Depends on the job. Speaking as a Software Engineer, being a student was tougher for me. I had about 4–5 programming assignments due every week. I had literally no free time. I was sleeping in the computer labs and surviving on instant ramen and popeyes chicken and Red Bull for 4 years. Each Final you had to tediously study hard for because it was worth like 60% of the final grade, and it was usually at 7am-8am in the morning, and the whole class average is like a C+ at best. Most of the professors at my lectures were inevitably East Asians or Indian or East European which meant that they had an accent that was impossible to understand.
Then I had to study for all these interviews and the first jobs out of university are the hardest. You can only get the junior positions or internships, no one wants to hire a guy who has almost no work experience. You have to pass the grueling algorithm challenges against 1000 other students also looking for a job , and you get paid peanuts.
When I am a full time worker, other than the occasional overtime day, I come in at 9 and I leave around 5 or 6. I have free time after that to do what I want. I have enough experience to change companies easily. I can ask for higher salaries for the same reason. The actual coding experience at companies isn’t nearly as difficult as the coding challenges you undertook getting there. Yeah you have to deal with your boss and coworkers, but overall I would much rather be a full time worker. Did I mention that you make money? As a student I was surviving off of pennies made from various part time jobs in university.
Last year, I outlined a list of several goals that I had set for myself this year to achieve.
Let’s check back on the status of these goals now.
1) Graduate on time
I just finished writing my last exam today, and am confident of passing all my courses. As for my GPA, hopefully it will be improved. Edit: Finished with a 2.75 GPA, achieving my goal of having my GPA >= 2.7!!
Status: Done
2) Eliminate three quarters of my debt
If you take a look at my spending levels compared to last year:
Spending May 2009 – Sept 2010
Spending Sept 2010 – present
Comparing the two, it’s easy to see that without a car or eating out everyday, I saved a lot of money. The increased tuition and fees in this period is because of full time school plus cost of attending conferences and events this year. I’m happy to say that I took a lot of money out of my stock account this year and paid down $14,400 of my debt, that’s 77%. So yes, I achieved this goal. Status: Done
3) Secure a job by graduation time After many interviews, I managed to get the job offer from the company I was interviewing with in San Francisco. What a relief for me! I’d like to thank everyone who supported me, including those who comment on my blog, my family, friends, my professor for my CSC490 CS Education course, my AIESEC VP of Communications and my former manager from Environment Canada for serving as my references. I worked hard and I will continue that way. Status: Done
So all of that is done and it feels rather surreal to me. Seems that college went by rather fast, a lot of all nighters, and maybe not enough socializing. Still, I think it helped me evolve as a person. Even this year, I am quite different than a year ago. I don’t have a car anymore, no steady source of income yet, no $20k in stocks, and no girlfriend once again. Yet I feel more mature somehow. Maybe cause I have tangible achievements now. Anyways, I thank the University of Toronto for causing me to become a stronger person, and feel quite relieved to end off my 17 years of education (since kindergarten). I still don’t know about grad school yet (GPA too low), but I am ready to move on to the real world now.
I think ironically, though I am only taking 3 courses this semester, I’m somehow busier than last semester. Anyways, I’ve been job searching the past few weeks, and it’s almost like having another course because I have to study for these interviews. In addition to all my assignments, I think I’m booked till the end of the term.
Jan 19-28: 5 interviews, Macroeconomics midterm 2
Jan 29-Feb 4: CSC490 project proposal, 2 interviews
Feb 5-15: 490 project, 490 assignment 1, 1 interview
Feb 16-Mar 1: ECO336 midterm, ECO336 research paper,2 interviews,AIESEC review board
Mar 1-Mar18: 490 assignment 2, Macro midterm 3
Mar 19-Apr 7: Conferences, 490 project, 490 test
Apr 7+: Intense job searching if I haven’t gotten one, 2 economics finals
In addition, I have to keep actively searching for jobs + interviewing because I’m graduating in June, keep up with AIESEC duties as Communications member and Webmaster/Social media manager including weekly meetings and updates, do weekly 490 research paper summaries, and gather data for my 490 project.
Hopefully I can keep updating my blog regularly though, but we’ll see.
