to Ottawa.
September 1998: Co-op 2
The Ventura team dissolved after version 8, so I was moved onto the Consumer Applications team, where I was QA for Corel Print House (a now discontinued product). I lived in the same building as before, but this time on the third floor with two roommates, Ryan, who also worked at Corel, and Mike, a friend of Ryan's.
Mike didn't know how to cook, and had little interest in learning. He was perfectly content with eating TV dinners all term, so Ryan and I proposed to cook for him if he washed dishes. He agreed, and made good on his end. But like any rational human being, doing dishes everyday for 4 months became tiresome, so Mike's solution: buy more dishes. By the time we moved out, we must have had two dozen plates and glasses for the three of us.
I got another excellent evaluation at work, and an interview to return as a developer. They liked me, so in May I would return to the same team, only wearing a different hat. Now I started to become concerned with my decision. By staying with the same company (a company that seemed perpetually in the red), I may be hurting my chances to get hired somewhere should something happen to Corel. Then again, with my 8 month experience in QA, I didn't feel I could make it anywhere else. So I agreed to come back.
January 1999: 2A
I moved in with Ang and 5 of her friends into what I like to call The House Full Of Girls. There was a mix-up with the room situation, and it turned out that one of the girls who was supposed to leave that term didn't, so I roomed with Ang. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that as a house, the girls decided to charge me equal rent all the same. Let that be a lesson to subletters who don't feel the need to write out a contract. I set up my desk and computer in one of the basement rooms colourfully referred to as "The Dungeon". It had everything but the shackles on the walls.
Living there proved interesting. One of the girls started dating an older man, who no one else liked. She told the rest of us not to mention him to her parents, in case they called. We didn't like being told to lie for her, and luckily the situation never arose. Regardless, her friendship with the other girls suffered and she informed us she wouldn't be coming back for another term.
School treated me to the worst professor I have ever had. The class was Linear Algebra 2. The professor was 10 to 15 minutes late everyday. He spoke so quietly that he needed a microphone, which took an additional 10 minutes to set up. You knew he got it working when his familiar "Can you hear me in the back?" echoed through the mostly-empty lecture hall. At the end of the last lecture he informed us that he did not have time this term to cover the final unit, but assured us it would still be on the final exam.
One of my worst marks ever was earned in that class.
May 1999: Co-op 3
Back to Corel, only this time I was a software developer for Corel Print House. Ian said he would come with me again, so I rented out the same apartment we had in 1998. He backed out at the last minute, so I was on my own (but he did pay part of the rent for the inconvenience).
At work, I was being eased into my new position very gently. Excruciatingly gently. My manager didn't trust my abilities at first (rightfully so), and denied me access to the product engine. So most of the work I did was to the UI and the Corel Co-op web page, known as SLACC, headed by Rafi.
About three quarters of the way through the term, my manager quit (he would be the first of many managers to jump off that sinking ship). Another developer was promoted to manager, and he had no problem giving me access to all the source code. When review time came, he ignored my previous 3 months work, claiming he could only judge me on the work he managed, so I ended up with a Satisfactory review. I wasn't too happy with that, so I asked for a chance to redeem myself. He agreed to hire me back for another term.
September 1999: 2B
I moved back into the HFOG, only this time I managed to get my own room on the main floor. Sure you had to go through the bathroom to get to it, but it was mine.
Courses were brutal this term. Introduction to Numerical Computation was the worst computer course I ever took. It's a course that's required for a degree in math, but isn't a prerequisite for anything, so many people leave it to their 4B term in the hopes that it will be phased out. The course was about spline interpolation, Fast Fourier Transforms, and a whole lot of other stuff I don't remember. Not many people understood that course, but lucky for us the prof gave us practice problems and gave an open book exam. The class brought their practice problem solutions to the exam, and were pleasantly surprised when we found most of the exam questions to be identical, or very similar, to the practice problems. I rode the bell curve to a very comfortable mark in that class.
