What an amazing year! But so hectic! Here are my ups and downs from Toronto → Waterloo → Montreal.

In Fall, I interned at Shopify Montreal. I was back home! Even though I faced less stress than before, I still felt pretty bad because I was recovering from depression. My mood was like a roller coaster: I would feel great at certain moments, but I can start feeling like shit right after. Fortunately, I did a lot of reflection and reevaluated my values and priorities in life which guided me towards the path of recovery. I think that I finally came out of depression by end November. It took so long! Here were some of my struggles.

📉Negative 📉

Lifestyle struggle

I was finally back home after such a long time, so initially, I was really happy. However, I soon realized that living at home comes with many constraints that I was no longer used to (e.g. eating dinner at a fixed time, sleeping before 3 AM 😅). My university lifestyle was too different, so it took me a while to adapt.

FOMO struggle

Then, I struggled with juggling between work, family, friends, and personal development. I chose to intern in Montreal on purpose to spend more time with my family so I would prioritize family events. However, I didn’t like feeling left out so I would still go hang out with my friends. Maybe it’s because I didn’t balance it well, but at the end of the term, my friends felt that I always reject their invitation while my family thought that I am never home. To make my life easier, I decided to not work in Montreal again in the near future 😂.

Interview struggle

Another issue I faced was interviewing. Once again, it was interview season for summer internships and the timing is just so bad. I just started a new internship, was getting used to my new environment, and then 💣💥 interviews again. It started very bad because I was not ready for interviews: I went on a trip to Europe before starting my internship 😛 and didn’t study at all 😬. Fortunately, I had on average one interview per week which is way better than last semester since I had time to recover between interviews.

Eating struggle

In the middle of the semester, I started to feel physically repulsed to eat food that I didn’t enjoy. I developed an eating disorder. I would often say “This food tastes bad” and it actually meant I wanted to throw up because of it. I still don’t know why it happened, but it happened way too often because I was a picky eater … This is such bad timing because I had free food at work and I couldn’t enjoy it at all. Also, I knew I was going to Singapore for an exchange next term and the food there is known to be very good. I became even more stressed because I absolutely wanted to feel better.

Learning struggle

I noticed that I was facing a wall with interviews. The root cause was simple: I knew I had trouble with some concepts, but I didn’t take the time to learn them well (e.g. graph traversal). Rather than trying to digest a concept, I would simply learn it for the short term. This strategy works well initially, but at a certain point, I just didn’t have enough time to relearn all the concepts before each interview. This was not helpful for my growth so I decided to slow down my pace to learn well. Finally, I don’t have to review how to reverse a string before every interview 😂.

This also helped me optimize my strategy for interviews: I learned that I don’t remember details well, but I can easily recall general ideas. So to make everything easier, I simply switch to a more intuitive language for interviews (from C++ to Python) and it actually worked so well. I need to thank an engineer at Google for this tip! My success rate dramatically improved after that.

Effort Struggle

The last struggle I had is that I had trouble trying my best for things. I think the cause is that I didn’t like being hurt because of failure; therefore, I will often not care so much on purpose so that I don’t get hurt if I fail. E.g. I would not try hard for interview/ hackathons/ scholarship and not care that much when I get rejected. However, by not caring, I put less effort into my tasks which lead to more negative results. After reading a book, I noticed my mentality and I decided to change.

I think it was the start of my recovery journey from depression. I started to feel way better and put more effort into all my actions. Of course, I did fail after trying hard. E.g. I failed an interview for a job that I really wanted and that threw me off. That was such a huge setback because I was actually starting to feel way better. I was back to being depressed for a week or so, but fortunately, I recovered quickly after changing my ideas (I went traveling 😊). My effort did lead to results: I passed my next interview!

📈Positive 📈

Fall was a period of reflection, but I still had a lot of fun like usual. I enjoyed time with my family, hung out with new and old friends, went to intern events, hiked, bouldered, skated, and skied!!! (I was so surprised by my okay skiing skills).

I had a great team at Shopify and really enjoyed the culture. My mentor pushed me to do better and encouraged me to get feedback which is an advice that I still apply all the time.

I kept going to hackathons and traveling: I went to Ottawa, Boston, New Haven (Yale University), and Toronto. I even met many celebrities such as Malala and Yoshua Benjio!

Next

Even with all the struggles, I think this semester was very crucial for my personal growth. The only thing I regret is that I didn’t learn enough at work and didn’t meet enough people even though I was giving such a good opportunity.

Next term, I am going on an exchange semester at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in Singapore. I think my challenge will be to juggle between fun and study: I chose NUS for those two reasons, but they are kinda mutually exclusive 😅. There is only so much time in a day and I won’t be able to do both. We will see how it goes.