In the meantime, feel free to watch my amateur John Mayer covers:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCtDpbESDmo
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IxKNiE4JiA
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61sNDDjjmDM
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh45iQGOjPo
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ3OgfFp6N4
One thing I noticed about myself as I got older was that I started becoming more aware of my Chinese culture.
Well here’s the story. I was raised in a small city with virtually no other Chinese people. So I started becoming very white washed. I lost all my Chinese skills and sense of culture. When I came to Toronto, due to the influence of other Chinese people, I’ve started rediscovering that culture – and in the process becoming more traditionally Chinese.
Even more so than my parents. My parents never really thought much about going back to China, but I’ve been wanting to go back for a while now. There’s a sense of beauty and history there I wanted to experience. I guess you could call it “一种落叶归根的感觉”, a sense of belonging. I wanted to go back to visit because my ancestral home and my relatives were calling me.
My ideals for what the ‘perfect woman’ for me changed as well: It used to be that I had crushes on Caucasian girls, or Asian girls that were raised here. No longer the case. Now I’m all about the ‘traditional’ Chinese beauty – the shy, quiet reservedness, honesty, politeness, calmness, loyalty, obedience; basically the same qualities I had myself.
I’m the Chinese student that the average Asian parent would probably like to have. I’m obedient, reliable, took orders well, and work efficiently. I have ‘artistic’ talents, rather than physical talents. I wished that my parents had pushed me harder during elementary / high school because I wanted to get into a good university. I went into Computer Science not because I was forced to but because I wanted to. I wished my parents made me learn piano; instead I learned it by myself because I had no money for piano lessons. Same with guitar. I wish my parents sent me to Chinese school; I learn it by myself during my spare time. I’ve designed websites since I was a kid – again in my spare time.
In short, I didn’t really relate to other Asians saying their parents ‘forced’ them to do this or that, because I wanted to be a good student. You only get one chance at life so make it your best, that’s my way of thinking. Get a good education, network well, find a good job, marry into a good family. I’ve wanted to live a good life – hence I was never bothered by overwork; I liked working hard; I like striving; I wanted to be the best I could be. My brother is like me – but even more competitive. I think it may come from our genes – my dad was a farmer so he’s worked hard his whole life, and my mother’s side was descended from Chinese nobility so the ambition was always there. I guess some of it passed on to me.
Basically, during these past few years, I’ve ‘rediscovered’ who I really am; I’m at my core a Chinese person, traditional and conservative, and heavily influenced by American ideals of innovation and leadership; I’m also politically conservative. But I don’t think I would be satisfied with myself if I was any different.
I have set three goals for myself that I want to achieve by the time I graduate. These goals are necessary in order to keep me motivated and thinking. I graduate next year, June 2011, so I hope these goals will be met by that time.
1) Get close to a 3.0 GPA as possible, and graduate on time.
This goal is most important because, otherwise I won’t be able to graduate at all and all my other goals are ruined as well. I am taking 5 courses currently, and doing about average in all of them. Hopefully I can stay afloat with my courses and graduate without issues.
2) Eliminate over 75% of debt, and/or leave only my student loan as debt.
As mentioned in previous posts before, I am quite in debt. However my stocks have been improving, so hopefully I’ll be able to take some money out soon. It really depends on how well my investments go until then though, but I want to get most of my debt eliminated by the time I graduate. I have about $6000 in student loans, but relatively that’s not that bad, and it also happens to be about 25% of my total debt right now.
3) Secure a job / internship by graduation time.
I’ve been meaning to find a job in the US for a while now, so hopefully I can act on that more next semester and find one before I graduate. There’s all sorts of visa issues I’ll have to deal with once that happens – but I’ll deal with them then. Alternatively, getting an internship position in Asia through AIESEC wouldn’t be bad either.
All three of these goals require hard work and a good amount of luck and fate. I promise to work hard, and ask only that God give me guidance to help light my path. My situations tend to be a bit more complicated than the average person – my life isn’t as simple as I would want it to be, and there’s a lot of factors involved. So for all the troubles I’ve received this year, I can only hope that what goes around comes around, and that next year will be a better year.
