Chapter 37

I was an undergraduate majoring in Biomedical sciences. If you wanted to become an Optometrist, where should you start? That’s easy. Look at the UW Optometry’s website for prerequisite courses. With this in mind and trying to be as keen as possible, in semester one of year one in undergrad I had planned out all my courses and schedules for all of the next four years. I plugged in as many prerequisite courses for UW Optometry as possible and then all of UW Pharmacy, which was my backup. After that, whatever leftover electives I had, I chose to do prerequisite courses for Dentistry schools or even Med school. More backups because who knows how things are going to go. 

The planning was very easy for year 1 because there was pretty much no planning at all. Most of our courses were mandatory and required to simply be a part of the science program. This year, in truth, served as a rite of passage. You had to survive year 1 to say that you were good enough to be a science undergraduate student. Was this a difficult task? Not really…For most people. Some would struggle but most would make it out okay. The only problem then was, who wanted to be just okay? We were all racing towards the top of the class to get a shot at going into professional school. This was never about doing the bare minimum. We were here to compete and since year 1 had pretty much the same schedule for all science students, it really sized everyone up and introduced us to standardized testing in large classrooms. 

But here’s an interesting thing I would like to share with you. Despite the fact that I am now working in a field of STEM as I write this, I almost remember none of the things I learned in undergrad nor in highschool regarding sciences. Also, I’ve had conversations with friends of mine who did go onwards into med school, optometry and pharmacy and they’ve had similar experiences. The classes in undergrad were pretty simple and quite forgettable. They’re seemingly so unuseful that it seems it was designed to be more of a testament of will rather than a preparation for the future. I think the main reason for this is the fact that the courses taken in science were a means to an end. 

I took science classes in high school to get into university in a science major. I took science courses in university to get into Optometry school because they were prerequisites or were mandatory. I never took them simply because I had an interest in the topics at hand. They were just the means of making my application for Optometry up to par. This kind of tells you the real world significance about those courses. It seemed more like a hoop we were jumping through rather than a course that will benefit our understanding of sciences. Studying was hard with these thoughts, not only does your studying stamina degrade, so does your motivation to study. Quite expectedly, this would also spark the beginning of a very cynical view towards studying for a lot of those professional school hopefuls. What’s worse is that you’ll see later on that this would induce burn out. Another very common theme among those aiming for professional school. 

First year science undergrad was full of these courses and as I mentioned, completely forgettable. A part of me hoped that aside from the mandatory science courses of first year, the prerequisites for optometry school must have some interesting courses or courses that would be seemingly worthwhile to a future optometrist? The answer to that? Also no. Well…

While not directly related to science, I did find that out of all the courses I took in first year, the only ones that I would find to be not forgettable was Math. This was an interesting concept and not even a new one either. I don’t recall any of the biology or chemistry topics learned in highschool nor university but I remember all the math I’ve taken and even in the logic of its problem solving. Sometimes, even when I see the most complex math problems I’ve seen since university, a piece of my mind remembers going through the steps to solving the problems. I think the main reason is that math is more about a specific way of thinking rather than brute memorization. 

Now, I don’t want to paint a bad picture that first year university only served to make me cynical and hate the world. It did, but it was also quite a unique experience. Just like how it was with elementary to middle to highschool, the class sizes were much bigger. The competition was more fierce. This made sense, these classmates acted as the participants for the race ahead towards professional school. 

As I mentioned, there were 4 big schools that any aspiring Science student looked to. They were Dentistry, Optometry, Pharmacy and Med. Med was the most well known and probably had the most pursuers. These people were also the most hardcore. They entered the program with firmly established type A personalities and god complexes as large as their ego. They had to be competitive. Afterall, the acceptance rate for medical school was very low. You had to stand out. Otherwise, you were going to get left behind. While this was especially true for Med school hopefuls, other professional school hopefuls weren’t just slacking either. LP and I knew that it didn’t matter if some of our colleagues were aiming for Med school. They, too, probably had backups. If the Med school hopefuls ever applied into the Optometry school with Med school resumes, we were both going to be competing against them. While there were 4 professional schools, everyone was still in the same race. 

LP and I knew our place and knew our goal. We had both come from Agincourt C.I. with our eyes on the coveted 90 spots a year of the Optometry program. When the pressure started to rise up in the first year, we were prepared for it. Which was actually a surprising twist. I thought that university would actually be harder in all honesty. However, as it turns out, our highschool would prove to be more than just the school that gave me some of the best experiences in music that I would ever get in my lifetime. It also gave me a lovely send-off present in that it had a relatively difficult set of science teachers who had prepared LP and I quite well for university. 

I had an average in highschool of around 87% when I got into the University of Waterloo. That gave me an entrance scholarship of around $1000, which was nice. Though it was hardly outstanding. However, when school officially started and LP and I got our classes and assignments handed to us, it felt like a continuation of high school, not a common feeling for our fellow students. Our highschool teachers had prepared us for a lot of the material already. In fact, even friends of ours who weren’t in the advanced placement program for sciences in highschool seemed to do well. We were in familiar battlegrounds. 

