Chapter 36

I was living in a student residence in the first year of my science undergraduate degree. It just seemed like the thing to do. Graduates from my high school that came back to visit always mentioned that living in a dorm is like a rite of passage. During this experience of living away from your parents, we would learn how to live with your friends for the first time. 

For me, this was the first time I realized how much I was dependent on mom to simply survive. When I was living under her roof, Mom had cooked me meals and cleaned our place up. Now that I was essentially on my own, I had to do that all by myself. However, as it turns out, that wasn’t really all that hard to do. By this I meant that I had a habit of cleaning after myself well and learned how to cook pretty quickly too. The hard part? Doing this consistently. 

Cleaning became kind of inconsistent but in truth, it wasn’t really an issue in this regard. I found that whenever I got stressed out, cleaning was the thing to do. The fact that we had so many courses for the entire term made it so that I would rarely go a day or two without cleaning my room. Cleaning was just a nice feeling. It made me feel like things were in order and satisfied my need to be in control of my entire surroundings. Cooking was where I really struggled. Cooking back then was fine for the first few dishes but since I needed to do this about 3 times a day to survive, it quickly became super bothersome. 

Around the second week, I stopped cooking. The cafeteria at school was just such an easily accessible location and with decent prices. Why pay for ingredients that you have to spend time assembling and then clean up after when you can just eat out and just dump it all into the garbage afterwards? The amount of time saved and energy saved from cooking just made no sense to me and even as I am writing this now, I still have a distaste for the feeling of time wastefulness with cooking. 

While mom wasn’t there to help with these things anymore, she was still helping me out. She and I had agreed that she would pay for my rent while I was in university and she kept that promise. This wasn’t such a huge burden on her. I know that sounds kind of spoiled but just hear me out. I am trying to analyze this from a purely mathematical perspective. Since I left my mom’s condo, she rented out my room. The amount of difference between the rent she now got from my room in Toronto and my rent in Waterloo meant she was making a profit every month. Despite all this, I was still grateful that mom was there to help with rent. I only had the leftovers of my lifeguarding money, which wasn’t a lot, and my student loans to cover my tuition and living expenses. If I needed to pay for rent too, I probably would’ve been in a bit more trouble. I was grateful but I also knew how mom was thinking and thus, I kept a ledger with all the rent I ever borrowed from mom. I knew she probably kept a ledger too but I didn’t mind. I planned on paying her back all of this money at some point in the future. 

Aside from the small interactions I had with her regarding rent, I wasn’t so bothered or affected by mom not being around anymore. This was because in all honesty, we had grown pretty distant in the last years of high school. In fact, I had pretty much kept to myself after grade 10. My mom made food for two, ate and then left the leftovers in the fridge. I would take it out and eat it at my leisure when I got home as she went on about her responsibilities. Between the large quantity of extracurriculars I was doing and her job, we almost never ate together nor really spoke much. That’s right, our summer vacation was the most interaction I had with not just dad but also with mom. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure most of my summer RCM stuff she never even knew I completed. 

Anyhow, one last thing to consider when living in university. It was my roommates. To be honest, they never really played that much of a role. I was in some part kind of hoping for more but it just really never took off. Who were my roommates? They were people from my school. Agincourt Collegiate Institute, my high school, was known to send a lot of their graduates to Waterloo and this meant that it wasn’t all that hard to find roommates. 

I had a friend, who I knew from being in all the same advanced placement science classes, that was in the same program as me. Not only that, we had very similar trajectories for our careers. In grade 10, we both noticed that in our civics and careers class that “Optometrist” was at the top of the list for job satisfaction. In grade 11 and grade 12, we both took the same science courses to try and get into Waterloo for science. Now, in undergrad, we were both taking pretty much all the same prerequisite courses to try and get into Waterloo Optometry. We had a lot in common and that meant two things. One, he was now a rival to me in our race towards getting into one of the 90 seats the Optometry program had. Two, it was pretty simple to talk to him about being roommates in first year since all our schedules would pretty much be the same. Sure enough, during the summer before first year, we coordinated living together pretty easily. Our dorm was made of 4 rooms and as it turns out, he already had two other friends that he wanted to room with. I filled in the last slot and the rest is history. Now, I think it’s important to give him a moniker because my relationship with him would grow quite significantly in the next couple of years. So, since he is definitely bound to show up a few more times, let’s call him “LP”. 

