Although being 19 only took up 5% of my life, it felt as though 90% of my accomplishments has been done within this year.
I turned 19 on May 25 of 2024 in Markham when I was working at my first co-op. It was my first time in which I celebrated my birthday away from home. The first time away from my close friends and family. A weird feeling for sure, but I am incredibly grateful for my friends in Toronto who celebrated with me.
The summer of 2024 from May to August was probably one of the biggest lows of my life. I was only getting paid $18 an hour for a job that was completely irrelevant to my major which made me feel like I was working for nothing. Furthermore, commuting 50 minutes to work everyday put me in the trenches. I also lived at a homestay with an immigrant family that didn't speak much english who had a toddler who cried everyday. I rarely had uninterrupted sleep, lost money, and it was the first time in which I appreciated living from home.
Luckily the job was low stress, which allowed me to spend a lot of time at home and during work to read documentation and experiment with code. I probably spent over 200 hours during the summer to learn full-stack web development and Machine Learning. My goal during this time was to build projects that I could use while interviewing for my second co-op. To me, coding isn't just learning syntax and algorithms. It includes design patterns and best practices, in which I have spent several hours experimenting with, and has been some of the most fundamental concepts that I have taken away with to become a software engineer. After my co-op ended in early August, I spent the rest of the month coding and resetting for the upcoming semester.
I came back to Toronto around September 2 which was when I attended my first rave - Illenium's concert. After a tough summer, it was definitely the best way to end it since he had been my most listened artist for the past 4 years.
2A was also the worst semester out of my 3 semesters at Waterloo. The main reason being that I was sick for almost the entire term. It started at the second week of school where I felt tired for a whole week and sleeping extra didn't help. I would sleep 8+ hours everyday and still feel drained. Then after the week of being tired, it would lead to over 2 weeks of coughs, decreased energy, and the lack of motivation to exercise, do schoolwork, and participate in extracurriculars. This would usually span for about 3 weeks (1 week tired, 1 week sick, 1 week recovery). Now, imagine this repeating 4 times throughout the semester. I don't think there was a time where I was breathing normally the entire term. Compared to 1B, my overall average dropped 10%. Luckily being in CS, GPA isn't the most important thing, and since I was employed, it was more of an inconvenience than something that really affected me.
2A co-op search was also quite interesting. I had 0 interviews in cycle 1 which made me feel like shit because everyone around me had multiple offers during that time. I felt that my resume wasn't that bad either, so I waited patiently for cycle 2 and tried again. Luckily, I received 7 interviews in the span of a week. All of which were software engineering internships that payed in the range of 25-40 an hour, which was a way better pill to swallow compared to my first co-op. Some notable ones being Huawei, Agentnoon, and what would eventually become my second co-op, ABIC.
The way in which I got the job at ABIC could be attributed to luck, but I think I have the right to say that it was truly because I took more initiative than the other candidates. The reason being that I wrote a Linkedin message directly to the companies CEO on why I was interested in the role and my previous experience in real-estate directly aligns with that their company does. He replied, then passed it to an executive, who passed it to my current boss, who said they interviewed me because my name rang a bell to them. During the day of the interview, I set an alarm to prepare for it at 9:30AM. What I didn't realize was that it was during 9:00AM. So, my dumbass missed my interview. I sent them an email apologizing, and they scheduled another interview the day after at a similar time.
The interview was primarily a behavioural one. They asked me decent questions regarding my past experience, how I added value and efficiency to the business in my previous co-op, and my coding experience from my projects. Having done a few behavioural interviews, as well as doing a lot of public speaking during my time in BBA, I tend to perform quite well during behavioural interviews. Though, the two managers who interviewed didn't give much of a reaction to any of my answers, so I had relatively no confidence for my performance afterwards.
Fast forward to the same Friday, rankings came out during my linear algebra class. I genuinely thought I was rejected and was too scared to open it during class. But when I stepped outside, I was shocked to see that I was ranked 1 for this role.
With a co-op acceptance relatively early into the semester, a big weight was finally lifted off my shoulders. It was the first time in which my role aligned directly with what I wanted to do with my career, and paid a good amount of money. The only downside being that I would have to again relocate to Barrhaven, a suburb about 30km south from Ottawa, meaning I would spend the next 4 months completely isolated away from my friends. In fact, my closest friend was 20km away.
I started my second co-op on January 9 2025. To my surprise, their office is one of the best ones that I have ever seen. It is arguably better designed than the Amazon office in Vancouver, which exceeded my expectations. Having completed 3 months of this internship, I am fortunate to say that I thoroughly enjoy everything in this job. It is relatively low pressure, had unlimited coffee, snacks, a decked out setup, and great co-workers. Apart from the location, ABIC has been the best job I have had up to date.
The timeline here is around late January 2025 to late March 2025:
I truly believe that these 3 months have been some of the luckiest moments of my life, in which it has granted me numerous opportunities to become someone beyond what I could have ever imagined in doing.
On January 27th, I attended UofT Hacks with Fahmi, Krish, and Andrew. We attended the hackathon with big hopes of winning... until we couldn't come up with any idea on what to build for the hackathon. And by Saturday evening, we gave up and decided to go to the 'Tech Roast Show' for fun. I really enjoyed the show starting from the beginning.