I also took a film course: The Cinema of Science Fiction. You know you're in a bird course when you do a class presentation on The Planet of the Apes, and your final essay is comparing the slapstick comedy of Woody Allen's Sleeper with the dark tongue-in-cheekness of Stanley Kubrik's Dr. Strangelove.
January 2000: Co-op 4
Since I had signed a year-long lease at the HFOG, I had to sublet my room while I was gone. I subletted the room to a foreign-exchange student from China who signed his name "Geogre". Being from China, he didn't seem to respect women as authority figures, and when Angela asked him for his first month's rent, he refused to pay. Ang phoned me and I told her to have Geogre phone me as soon as he could. He never phoned, but apparently paid Angela in full once he heard I was angry with him. He never missed another payment, but I looked into eviction regulations just the same.
I ended up living in the same apartment that I had in September 1998 with my friend Brian and an engineering student, Matt. Like Mike before him, Matt didn't know how to cook, so we made a similar arrangement. He did dishes, and in return, Brian and I would cook something other than the case of Kraft Dinner Matt brought with him.
Corel, again. This time I was one of two co-op students on Corel Gallery. My previous manager had been promoted, so my direct supervisor was the only full-time developer working on the project. I was given a printout of a dialog and told to implement it. Ok, fine. The problem was, every week someone different would bring me a new printout, and I changed the design accordingly. I ended up covering my entire cubicle wall with these printouts.
In the end it didn't matter, since the project was cancelled. Too bad no one told the two co-op developers, who kept happily working away at it for another two weeks. I only found out it was cancelled by asking the lead QA why no bugs had been logged.
It was then I realized I didn't want to work at Corel anymore.
I got an excellent review, and with no regrets I told them I wouldn't be returning in four months, and wished them all luck. As far as I know, only one person I worked with at Corel is still there.
May 2000: 3A
Spring terms are usually the least busy term of the year. Most of our roommates in the HFOG were home for the summer, and didn't want the hassle of subletting, so most of the house was empty. We rented one room out to an architecture student, and Ang and I had the rest of the house to ourselves.
This was the first term since 1A that I went through the Co-op process again. I touched up my résumé and started applying. I got a few interviews, then, on a whim, Ryan and I applied to a year-long job in Japan for a company called AISoft, a subsidiary of Seiko-Epson. We were shocked when we both got interviews, and even more shocked by the interview questions:
- What did you do last weekend?
- What foods do you not like?
- What makes you angry?
The interview was topped off by a photo shoot, which I'm sure violates all sorts of Canadian employment laws.
Obviously we did ok in the interview, because we were both offered the job. About a week after accepting the offer, I got a letter form my academic advisor denying me permission to go. When I confronted him about it, he admitted to not having my file in front of him, and couldn't give me any reason why he denied me. After suffereing much embarassment (and after instilling much anger in me), he finally agreed to let me go.
We packed our bags decided to say konnichiwa to our future.
September 2000: Co-op 5, 6, 7
I said goodbye to Ryan as he left for Tokyo in September. Why wasn't I going? Because my visa, which had been couriered, didn't make it to my house. It went all the way from Matsumoto, Japan to Brampton, Canada, then they gave up and sent it back. By boat. The Japanese government refused to issue me a new visa until they received the old one, so I had nothing to do for a month and a half.
Fearing I would soon run out of money, I let my dad hook me up with a job at a meat packing company. There I hauled, cut and bagged various pork products until my visa arrived. On October 10, 2000 I arrived in Japan, ready to start my 10.5-month work term.
I kept a separate account of my adventures at Welcome to Matsumoto.
