The First Week: Initial Thoughts

The first week of classes has finished up at Waterloo! After a fun and exciting orientation week where we got used to living in residence and met lots of new people, this week introduced us to the academic aspect of university life. From lectures to labs, we are slowly but surely making the transition from cramped high school classrooms to capacious lecture halls.

This week was definitely much more relaxed than I'm anticipating the rest of the term, because many tutorials were cancelled and so the days felt a lot shorter than they are supposed to be. With also fewer-than-normal assignments and studying for the week, this week has been a good transition week from orientation to the full engineering workload. To be honest, I am somewhat intimidated by the impending work; even after completing the International Baccalaureate program in high school, I feel that engineering will have a heavier workload, with the added pressures of living on my own and balancing school with extracurricular activities. 

That being said, there are also many things that surprised me about university class; they aren't as different from high school as I'd previously thought. Although the class sizes are much larger and professors definitely have a different teaching style than high school teachers, most lectures utilize interactive components such as examples to demonstrate topics. Moreover, professors are generally very open to stopping lectures to answer questions. A common misconception is that university is all about sitting through lectures and taking notes; in actuality, during labs and tutorials we have many opportunities to apply our knowledge to example problems and hands-on work, in order to practice what we learned in our lectures. This ensures that if we have any questions about the work, we are able to speak to teaching assistants and get help right away.

All in all, the first week of classes has been a great start to the term ahead. I hope to continue keeping the momentum of the week going and stay on top of everything, become accustomed to classes, and join clubs/student design teams at Clubs Fair next week! University life has been a big but exciting change, and I'm looking forward to whatever opportunities come next.