So, LP and I were living with two other graduates of our high school. Things were bound to change right? Well, sorta? To be honest, the time I spent with my roommates was never something I really thought that much about. Maybe it’s because I didn’t really have the same interests as them. LP and the two others from my suite enjoyed things that I simply did not. They often played poker and this little game called “League of Legends”. I tried my best to get into both of these but it simply wasn’t my thing. While they spent time doing this and that, I kind of just was there in the periphery. Sometimes we did do a suite thing or two but it never really took off or anything. To be honest, I remember my first year much more for the extracurriculars I picked up outside of university rather than my time spent in my dorm. There was one thing that stood out way more than anything else in my first year in residence. To fully understand this, let me just give you a bit more context about the change I was going through. 

Back in Toronto, I had a small room to myself. There’s a bit more to this story but for now, just picture a relatively small room with a small walk-in closet. The size of the room was around 4.75m by 3.25m. It was on the fourth floor and had some decently looking amenities. The condo was also relatively new, having been finished building around a year prior to when we moved in. 

Now let’s compare this to my new dorm. My room was around half the size and resided on the 3rd floor of the University of Waterloo Place, or UWP for short. This building had been around since the 1960 and while not extravagant, definitely was livable. It had some vending machines on the first floor and a laundry inside our building that could be accessed. Furthermore, we also had a Don, who was an upper year student who lived on each floor and acted as a supervisor for each of the floors should things get a little crazy. It wasn’t particularly memorable in any means. It was just your run of the mill, university residence. But I realized too late that it was missing one very important thing. Air conditioning. Out of all the things that went on in the first year, I would remember this the most. 

If you’ll recall, a few chapters ago I mentioned how my mom’s value system was stacked in a way that quality of living was at the bottom. Then I mentioned that at some point in the future, my uncle would coax my mom into getting an air conditioning unit. Well, ever since that time, I had been spoiled for air conditioning. I don’t know when I started to simply take it for granted that my living quarters would be air conditioned but it was so normalized that I had not thought about how my life would be without it. When my mom and I moved into the condo I would reside in right before I would graduate, the air conditioning stayed. In fact, in the condo I was living in before university, the air conditioning was not only there, it was centralized too. This meant that when I got to living on the top floor of an over-50-year-old-building, that I was essentially living in hell. I felt like every night was equivalent to the night I spent at my maternal grandma’s place in ShenYang. It was agony. 

On the first day of moving into my dorm at University of Waterloo Place, I unpacked the car and then proceeded to fill my room to the brim with garbage. By this I meant a whole bunch of useless stuff. I had books I never read, a keyboard I never played, and a whole bunch of stationary that I really didn’t need. If you looked in my closet, you would have found my cello sitting next to literally all the clothes I owned. It was jam packed because I didn’t really know what university life was going to be like and thought that it was better to be over prepared than under. However, despite all of this crap filling my room, I had forgotten to bring a means of cooling the room down. Sure enough, as night came, the temperature started to rise. It was stuffy as hell and even after opening all the windows, nothing seemed to work. 

On the first night, I remembered trying to sleep with the window completely opened only to find that it was too hot. After briefly dozing off, I awoke to my entire body drenched in sweat. As I failed to fall back to sleep, I got up and tried to move my bed directly adjacent to the window. This also didn’t do much at all. It was only after I removed the mattress and placed it on the floor next to the window did I experience a degree or two lower than the room. Even then, sleeping was very uncomfortable.

This problematic sleeping issue continued for the first week at my residence at UWP and near the end of the week, it was starting to show. I was sleep deprived and super on edge. I was agitated and irritated by pretty much anything and everything. I was always drowsy and would be either super hungry or completely devoid of any appetite. I was adapting to all of this just swimmingly.

Meanwhile, LP and my other roommates had the genius idea of bringing along a fan to at least add a bit of cooling to the rooms and I think this gave them a much easier time than I had. The only silver lining was that in our first week at university, we didn’t have classes yet. At least this sleep deprived version of me wouldn’t tank my grades. 

