I remember when I was accepted to Waterloo, I couldn’t believe it! It was a Friday, I just did poorly on a bio test, and wasn’t feeling too good, when I checked my email and saw the letter. I thought it was spam or fake, but given that I’m here, evidently not. At first, I was euphoric. Everyone who wants to be in a good engineering program has heard of Waterloo, and it’s amazing if you get accepted. However, I’d imagine many of us heard the same thing about Waterloo: Waterloo is full of the brightest and best, and there’s no way I’d keep up. As I thought about it over the summer, I was nervous.
I heard the people were all very competitive and hostile to each other. To quote a friend in CS: “They’ll chew you up and spit you out”. I heard about how they rank all the engineering students by marks, so you can figure out exactly what position you are in. While apparently, they do rank students, everyone is extraordinarily kind. If you have a question you can just ask an upper year and they’ll help you out. While the course work may be challenging, the people are an absolute delight.
As for school, while the material can be challenging, it’s by no means impossible. With all sorts of practice work available, and many friendly professors, nothing in the schoolwork has been impossible, by any means. While it’s true there was more work than in high school, if you manage your time, there’s still time to relax, just a bit later in the day. On top of that, the work is all courses I knew in advance and find interesting. Something people neglected to mention is that if you pay attention class, you can spend less time studying, since you already have a more solid grasp of the material.
One unfortunate downside is that engineering demands an awful lot of time, and there’s never enough time to do everything you want. Whether there’s a ferris wheel or free cotton candy, it leaves difficult decisions about what to do with your little free time. There’s never a better time to get involved with so much stuff than university, but school and co-op tend to come first. Now to see if those sacrifices pay off on midterms.
Leave a Reply