Reflections from a term in Canada
on moving
I’m looking for Summer ‘26 internships in AI / ML / general SWE! My portfolio can be found here.
Pace
Something that I didn’t quite expect coming into Waterloo and something that has been on my mind for quite some time now is the intensity at which things are coming. And this intensity is not trivial, it’s one to get easily overwhelmed by. Maybe it’s getting used to school life again, and balancing school life with a ton of different stuff, now, that the stakes are higher, in a completely new environment. I wonder how many people are feeling the same way, and maybe that’s why Waterloo is so infamously notorious1.
I wonder if this is something that I’ll get used to. There was a week back from reading week (fall break) that I was definitely enjoying myself by pushing myself to go for all the intramurals and do stuff like run and have fun back to back. And then I got sick. I told myself that I was purposely overloading to get a gauge of all the things that I could handle, and then I got overwhelmed.
Jumping straight into a rigorous program 2 years and 9 months after finishing high school is not easy; I don’t think I’d sufficiently accounted for that.
Race Preparation
Going into anything fast paced, I would love to have had some sort of mental visualization. But that didn’t happen. I was preoccupied with setting up the logistics of living life in Canada: phone plans, bank plans, supplies, living requirements etc. Being a local here (as most people are) offers so many different perks of having your own friend group, family support being nearby, etc.
Student life comes at you fast: coding OAs, projects for design teams, applications for undergrad research opportunities, weekly assignments, weekly tests, midterms, thinking about job applications for summer, preparations for coding interviews, thinking about projects to do, balancing that with social life and fitness... it is a lot. Could I have known whether this was indeed the case before coming to Waterloo? Perhaps. Maybe if I went around asking people and bothered them enough.
Finding Community
I think that finding community has to be one of the hardest things as an international student that’s slightly older than the rest of the population of frosh. I keep lamenting to myself that it would have been great for me to get to know other Singaporeans who came here, but I haven’t quite connected with them. So this is definitely still a work in progress, and one of the many different things that I have to balance with as mentioned before.
Almost everyone I know here are locals (Canadians). And 17-18 y/o locals2, at that. Everyone here is either from Markham, Mississauga, Richmond Hill, or some Toronto suburb, or Brampton, or London, or Calgary, or Vancouver. And fresh out of high school kids would be able to guess what high schools someone from another town / province would have gone to. That’s how connected everyone is here, I guess.
And I’d be remiss to say that I didn’t have a support community here. I’m very grateful for everyone who’s helped and hosted me in one way or another, but it was just different from being back home in Singapore where everything felt so familiar.
So then it becomes a necessity for me to put myself out there, for me to go for (what seems like) large social mixers in CCF even though I crave deep, intimate conversations where I get to know someone deeply and at a personal level. But maybe that’s just the process of making friends.
I didn’t expect this to be that much of a challenge, but would I rather have it the easy way? An intention that I had for going overseas was to gain exposure to a breadth of ideas and see how people viewed the world differently, to break out of the Singaporean bubble. But when it comes to actually executing now, it’s challenging. I need time, and probably more touch points with upper year seniors who are always going to be rotating between on and off campus due to co-op work cycles.
Even with that amount of support, it can get lonely. That being said, I’m still grateful for the friends that I’ve made and I hope to get closer to them over the coming years.
Why Waterloo?
Prior
I told myself that coming to Waterloo was a function of: good community and good program. I’d written about this in a shorter blog post. I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into, apart from the fact that everyone on my Twitter feed generally said good things about Waterloo. Coming here in March ‘25 confirmed it: I loved the energy that the Symposium gave, but I didn’t actually tour campus. I only ever visited SCH and E7 (both at night)3, and the Waterloo Rec Center, which was not even on campus.
My brother convinced me that it would be good for someone looking to break into tech, and a good engineering school too. Then, I thought that even if CS wasn’t something that I’d do for sure, it’ll at least be creating something. And of course, the #1 (?) feeder school to the Valley was Waterloo.
In addition, I told myself that the main plus points of Waterloo was because of co-op and Socratica. And more than that, I was well aware that the 6 co-ops would give 24 months of work experience before actually starting work. I broke it down to my family and friends back home as such: 8 * 4 months school term, 6 * 4 months co-ops. In my mind, I thought it would be rather manageable.
Here
I was wrong.
Well it turns out that co-ops are the source of much anxiety and distress during an already stressful school term; Socratica sessions are on Sunday mornings, and that clashes with church.
I read the following comment on Hacker News back home, but didn’t quite grasp the meaning of it. I don’t think things have changed a lot over the course of 12 years. I’m definitely feeling the rigor of school, and I’d like to say that it is comparable to the rigor of JC.
I’m not regretting it (yet). There’s something about the intensity that I’ve described that is quite painfully numbing, and challenging. But I don’t think that backing down and shying away from a challenge is a good thing. I believe that suffering callouses the mind4.
Jensen Huang also said that he’d “wish upon (you) ample doses of pain and suffering.” Distance running too, is self-induced suffering, but there’s something rewarding knowing that you’ve pushed past your pain limit and squeezed every last ounce of effort available.
So perhaps this journey would be rewarding too. Perhaps I had a fairy tale notion of life in American colleges being easy and a cakewalk compared to the brutal beating of the A-Levels (and NS). It just might be that the previous experiences that I’ve gone through are gearing me up for Waterloo CS. I reminded that something worth doing is never easy.
And historically, suffering has always brought me the most growth. So maybe this period too would bring about some great amount of growth. I’m already experiencing growth and change in some areas that I didn’t think was possible that quickly.
