Miscellaneous

What now? Let’s reframe

I’ve heard this a couple times in the halls.

“I failed that PHYS115 Midterm, it’s all over…how am I going to be a Chemical Engineer now?!”

Firstly, let us put things into perspective. Suppose you really bombed a midterm and got a measly 20% on it. Let’s assume that after four years and eight terms you graduate with a 70% average. Now, by the math of ECE’s Professor Wong (who wrote a book on Surviving First Year, which I highly recommend you check out), the final impact of this disastrous midterm on your overall average is 0.37%. The immediate impact of a bad midterm on your current term is only 2%.  Understand that it’s a long road ahead, and a lot of things will change until then.

Also, I want to point out that whatever craziness and panic that strangled your mind last week has probably passed by now. (If not, it will.) You’re still at a great school, you still have your family at home. Frankly, aside from having a little more motivation to study, nothing major has changed outside your dramatic thoughts. This is called the focusing illusion: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.” said Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow.

What do you think affects your career more, your first co-op job or your first set of midterms?

On the path of being a full-fledged engineer one day, schooling is only the first step. The second step, real work experience and practical learning, begins over the period of six separate four-month work terms. For the moment, your current progress on the first step does not affect the second. (Employers do not see your marks if you are applying this term!) You may be surprised to find very little correlation, if any, between academics and co-op success. Next term, even though your transcript will be included, most employers will take marks into very little consideration in comparison to your work history or what’s actually on your resume.

The big picture is, how well you do in school has very little impact on where you find co-ops, and as long as you graduate, is not indicative of your engineering future.

Now, if Jobmine hasn’t panned out the way you had hoped, let us use the power of reframing.

Reframe

All the facts and circumstances of day to day life have no inherent meaning. You assign them meaning based on your own interpretations of the event. A failed midterm could be considered a personal disaster or an early (and rather harmless in the long term) wakeup call for improvement. Being rejected can be completely demoralizing, or a valuable taste of the job market and an opportunity to seek other arrangements. We rarely remember to consider these circumstances from another perspective, but the truth is that interpreting the same facts in another, more positive, way can lead to growth rather than despair. In psychology, they call this reframing.

“To reframe means to change the conceptual and/or emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a situation is experienced and to place it in another frame which fits the ‘facts’ of the same concrete situation equally well or even better, and thereby changing its entire meaning.

– Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch – “The Gentle Art of Reframing”

Students come to this university for co-op, not Jobmine. Co-op means that you will not be in school next term, but rather available to work for any company. Arranging your own job might be better than a one page form online and an email from CECA. Do you have family or distant friends who are engineers? Chances are that you do. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to send them your resume and be the only applicant in a position?

Frankly, after you submit that application on Jobmine, very little is left in your control, and putting so much energy in watching so many applications turn into rejections is just plain demoralizing. A person who reframes would take that as a sign to tackle something that they can control, looking for other employment opportunities on their own. Even if they don’t find anything, they’ll feel a lot better from the process.

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