A Freshman’s Reflections on University
Hi. I’m a first-year engineering student’s first semester, at Western University, fascinated by emerging tech and using it to solve large, complex problems. This started as a private way to collect my thoughts but evolved into a public, personal reflection. I hope it gives you value and perspective.
I’m not happy with my current life at university right now. I don’t like going to class. Though I’m able to understand and do the academic work and can score well on tests, I lack the motivation to want to do that.
And it’s not because I’m an unmotivated person. Or somebody who doesn’t want to do anything with their life. I think quite the opposite: I want to do extremely meaningful things with my life, I want to build tech products that millions and (one day) billions of people will use to significantly improve their lifestyles. I want to do that for emerging and developed economies. And yes, I want to make good money from doing that.
Spending the last year in TKS exposed me to a group of people that are extremely motivated to make things happen in fields that are truly important to humanity. And even though I love all my friends there, TKS exposed me to a type of group of people. The kind that, I think, is hard to find in university.
I didn’t get accepted to engineering at UWaterloo (which was my first choice). I really wanted to go there because my good friends were going there. I really really wanted to go there because the startup culture is the most thriving out of any other post-secondary environment.
At Western, the culture of students is to study, go to class, eat drink party, and repeat. And yeah, I thought I loved parties, and I went to a few over my first few months, but parties, as I know it, are fun dancing and food with your closest friends having a good time, and then going to get ice cream very over-dressed at 10 pm at night. Not trying to get drunk and do stupid things. Nevertheless, all my peers are smart, aspired for good grades and did well in class. They all are pretty good box-checkers.
I went to the University of Waterloo for the first time since school started for a hackathon over a weekend. But more than that, I went to visit friends. Even more than that, secretly, I wanted to see what it was like, and decide if I truly missed out on something, which for a long time, I thought I did; and so I was expecting to confirm a fear to myself during the visit.
Turns out, I truly don’t feel UWaterloo is a better environment to be in; with a few exceptions. First, the most pleasure and happiness I felt was with my three main friends I went to visit at UWaterloo. They’re guys I’ve known for 4 years now, and yes I’m very close with them. Which, in all fairness, isn’t comparable to my experience at Western because I haven’t invested a similar amount of time in relationships with friends to assess which is better.
I thought UWaterloo would be this bustling entrepreneurial, ambitious environment. And in some places I could very clearly see that: like when I spoke with founders from Velocity, UWaterloo’s in-house accelerator. Those people were smart and were leading ventures.
But, for all the hackathon, and the limited people I interacted with on-campus across various programs (albeit, all very smart), seemed to be very ambitious box-checkers.
At Western, people were smart and only did the minimum to get a sufficient grade. People aimed for ~80s. Nobody gave up prematurely.
At Waterloo, people seemed to want to excel and ace classes they were in.
Both groups of people, however, we're checking boxes of tasks they were supplied with. At Waterloo (with my sample population being hackathon competitors), the culture was to go above and beyond, and if you didn’t do that you were less than average. People excelled because they have to. Sure they had a habit to, but that was also (arguably) formed from schools provided expectations of enriched education programs (likes of AP, IB, IBT, etc).
At Western, it wasn’t common to give it 150%, and people settled with a great effort, which resulted in them in grades that will do them well in their careers: as in, both university students’ grades would get them great jobs, graduate program admissions and a sense of accomplishment (arguably artificial).
Neither group of people were interested in what I’m interested in. Which, for lack of a better term, is founding, growing and leading tech startups working on products that are truly meaningful to humankind, with the potential to impact billions.
Some will say that’s a very particular accomplishment to fancy and very few do that. But I would respond, saying, it’s not the fact that they’re interested in startups that make them great people to be work with and be friends with (and attract me), but it’s the fact that when they are working on a startup, it’s because they want to.
Then if a person is creating their own TV show, writing a book or making various forms of art, it doesn’t matter to me. What they are doing, shares the same trait of doing it because they want to. And if their passion projects make up a large part of who they are and what they want to do, then so be it: the reasoning behind it is the same though. They do it because they want to and because they want to make an impact on others; their passion projects are their mediums of choice.