Signal from noise
It doesn’t make it easier that there is a huge variation in the level of ambition, technical abilities and networks formed for frosh in the loo. It’s always easy to look at someone and lament that that opportunity could’ve been mine. Spending too long thinking about such things in NS taught me the response to such external stimuli is twofold:
The first is recognizing why it feels gutting in the moment
Because we relate to that person of a similar life stage, and when we think that we could’ve done something similar to them, but they did5 and we didn’t.
High status scholarships, fellowships and admittances into accelerators will always be lauded as success, but what about the contrary? What does not getting what we want teach us about ourselves?
Consequently, that prompts us to investigate what drives us, and what makes us fulfilled. The envy reveals to us what we base our worth and identity on.
The harder thing to do in the moment is to focus on what needs to be done, remember the intention of why we’re doing it in the first place, and execute it to the best of our ability with laser-like concentration.
Faith
But maybe all of the above was to bring me closer to God. To make me broken, so that I can be made whole through Him and Him alone. In some sense, I think it’s true: I don’t think I’ve kept up such a healthy, consistent schedule of reading the Psalms everyday and just penning down my thoughts, to the extent that I feel like I can’t go without a day without grounding myself in His word right at the start.
And I’m really grateful for CCF: particularly the Discipleship Group (DG) I’m in. Jon does a great job leading and making everyone feel comfortable to share; with a group of 6 guys acting as accountability partners I think I’ve seen growth in areas that I didn’t think would come so quickly.
I celebrated Thanksgiving over at a CCF member’s (who also treated the first years all to lunch after our first church session!) place over the long weekend, with a bunch of people I met for the first time. Apparently all of the males there were either on the way to serving the military or have served the military before, that was a nice touch. More importantly, it was a nice cosy dinner for the stragglers in Waterloo over reading week while everyone else was back home. It really made me feel welcomed there, and having a meal with people who shared the faith and were able to discuss it at length was a nice touch too.
Every time I consider the question of faith and my relationship with God especially in a season when there is a huge amount of flux, I believe that God always strips away the worldly things that I find my comfort in. As listed painstakingly here, there is an overwhelming amount of things that I could be doing and should be doing, but out of the extracurricular buckets I do think that faith is taking up quite a fair chunk of time.
As the term progressed and I got to know people in the fellowship better, it prompted me to think critically about my faith. That culminated in my first(!) write-up solely about faith, which I am happy to share and chat about; feel free to reach out.
1A Complete
It’s a little mind numbing to think that I have 7 more of such terms to go (I’m writing this right after my finals). But maybe I like to be challenged. Playing games or getting quick dopamine hits from Instagram really does pale in comparison to working on something intellectually stimulating for a sufficiently long period. And I think I’m starting to appreciate how rigor and stresses of the environment forces me to focus on the things that matter.
Here are a list of highlights (!) from my first term:
Getting absolutely smoked by OAs
Picking Phys 121 as an elective
Even after taking H2 Phys, taking this as an “introductory” course required me to spend the second most amount of time out of all subjects (after CS). The depth and rigor of university physics is honestly at a different level!
Running, while the weather was still good!
I came really close to PRing and breaking 20 in the 5k, something that I haven’t done in 4 years (without super shoes, on a course with tight turns -- at this point I’m just coping)
PRing by 8-9 minutes in the half marathon6 after deciding to run it on a whim.
Funny story: I had originally signed up for the 5k with the run club, but since the route changed (and involved crossing a road with traffic), I switched up just before the race started. It wasn’t even a proper race (we still had to cross roads and wait for stop lights), but somehow almost everyone PR’ed that day. I ran that in non-carbon fibre plate shoes, with half tights and short sleeves in 5 (?) deg in the rain. Definitely would find some way to layer up in the future.
Waterloo’s nature is actually really nice — there are many trails to explore out of campus.
Joining R2L as a URA!
Will be working on world models with Zhiyuan and Prof. Victor Zhong! Super grateful for this opportunity; undergrad research is one of the things that I’ve always wanted to try.
At a higher level, I think knowing how to engineer, and run ablations in a controlled manner is more important now than ever with AI (slop) accounting for a good chunk of code in the internet. What are the failure modes? Do you have accountability over the results?
Absence truly makes the heart grow fonder.
After realizing that Singapore is a rather coveted spot for doing exchange, and as a way to procrastinate studying for the rest of my finals, I wrote a short guide(still WIP) to getting around back home.
Courses taken: M135, 137P, CS135, PHYS121, COMMST223
The next update will probably be after my 1B term. Until then, here are some photo highlights!
As an aside, even though the water in Waterloo is hard, people from Laurier (one of the other two universities in the same town) don’t actually lose hair as compared to the folks in Waterloo. I find it tragically funny that that is the case, but I can’t remember who said it.
I’m quite blown away at the level of maturity that some frosh have! Thinking back to my 18 y/o self, I don’t think I would be able to approach university life with that amount of level-headedness and ambition.
I later realized that said students working in labs were the folks from engineering design teams, of which I’ve joined Rocketry :D.
A phrase first popularized by Goggins, in his book Can’t Hurt Me
Something that I realized that is different in Canada (maybe North America) as compared to Asia would be the culture surrounding responses to challenging tests / exams. Back home, even if we felt that it was easy, we wouldn’t go around exclaiming that it was light, probably out of consideration for those who didn’t feel that way. “Oh I hope it’s okay…” is a normal response. It doesn’t seem the case here — classmates would genuinely say what they think, which can be daunting if you felt the exam was tough and someone else felt that it was easy.
Paused for traffic lights, had to stop at certain points to get a sip of gatorade (no fuel otherwise)
Congrats on finishing 1A! I’m pretty sure there’s an afternoon Socratica session that wouldn’t conflict with your church schedule — might want to check it out