The part that will forever be ingrained in my memory was after the intermission. They asked 7 people from the crowd to raise their hand based on their prompts like 'raise your hand if you have the best soft skills'. When they said 'raise your hand if you are single', and instantly, Fahmi and Krish raised my hand (because I was in a fried situationship during this time). To my absolute surprise, the MC pointed at me and told me to come up on stage in front of over 1000 people.
The stage consisted of 7 contestants, and the crowd had to decide who on stage was 'The most human in Toronto'. Standing on stage was nerve-racking at first, but I quickly got used to it when I started talking in stage. They first got us to pitch ourselves based on the prompt we got on stage with. Mine being, having to pitch why I would be a great boyfriend. I said some bullshit like I can do 10 pullups and 30 pushups and like Illenium, and the crowd thought that was funny for some reason. Looking back, it's probably because I talked like the most generic asian ever and seemed natural on stage.
With a couple other challenges, the crowd slowly weeded out the other contestants, and at the end, it was me and this other girl, Emma. Funnily enough, they only kept us two up there because the crowd shipped us two together. But at the end, we were both instructed to comfort the guy on stage who was acting sad. And just by saying 'it's all good bro' 3 times, it was enough for the crowd to cheer the loudest for me and have me awarded with being the most human person in Toronto.
What's weird to me was that when I was walking outside, people recognized me, and a guy actually asked to take a photo with me. Kinda cool being semi-famous for a night tbh. Nothing much happened for the rest of the night, but I did meet two new people, Rodney and Alvina, who are both coincidentally from Barrhaven. We talked a bit during the night, and parted ways doing our own things afterwards.
Fast forward a week, I was doing my typical coding at work, when I randomly received a DM from Rodney telling me to attend his blockchain workshop at Carleton University. I agreed, and attended the workshop knowing nothing, and coincidentally saw Alvina there where I said the best line to talk to someone: 'I think I've seen you before'. We talked during the event, and afterwards, us 3 went to daldongnae together to got to know each other better.
It was around this time where Alvina told me to join UTMIST, the main AI design team from UofT. I shot her a text message the day after, interviewed for the team, and was officially a member of their team. Despite the design team being quite competitive to get into, I was lucky that someone was willing to bring me on their team. The work here was quite interesting, as I was introduced to several things in regards to ML Engineering. Things like AI agents, vector stores, LangGraph, etc. were cool to learn, and are extremely valuable technologies to know during this time as a software engineer.
February was primarily focused on my job and doing some work for UTMIST. I showed up to Toronto twice this month to attend a meeting and CUCAI, and got to know the team better. I showed up to whatever events there were, and had a great time meeting new people.
March was CuHacks, a hackathon hosted by Carleton University. It was predetermined that me, Rodney, and Alvina would team up to create AI Rizz glasses with the Meta Ray bans. It was a very complicated project, and the finishing product only worked in ideal conditions. When we demoed to the judges, none of them seemed to have cared, and of course, we didn't win prizes.
Despite losing, Alvina decided to post the hackathon anyways because we made a funny video alongside it. The video gained thousands of views on LinkedIn, and many people outside of the hackathon thought it was an impressive project.
One of them being the ML lead of Bree, growing fintech startup in Toronto. He contacted both Alvina and me (which he said it was ONLY because the post mentioned that I was looking for internships), and offered both of us interviews. I thought it was a scam at first, but after talking to him and reading more about the company, I realized that the company was legit, and usually only hired very good 4th/5th years from Waterloo. And to be offered this opportunity, I knew that I could not pass this up.
From absolute coincidence, we scheduled the interview on the same week, which was also the week in which I attended another hackathon hosted by UofT (GenAI Genesis). I told him that I could come in for an in-person interview instead of a virtual one, and do the technical portion right away. He agreed, and I was given the task of doing a system design question where I had to explain how I would create a specific app, then create it with a Cursor prompt. I went through my database design, how the UI would look for low user churn, and some technologies I would use, as well as scaling it for more users. I prompted cursor to create the app, it worked perfectly, and I was confident that I passed the technical portion.
To being able to answer these interview questions was solely because I had been consistently preparing interviewing through Leetcode, and spending time reading documentation to understand specific details in the web. For example, I demonstrated that I fully understood how forms worked, how they are validated, and the best ways to design them so they are secure for all edge cases.
Afterward, we talked about expectations for the job, and arranging to start for the summer, and that he will send an offer the Monday offer. as of now, I am confident that I will receive the offer and start working at Bree.
-- the story ends here on March 23, offer is March 24 --
Takeaway:
What's incredible to me is that within the span of 1 year, so much has changed in my life. I started 19 being unhappy with where I was at in terms of job placement, and I wasn't too hopeful that things would get better. However, I changed one thing in my mentality, which was to show up to everything. I tell myself, 'you don't know what you don't know, and it never hurts to show up because you can never be certain as to what can come out of it'. And to my surprise, attending 4 hackathons within the span of 3 months just for the sake of it, and spending entire paychecks to travel to Toronto just to 'show up' has granted me opportunities that I would have never imaged in doing. Making new friends, being featured in front of thousands of people, and doubling the salary of my first co-op within a year feels like a dream to me. But with this newfound opportunity, I hope to spend my 20th year being alive to achieve even bigger goals, and finally relocate out of the trenches: Seattle, New York, or San Francisco.