Everyone in university is there because they need to be. Some will say they want to be here, but I would argue that they only have a superficial understanding of their lives and what they need to get to their destination. Hell, I’d even say some people have superficial understandings of their destinations, as a whole.
For example, ambitious box-checkers, available in abundance at both schools, would aspire to be software engineers or investment bankers (this is the average ‘high-end’ goal at Waterloo and Western I’ve seen students associate with).
The only thing I think I’m missing at Waterloo is the greater abundance of startup folks; in comparison, Western has a much smaller community.
None have any idea what either of their career goals entails: like hat life will be like spending 40 years in those positions? And don’t get me wrong, I know just as little as the average person (no one has any tangible experience), but I understand that I don’t understand certain things, and I’m at peace with that. There’s nothing I can do right this second to help make up my mind (granted, as one rises in their year of study in university, their experience and therefore, their understanding increases, but let’s talk about early-year post-secondary students).
My three friends at Waterloo, from my experience learning and laughing with them over the years, seem like people interested in taking the risk in working on ambitious and ‘crazy’ passion projects.
I love hanging out with them because they’re my friends, but I love working with my friends because they entertain and fantasize with me, about my crazy ideas and ‘will to work’ on something that beautifully solves a hard problem.
These terms: “ambition”, “drive”, “hard problems”, every time I say them, seem like buzz words. But I can’t stress how much I transparently mean what I say when I use them.
So no, I’m not missing out on anything at Waterloo. And it’s just me, at Western, thinking things don’t feel right.
I want to be apart of a group of people where the culture is to do things that matter. And to be around those who are genuinely really interested in spending their non-sleeping lives working on solving hard problems.
My friends entertained that in high school, as did my parents and some teachers. Not to mention, I had the TKS environment around me for all of my final year, and some interactions in my third year (of high school).
In TKS, a term used quite heavily is ‘unicorn people’. And it’s an effective name to this otherwise unnamed vibe of students who do exactly as I describe: want to work with tech to solve hard problems that will impact billions in the world for their whole life.
When I moved into university, of course, I try to keep with the habits that I had built from learning and becoming a unicorn person (something still in progress).
But I stopped frequently being around the people that entertained my mindset and empathized with me: my teachers, parents, those few friends, TKS.
It’s like someone took the boat out from under me and I’m getting tired from swimming and keeping myself afloat, reaching for any piece of floating that provides an environment for me to keep cultivating projects, crazy ideas, and any progress of me one day building great products that many people will use to change their life.
I’ve been searching for an environment for people like me; my kind of mentality and aspiration. I spent many hours with so many of them last year, they have to exist to some degree: accelerator and entrepreneurship programs, student venture capital communities, and the likes. So far my experience has been disappointing; most people I’ve run into only seem to simulate and fake their want to have the unicorn person mentality and attitude.
But I’m an optimistic person, there have to be people I haven’t met yet here at my university that are similar to me in a goal-sense, I just need to find more efficient ways of weeding those people out and meeting them.
I don’t love university right now, but I’m speaking very soon relative to the amount of experience I’ve had with it. I need to fix my environment, and right now I’ll have to artificially generate the kind of attitude I want to be surrounded by.
That being said, I’m the first to recognize the great things I’m lucky to have and show gratitude for it: my parents, mentors, experiences I’ve had, and a non-toxic educational environment, to name a few. I also realized that I’m so lucky to have the friends I have.
Smart people — with great perspectives I trust and respect — that I’ve grown close with. I can imagine there being people in the world without a great friends’ support system, and I’m the first to acknowledge how lucky I’ve been having great friendships with the people that I have known. Not to mention, many of them I share and bounce ideas off of, creating a great, direct, personal feedback loop.
I heard this from someone very smart, and feel obligated to pass on the message: For any incoming or just-entered university students, everyone says it’ll be the best time of your life. And for many people, it will be. But if it’s not, it’s not your fault. Whether or not everything will end up all right in the future, I’ll let you know when I graduate in a few years. 😉
Cheers. Thanks for reading.
Swarit
