Don’t Let Your Schooling Get in the Way of Your Education

First year explorers of the engineering faculty at Waterloo: Welcome!

My name is Rob, and I’m now starting 4A Environmental Engineering. I’m currently writing this article from Kumasi, Ghana, where I’ve been working this summer for the tech startup/social venture votomobile.org, a co-op placement coordinated through Engineers Without Borders (EWB) Canada. I won’t spend too much of this space advertising EWB, but I’ll encourage you to check out our information booths that will be around this week, our first General Meeting which we’ll have posters for as well as try to advertise in your classes, or stop by our office in the Student Design Centre in E5 Room 2000.

If you’ve ever seen the movie version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, you’ll recall the play-dough machine school/factory scene during Another Brick in the Wall Pt. II/Happiest Days of Our Lives. Although Waterloo isn’t exactly like this, and I can name off a lot of really great profs I’ve had who are into learning, in a lot of ways our education system does a better job of preparing you for a pretty conventional, establishment job than encouraging you to do something truly original. Some students in Quebec got pretty upset about this last summer (I happened to run into the march on the way home from a bike polo tournament, and it was incredible: parents with babies, old people, people in wheelchairs marching, people waving flags and cheering them on from their balconies, ah, solidarity!)

The point is, you’re young, you have your whole lives ahead of you, and a great jumping point to make basically anything happen at Waterloo. This town is in the top 20 in the world for startups according to the Startup Genome’s Startup Ecosystem Report 2012, has a great art scene, awesome nature closeby, packed full of energetic and optimistic young folks like yourself. Whether engineering is the place you want to do something incredible, or you’re into art, or politics, or whatever, there are opportunities and supportive communities all around you. It can be easy to forget when you’re on you 53rd consecutive hour of wakefulness under a crust of Doritos dust and your own nervous sweat, but accomplishing something remarkable should be what it’s all about. As my cool uncle Greg, puts it: Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education! (I’m sure he ripped this off from somewhere, which is not okay. Note Policy 71 well, first years!)

Try to think of someone you really admire for a minute. Now ask yourself, did they get there by avoiding conflict and doing what other people told them? No! They had some spark of craziness which they were able to carry through all the normative effects of society to forge something that improved people’s lives, gave people hope, and lit a corner of human possibility for us to peer into. Did Nikola Tesla work hard to get on the dean’s list, get the Queen Elizabeth II scholarship, and always get enough sleep? Did Martin Luther King, Jr. tiptoe around politicians? Did Occupy Wall Street pack up because people didn’t get what they were all about? Your officially required and institutionally recognized accomplishments are nice, but probably won’t make you feel like yourself or spur you on to do something truly innovative.

As someone passionate about learning about the systems we’ve created to allocate productive resources and political power, I’m passionate about spending a lot of time with EWB working on that, but I know it’s not for everyone. In whatever way you find, I would urge you to challenge yourself to think beyond the classroom in your years here, do something that scares you, do something you think is maybe just possible, do something you’re bad at, do something that makes you feel like yourself, and do something that contributes to the sustainability of humans as a creative community that accomplishes amazing things. Have a great first term, and keep the dream alive!