preliminary
after dropping cis3110, i had to retake it over the summer. my options were york, uwaterloo, uottawa, and tmu. i ruled out york pretty quickly — i’d heard the profs weren’t great. i also passed on tmu after hearing they were likely doing a one-test, midterm, and final format. not ideal for me since i usually don’t perform well in exams.
that left me with uwaterloo and uottawa.
at first, i was fine with uwaterloo. but after digging into the course structure at uottawa, it seemed like the better fit:
zybook, midterm, final, and assignments
zybook is basically free marks, and i usually do well on assignments. that meant i’d only need to manage the midterm and final — plus, there’s no pass/fail component tied to any of them. the only downside? uottawa is far. like, 5–6 hours by train or bus one way. i don’t mind commuting, but doing that weekly would’ve been a lot — in time and money.
so i registered for uwaterloo first, just to get a feel for things while waiting for uottawa’s non-degree enrollment to open. eventually, i got into both uwaterloo and uottawa for operating systems.
then i noticed uwaterloo’s cs349 (user interfaces) had recently been revamped. it looked solid — typescript, vite, dom, and modern ui concepts. since it’s a third-year course, i’d be able to transfer it toward my uoguelph electives. so i went for it.
after registering for those two, i added four 6-week courses and one 12-week course at uog to round out the rest of my credits. i figured if i pushed through the short ones early, the second half of the summer would be more manageable.
so yeah — heading into summer 2025, i signed up for 8 courses across 3 universities, while juggling 2 jobs — one as a full stack developer at uog, and the other as a software dev intern at brown & beatty.
definitely one of my most ambitious summers yet.
week 1–3
week one hit hard. here’s what my schedule looked like (my full-time job hadn’t started yet):
- monday: cs349 @ uwaterloo
- tuesday: commute to ottawa
(pulled an all-nighter, left the house at 4am, took the megabus with a layover in kingston, arrived in ottawa around 12:30pm) - wednesday: cs349 again
- thursday: cs350 @ uwaterloo
- friday: back to ottawa
(another sleepless night, same early morning departure, same long bus ride)
i survived the first week. no biggie.
week 2 rolled in, and i officially started my full stack dev role at uog.
met a few people, had brunch with the team, and got introduced to the three projects i’d be working on over the summer. i was also attending the uottawa lectures via zoom since the prof offered hybrid access — which was a huge help. in between that, i was slowly chipping away at my brown & beatty tasks too.
it was a lot — but somehow, it felt like things were starting to click.
week 4–8
as things picked up, i started getting into a groove. the chaos of the first few weeks mellowed into something that felt… manageable.
by week 6, i had wrapped up most of my 6-week courses at guelph. felt good to check those off early. with only one 12-week course left at uog, the workload dropped just enough to focus more on my other commitments.
on the dev side, my role at brown & beatty started to get more involved. initially, i was focused on frontend work — building out interfaces using next.js, typescript, and tailwind — but eventually, i dove into database integration too. a lot of the features were tied to internal dashboards and file management workflows, so i spent a good chunk of time syncing with the team and cleaning up the data flow across the app.
over at uoguelph, i was juggling two projects as part of my full stack role. one was for the Lang School, managing award applications — think: student forms, reviewer dashboards, automated status changes, etc. the other was tied to Dress To Impress, where we built a platform to manage clothing rentals for students prepping for interviews or presentations. it was cool to see how tech could directly support students’ real-life needs.
outside of school and work, i still kept myself busy by being part of couple of hackathons and getting myself physically active
i mentored at Hack404, helping new hackers with ideation and debugging their projects. it felt nice to give back, especially since i’ve been on the hacker side so many times. not long after, i competed at SpurHacks where my team built Dialzara, an AI front desk that could handle bookings, FAQs, and customer calls using GPT-4o and Twilio. the hackathon was kinda rigged but W project
sports-wise, i was staying active too. played intramurals at uwaterloo and mississauga when i was back home.
last few weeks of summer
the final stretch was a blur. i had my exam at uottawa lined up around the same time as terrahacks, so i basically lived out of a backpack that weekend. stayed at the hackathon until like 6 am on sunday, dipped straight to the bus station at 7, rode it all the way to ottawa until 1 pm, and then went straight into my exam at 2. not the smartest schedule, but hey — i survived.
after that, i had about two weeks to grind for the uwaterloo exam. pulled long study sessions, brushed up on all the dom + simplekit stuff, and went into the test hoping for the best. finished late — around 10 pm on a tuesday — and walked out feeling like a huge weight was finally off my shoulders.
a week later, i found out i actually did better than i thought. i passed the course — W.
on the work side, i wrapped up my URA contract but got an extension for one of the projects, which was nice. same thing with brown & beatty — they extended me too, but this time with a bump in pay. not a bad way to end a summer that started off completely chaotic.