September 2001: 3B
I got back from Japan and moved into a two-bedroom apartment with Angela and our high-school friend Jen. It was difficult trying to readjust to Canadian lifestyle and especially difficult getting used to schoolwork again. Because I had the foresight to take a correspondence course in Japan, I only took four courses this term. I took three CS courses: Operating Systems, Algorithms and The Law of Information and a Japanese course. The Japanese course covered everything I already knew, so it presented little difficulty. Ryan and I teamed up for most CS assignments, since we were a term behind everyone else in our class. We pulled a few all-nighters worrying about memory management in our operating system, and I failed the Algorithms midterm spectacularly. But in the end, I did alright.
In December, in an attempt to procrastinate studying for exams, I used the 5 MB of web space Bell Sympatico gave me to start up a little website, then called Title Goes Here. From that little HTML acorn grew the mighty ranting oak you're reading now.
January 2002: 4A
Same living arrangements as 3B, and this marked my first eight-month academic marathon. Career Services sent me an unsolicited letter granting me permission to partake in another round of Co-op. This marked the first time the university administration did something nice for me (it wasn't quite altruistic of them; they were charging me $400 for the privilege).
In my absence the Co-op landscape had changed dramatically. Gone were the days of dot-com mass hiring, and profits-be-damned attitudes. Instead, employers sought the best and brightest students, experience be damned. Ryan and I figured we'd get more interviews than we knew what to do with, considering our vast experience compared to our peers. We were mistaken. I got only four interviews that term.
On a whim, I threw a résumé into the Microsoft bin. I didn't expect an interview, let alone a job there. Well I got the interview, and it went surprisingly well, so I accepted their offer.
On the school side of things, I took another three CS courses so my last term would be light. This was the last term the rest of our class was in school, so I bid my friends farewell after exams, and packed to go to Seattle.
May 2002: Co-op 8
After much complication, I got my passport and set up camp in Redmond, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. I had two roommates, Ted and Sam (not actual names), both Waterloo students. I got a ride in to work with Sam for the first few weeks, until he tried to rip me off.
Ted went to work early, and got home late, so I didn't see much of him, but he did leave plenty of evidence of him living there, including a bowl ground beef that after three months grew a new coat of fur and started growling at me every time I opened the fridge.
Work was challenging and exciting. I did plenty of activites, and even got to eat dinner with the big man himself, Bill Gates. At the end of my term, my boss told me that I did a good job, and that he wanted me back. I got on the plane to Toronto (via Chicago, of course) knowing that it wouldn't be the last time I would see rainy Washington state.
September 2002: 4B
I finally got to reap the benefits of taking three CS courses for two consecutive terms: I had one CS course and four electives. I furthered my foreign language skills by taking Japanese; tapped my creativity with a creative writing course; learned to design with Science, Technology and Values; and best of all, got to be lectured Economics by Larry Smith, perhaps the greatest lecturer of my university career.
I lived in a townhouse with Ryan, but not Angela, since she needed a year-long lease to complete her second bachelor's degree, and I would only need a place for four months.
I thoroughly enjoyed my last term at school. Partly because of the lighter workload, and partly because of the fact it was my last. I was stressed out about my Microsoft interview, however. I was flown down in November, and proceeded to bomb the interview. But all was not lost (obviously), they asked me back for another interview in January. That left me to study for my exams unencumbered by the thought of bombing another interview.
Exams came and went, and I packed up my stuff to move back to my parents' place to live until I started my career. The day I got back from my second Microsoft interview was the day I found out I successfully completed the requirements for my Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics in Honours Computer Science. It took just over five years, but I was finally done.
Epilogue
In January I went back to Redmond and came back with a job. I guess I can't be all that bitter about university, considering that without it, I would have never met the friends I did, never gone to Japan, never gotten a job at Microsoft, and most importantly, never gotten to do what I've wanted to do since I was a boy: get paid to play with computers all day.
So to Waterloo, I say thank you. It was a rough five years, and we may not have seen eye-to-eye on everything, but it was worth it, and I'm proud to have been one of your students.
And just in case you're planning to phone me to hit me up for a donation, let me save you the trouble: No.