The schedule for first years at university was that you would move in a week prior to the start of your classes. During this time, you would attend frosh week. A week full of events where you got to interact with other first years from your program. This was very fun. At least in the beginning. By this I mean that in the first few days of the week before coffee stopped being enough for me to power through the sleepless nights of living in an oven. 

Despite all the sleep deprivation, I still did remember a lot of the events I had gone to. I recalled all the science first years getting together and learning some cool orientation dances as well as playing a whole bunch of ice breaker games. During these games I got to know a lot of other people who had similar upbringings as me, or at least so I thought. Since the University of Waterloo was well known to be a demographic that is split right in the middle at fifty fifty between Asians and Caucasians, I found out about a lot of other Asians who did classical music training but are now in the field of STEM. What an experience! Of course, the year also being 2012 meant that I added them all on facebook right away.

Being surrounded by like minded individuals during frosh week was something else. It was like you had finally found your tribe and realized that it was a large collective too. You suddenly felt like you belonged at last. What an amazing feeling! That would last a beautiful 4 entire days. Then I quickly snapped out of it. 

The sleep deprivation was getting too much and around day 4 the activities were also dying down. All the “friends” I had added on to facebook were suddenly viewed through the eyes of a stranger. Who were these people again? I don’t think I truly connected with any of them. While it seemed like we shared a lot of interests, in truth, I think we were just caught up in the novelty of the time. Looking back, I must have deleted about 80% of all the “friends” I added during frosh week. They simply weren’t people I really connected with at all. The only ones I kept were usually friends of friends who I had already known before but never really had a proper introduction to or people who lived really close to me. That’s pretty much it. 

This purging of my facebook feed started around the 5th or 6th day. Around that time is when I realized that the friends who I thought were similar to me, really weren’t. Those who “did music” usually turned out to be a public school band attendee with no formal music education. Some did do proper music education but even then out of those people, there was rarely anyone who did it to the caliber that I had done. Finally, out of those who did go pretty deep into music and RCM, they were all pianists. Not a single soul among those who did music properly played cello. The differences that we all had took surprisingly little to unearth. A quick search into their facebook profiles was all it took. 

While it was sad to have the illusion of an interconnected web of like-minded individuals being pulled apart, I would be lying if I said that the events were not worth going to at all. It was fun. I think it definitely was worth the time and money even though in truth it was all just shallow conversations being thrown back and forth. In hindsight, all of this was worth it even though it ended up leading to a mass delete session on facebook at the end of the week. This was a once in a lifetime event. It would be a shame if someone just skipped it completely.

In case you’re wondering, no you can’t recreate this moment, even willingly. Or at least that’s how it was for me. As I am writing this years after the event, I must admit, I often find myself unable to relive that level of connection nor euphoria of frosh week even if I tried to lie to myself. This is because with time, you tend to see much more of the world for what it is and not what you hoped it to be. This can’t be more true than when thinking about frosh week. 

There are a lot of reasons as to why this is but the main one for me was that the minute frosh week is over and school starts, all those friendly people you were buddying up would suddenly turn into rivals. 

LP was in my science program but my other two roommates weren’t. They were in the accounting and financial management program or AFM for short. From talking with them from time to time, I learned about something called the “big four”. In accounting, the “big four” was pretty hard to mistake. When you mentioned it, people immediately knew you were referring to the big four accounting firms in the world. In science undergrad, we also had a “big four”. These were the top professional schools/programs you can usually go into out of science undergrad. The programs I am referring to are as such:

1. The Medicine Doctor program (MD) aka “traditional med school”
2. The Doctor of Dental Surgery program (DDS) aka “dental school”
3. The Doctor of Pharmacy program (PharmD) aka “pharmacy school”
4. The Doctor of Optometry program (OD) aka “optometry school”

All of these schools had limited spaces and too many applicants. My entire program all knew about this. With the exception of a few science majors who wanted to “just do research”, everyone else was here with an ambition to add the dissertation “doctor” to their name. 

As the niceties of frosh disappeared, the race for the top of class to get into those precious spots in professional schools would start. Soon, there would be a social paradigm shift. Instead of looking FOR friends with similar interests, you will now go looking OUT for classmates with similar ambitions. What was about to commence was an arms race with resumes as the ammo. 

Right after frosh. The game was afoot.