Note: This article was published a year after I wrote it.

What an amazing year! But so hectic! Here are my ups and downs from Toronto → Waterloo → Montreal.

While the first few months of 2018 were fun, the following four months were more … depressing 😢. Whaaat??? How did that happen?

Everything was fine at the beginning of the term. Actually, I had to fill out a mental health form for my school with questions such as “ Did you have negative thoughts the last few days” and I literally thought to myself “Lol, that’ll never happen to me”. Little did I know that a week later, I would answer completely differently.

This term, I decided to take five important courses for my degree and I was determined to do well. I don’t even care about grades that much: I just want to do well because I know those courses would be useful in my future. I knew that 5 cs/math courses were a lot of work so I decided to sacrifice my social life and quit all the clubs that I was involved in. I actually told my friend that “I am going to have no life this semester, but I am gonna do well in my classes”. In the end, I did do really well for my courses 🙂. But holy sh*t, it was such a bad idea for my mental health 🤦‍♀️.

On top of my study, I also had interviews for my internship the term after. I am so bad at handling interview stress. Let’s say my interview is at 4 pm that day. I would sleep badly the night before, because of stress. Then I would be very distracted and not listen in class, because of stress. I only feel relieved during/after my interview. But the whole day would be wasted. I didn’t do anything except being stressed. Now that I think about it, the stress mostly came from the fact that I was underprepared: I did not know how to some questions (e.g. graph traversal, bitwise operation questions) and every time they come up, I would feel very disappointed in myself. I actually noticed this problem, but I didn’t tackle it at that time which was a mistake. This only got better next semester when I changed my learning strategy.

Nevertheless, it was still manageable at the beginning. Things started to go bad during midterms time. Who thought it was a good idea to have interviews during midterms season? I know that probably is the time that fits interviewer schedule the most so I understand why it is like that. But holy sh*t, that was so bad. And I think that situation is common to many students at University of Waterloo. I was seriously depressed. I don’t remember the details, but I just know that my morale was very low. Most of the time, I was feeling bad about myself, was sleep deprived, was hungry but did not want to eat, was having very negative thoughts…

Eventually, interviews stopped and midterms ended. I thought I would start being normal again right away, but no. I was definitely feeling better, but I was still super depressed. The fact that I was indoors all day in a depressing building (MC for those who are wondering) and didn’t get any sunlight didn’t help. Another factor was the very tech focused culture in Waterloo. I would just talk about school/interviews all the time. I wouldn’t say it’s toxic but it definitely didn’t help me. I think I only officially got out of depression in November … it took so long.

Although I was quite sad most of the time, many good things also happened! I learned a lot in school and did very well. We had a triple surprise birthday party orchestrated by masterminds! There were also a lot of cooking events (Malaysian food is so good!). I did many fun activities such as cherry blossom + biking in Toronto, edge walk on the CN tower, VR arcade, etc. My amazing friends helped a lot!

TL;DR Waterloo was quite depressing 😢

What an amazing year! But so hectic! Here are my ups and downs from Toronto → Waterloo → Montreal.

I started my year in Toronto and spent four months there as part of an internship. My experience in Toronto can be summarized in one word: fun. This was literally the best time of my life. I was trying something new almost every day, traveled a lot, met amazing people, and had lots of fun!

Internship

I spent four months in Toronto interning as a software developer at Accedo, a video company. I was making TV apps! Such a dream job! I wanted to work on video media in a small office and I got exactly that. Towards the end, I was the sole developer on the new version of a very popular TV app!

Exploring

My office was located in the heart of downtown and that was sooooo fun! Every day after work, I was out exploring with other interns. Not only did we do activities such as skating, escape room, movies, and archery tag (my first time!), but we also visited many other tech companies by attending meetups or events on Eventbrite. We were also just next to a movie theater and we would go to movie premieres. We were at the Canadian Premiere Of Avengers Infinity War! It was such an amazing experience. I love my coworkers!

Outside of work, I was going around Toronto visiting museums, parks, gardens, libraries, or just walking around nice neighborhoods. I also attended many concerts, watched a musical for the first time (Come From Away is awesome!), and even tried watching opera! There are so much to do in Toronto, I can never get bored.

Hackathons

This semester was very intense in terms of participating in hackathons. I was at a tech competition/conference every two weeks. Don’t worry, I usually get my 8 hours of sleep even at hackathons and I never forget to have fun. It was very tiring but 100% worth it. I met very important people, won some prizes, and traveled everywhere!

List of tech events: StarCon, UofTHacks, Deltahacks, McHacks, my company’s internal hackathon, uOttahack, HacktheValley, HackPrinceton, Google games, and Equithon.

TL;DR Toronto was very fun.

Special thanks to SL: sorry for dragging you to so many events 😂