I’ve just watched the Obama Deception, you can view it here:
[tubepress video=”eAaQNACwaLw”]
The premise of the Obama Deception is a conspiracy theory related to the New World Order. Now I know America has been the home to countless conspiracy theorists regarding everything from the Federal Reserve to JFK to 9/11, but this video I thought was done pretty convincingly. It’s a subject that I’ve thought about before, that the world is becoming more global and as it becomes more global, more organizations are built to communicate with other organizations. This creates the atmosphere for the ‘world government’ view that a globalist agenda is ultimately bad for society because of the same reason that big federal government is a bad thing: it has too much power and jeopardizes the freedom and liberty of citizens. I’m gonna go further with this with a rant about equality because I think it’s related:
Society and equality
Alot of people want to contribute to society, they set up foundations, they volunteer and donate to help the poor and disadvantaged.
I have several observations on society in general, and they are that:
1) Population continues to increase and life expectancy increases
2) Because of this contributing, equality also increases
3) Competition increases as a result of the population and equality increases.
Equality may seem fair but I think that it actually does some harm as well. In this recession, where the unemployment rate hovers around 10%,
the last thing we need is more competition. Because of population, life expectancy and equality, more people are getting educated.
Have you noticed the admissions rate for top US universities are getting lower each year? That’s because there’s more admissions each year,
as international students from China and India which are becoming more competitive keep applying. More admissions + Same student space at top universities = greater more competitive admission pool = less admissions.
At the same time, more people are getting bachelor’s degrees. I don’t even need to cite a statistic I think this is quite obvious.
The more bachelor’s degrees, the more employers are going to have to look for extra credentials. In this day and age, just a
bachelor’s degree is hardly impressive. In order to compete, you need some high GPA/ lots of work exp/research exp/leadership exp/etc
Those days when parents thought their kids can get a good job with just a university degree is over.
Therefore I believe the problem is that there’s too much competition, especially in the Western world.
The solution is that there needs to be population control and a maintaining of social order. Americans have priviledges that many countries don’t.
This can only exist when there’s a social order. I recognize the need to help starving families in Africa and India but if everyone were equal, then
no one could have priviledge and capitalism cannot exist. This is the same argument Democrats and Republicans are making. Democrats are for
equality and ‘socialism’ to an extent. Republicans champion freedom, choice and the free market.
The world needs to be more about freedom and social order. The problem is the world is getting more competitive and at this rate, we will see
the population of the United States double in 20 years and people from Africa applying to US universities creating even more competition in ADDITION
to people from Asia. This amount of demand needs to be balanced with supply, and I don’t foresee any way the US and Canada can meet this supply at the very top levels. Sure more people=>more companies=>more jobs but it seems the job creation lags far below that of job demand right now and that issue needs to be fixed.
That is my complaint with the amount of contributing that goes on in the world. Population needs to be controlled. Third world countries exist for a reason and that is to be at the bottom of the social hieararchy. How can the United States and Canada be at the top if there weren’t any developing countries? War/disease also exists to control the population and thus lower the amount of competition. The employment rate after WWII was very low,
during the 50s and 60s unemployment topped at around 7% and is as low as 3.x% during the Truman/Eisenhower administration. Why? because soldiers who
died in WWII can no longer compete for jobs. This is part of the reason why the economy booms the decade after the war. In short, I think war/disease can actually be healthy for the economy in the long term if it occurs in line with population growth.
Personal situation:
So now that I got that rant out of the way: my finances have been suffering quite a bit recently. Stock market has not been good to me this year (lost all my profits from last year + $2000 in principal), I had to sell my car to pay for my tuition at a $1600 loss, I got scammed $2200 from a shady website contractor, and overall I’m in the red. Midterms have been stressful, and I’ve also joined some extracurricular activities like AIESEC and developing Magic cards in my spare time with CardForge. All in all though, I think my weaknesses here are evident. I am too impulsive with my money; despite my preaching of fiscal conservatism, I should actually work on practicing it sometime. I lack attention to detail in my projects, something that my PEY supervisor docked me for. What drives me is the thought that if I can do well in my courses, then I will have a shot at going where I want to go, and achieving what I want to achieve. Take a look at my spending distribution below and you can pretty much see that besides my tuition, my car was my biggest expense and perhaps the freedom of driving wasn’t worth the ~$10k that I spent on it.
Spending distribution (May '09 – Sept '10)
I will end off this lengthy post with some videos I recorded recently: while my singing is still not great, I think I’ve improved with that from before (and yes I’m obsessed with the Beatles):
