I arrived in the fall of 2016, a kid clutching a course schedule and a Tim Hortons breakfast wrap, convinced that university would transform me overnight into an adult. It didn’t. But it did give me a house full of characters, a fridge full of Hungry-Man dinners, and a brain full of things I didn’t understand — yet.
Cedar C6 was one of the rare co-ed houses on campus, a row of townhouse-style units connected by shared walls and student chaos. My room — a glorified closet — was possibly the smallest legal bedroom in the province. C’s, just down the hall, was easily three times the size. She was quiet and reserved at first, but slowly warmed up as the months passed. We all did, in our own ways.
J was the nocturnal gamer of the group. Every night, you’d hear the soft tapping of keys as he played League of Legends on his MacBook. When he wasn’t battling in-game, he was working part-time at his family’s sushi restaurant — a job he swore he hated, though he’d occasionally come home late with leftover sashimi for us to share.
Then there was L1, who met a girl during Frosh and promptly moved into party mode. His academic record didn’t survive, but his smoke alarm-triggered attempt at frying an egg is still one of my fondest memories. He practically lived at TPASC gym or bounced between house parties. I admired his gym discipline, if not his drinking habits.
R1 had paid a king’s ransom for his spot in residence but spent most nights at home. I think the longest we saw him in C6 was maybe a week straight. R2 kept more to himself — our conversations were few, but I do remember helping him debug an assignment and seeing his mountain of Hungry-Man dinners stuffed into the freezer after his first grocery run.
And me? I was awkward, anxious, and quietly ambitious — somewhere between C’s shyness, J’s introversion, and L1’s spontaneous chaos. I didn’t play sports. I didn’t go to parties. I tried to force myself into something social, something new, and even showed up to the first meeting for the Academic Committee... just in time to learn it had been canceled.
My university career began with confusion. My first scheduled class — MATA31 with Professor Natalia Breuss — was nowhere to be found. The room listed, AA112, was filled with confused students who eventually trickled out after realizing no one was coming. Turns out, the actual lecture was in HW216. I only learned this later, by chance, when I passed by the room after my CSCA08 class and saw Natalia wrapping things up.
So began my routine: a Farmer’s Wrap in the morning, a pre-packaged bento box from the Marketplace for lunch. I had just turned eighteen, newly armed with a credit card and little sense of budgeting. Within a month, I had racked up $400 in food expenses. That’s when I discovered the Grocery Bus — a Saturday shuttle to Food Basics and T&T, our weekly lifeline. But my idea of cooking back then was... well, hot dogs. Every day. Hot dogs.
It wasn’t new. My dad, a man of minimal culinary ambition, packed me one in my lunch nearly every day in elementary school. In high school, the cafeteria sold mostly hot dogs. And in first year, I kept the tradition alive. I didn’t really know how to cook anything else.
I had a rocky academic start. AP Calculus helped me breeze through parts of MATA31, though the delta-epsilon proofs felt like reading ancient Greek. CSCA67 was another beast entirely. But I had one thing going for me: I started assignments the moment they dropped. That small discipline saved me more than once — a trait I shared with C and J.
CSCA08 came with three assignments that still stick with me. The first was a word search puzzle solver; the second, a card-based substitution cipher; and the third, a simplified SQL interpreter called SQueaL that worked on CSVs. We’d gather in our common room, propping laptops on dining chairs, debugging together. We didn’t always know what we were doing, but at least we struggled side by side.
I still remember the evening after our last exam, when we ordered PizzaPizza and collapsed into a heap on the couch. For the first time, I thought: I feel at home here.
Winter 2017 introduced me to Linear Algebra, and with it, the first academic gut-punch of my life. High school math had always been “plug and chug,” and for the first time, it failed me. I didn’t understand why anything worked — not the dot product, not the eigenvectors, and certainly not the mysterious rituals of matrix multiplication. I studied day and night and still earned a D.
CSCA48 wasn’t much easier. Nick Cheng introduced us to recursion, heaps, and linked lists. Exercise 6 — flattening a nested list — nearly drove me to madness. But the moment I solved it, it was like lightning struck. I felt brilliant, even if just for an evening.
Outside of class, we’d explore the city — birthday dinners downtown, late-night runs to Midland & Finch. We bonded with folks from Cedar C3 and Elm E6. One of them, T, introduced me to Linux. I dual-booted Ubuntu, seduced by the idea of being a “cool hacker” like him. Eventually, I even switched to Arch. What started as a whim turned out to be one of the best things I did for my CS education.
That summer, I stayed behind for classes. As a co-op student, I needed the credits. CSCB07 — Software Design — was taught by Joe Bettridge (better known to us as “Joe Blows”). Assignments were named after candies: “Chocolate,” “Caramel,” “Toffee.” We tossed around the phrase “It’s a design choice” more than actual design decisions. The final assignment was a 24-hour hackathon where my team built a banking app in an Android wrapper, holed up in the Bladen Wing till sunrise.
That same summer, I met C — the language, not the roommate. CSCB09, taught by Bianca Schroeder, was my first taste of systems programming. Up until then, programming meant clicking the green "Run" button in PyCharm or IntelliJ. C taught me what was really happening behind the scenes — memory, pointers, and all. At first, pointers looked like absolute chaos, but I grew to love them. In fact, I still write C when working on systems-level code.
By the end of that year, a lot had changed. J dropped out. L1 switched to Economics. R2 went into music. T transferred to Math. L2 moved downtown. Only C and I stayed in CS and made it to graduation together. We still talk. We still laugh.
Looking back, I didn’t become an adult in my first year — but I stopped being just a kid. I learned to code, to cook (barely), and to think for myself. University didn’t transform me overnight. But piece by piece — in every hot dog, every failed proof, every late-night debugging session — I built something real.
Something like a life.