While LP and I went about our days as usual, it quickly dawned on us that there were more than a few science students around us who were struggling. It seems some other highschools had not prepared their students for university. Highschools were smaller than university and in some cases, much less regulated. Furthermore, in highschool, you can also get credits and average boosters from accredited nightschools or summer schools, where regulation and standardization was even worse. What this meant for those students was that they were in for a rude awakening. 

I remember seeing a lot of people having mental breakdowns after the first physics midterms rolled around. LP and I walked out of it feeling like it was any regular old test we did in highschool but as we walked out of our classes, I recall the faces of our fellow students crying. It was hard not to feel sorry for them. They had been completely fooled by their highschools into a false sense of superiority had now fallen to the bottom of the class, or worse. Some of these unprepared students who once thought they were going to be rivaling those who were competing for med school spots have now found themselves struggling to pass. All because their high schools thought it was appropriate to let them enter university and do physics when they were never even taught a single thing about kinematics equations. 

While it was tragic what happened to those who were unprepared, it wasn’t really fair to those of us who came from tough highschools either. The unprepared usually got into university with GPAs that, while falsely so, were still incredibly high. I knew of a few classmates who bragged about entering our program with $2500+ scholarships due to their 90%+ averages only to have their egos shut down completely after the first midterm. That scholarship money probably could have gone to someone who understood sciences more and probably deserved it more too. It was unfair but to be honest, a few thousand dollars in scholarships was really not a fair trade for the ego drop. Even less of a fair trade when you recall that GPAs are unerasable and forever. 

Luckily, this rude awakening will hopefully be less and less of a thing in the future. This is because Waterloo and other universities are aware of such discrepancies in highschool. They have also been keeping track of everything too. In fact, they are even a few steps ahead of us because they also know of a thing called grade inflation.

That’s right, there has been a gradual inflation in the grades of highschool students entering university. It’s exactly as it sounds, more and more high schools are passing students with higher and higher grades. An average of around 87% may have been more impressive back in my day but now it was pretty much commonplace. LP and I found out about this around our 4th year of undergrad when a first year student had told us about how they entered the same program as us with an average of 96%. While this wasn’t abnormal, it struck us as kind of unique because they had also told us that their entire class had averages around there. 

It was from this conversation that LP and I would happen upon an article about grade adjustment for acceptance into the University of Waterloo. It wasn’t hard to find the article either. Between one of our study sessions the UW Reddit group posted it for everyone to see. The article said that the University of Waterloo was aware of grade adjustments and that they were tackling it. 

They did this by taking a look at the pool of students from a highschool and monitoring their grades in first year at Waterloo. They would then double back to see how their GPAs changed between their highschool admission grades and their GPAs after year 1 was done. Based on the difference, they would form an adjustment criteria to determine which school truly had the best students and which ones had the worst. This made things more fair. I remember chatting with LP and having a conversation about this, joking about how “back in our day, we failed class in high school and we liked it”. While I’m not sure how much hardship the kiddos are getting these days, it was nice to see that there are forces at play trying to make the world more fair. 

While I never found the adjustment number for my high school and its science students, I remember the adjustment number for my highschool’s engineering students. That was around an adjustment factor of 6~8%. A decent adjustment percentage and one to be proud of especially when you considered the fact that some adjustment factors went over 50%. Essentially meaning to say, if you want to get into engineering at Waterloo, don’t go to that high school. That or try to get into university with an average of 200%.

While the courses weren’t too bad for me nor LP, I did burn out at one point. I think at some point the motivation to study for courses I had no interest in except to use them for optometry got to me.There was probably another reason why I burnt out for which I attribute to a lack of sleep, stemming indirectly from a mismanagement of time. How did that come to be? Well, wait a tiny bit. I’ll be telling you about some of the extracurriculars I found myself doing for a while in the next chapter. 

Or…at least the ones responsible for burning out in first year.

P.S. If you want to know about my first burn out. Here’s the summarized version of it.

I found myself giving out on my last exam of my second term of year 1 university. It was beginner chemistry 2 or CHEM102 as we called it. I had been steadily taking out a loan of sleep in the weeks leading up to the exam because of some part time hobby commitment I had mismanaged. I was in need of an all nighter to study. Being completely unprepared and this being my first all nighter however, I did not have enough coffee and passed out trying to cram for the exam. Then, time skipped for me. I don’t recall going to the exam but I do recall waking up to the proctor of the exam exclaiming that there was around 30 minutes left. This was a rude awakening in itself. I had a sudden burst of adrenaline as I came to then, very frantically, I tried to answer as many questions as possible. When the exam finished, I walked out, unsure of what really happened. In the next few weeks, I waited for the exams to be graded and slowly, I accepted my fate. I screwed up. A failure this early into my university career would undoubtedly set me back in the race for optometry school. All those years of parental expectations hit me hard and I felt kind of depressed thinking about how inconceivably stupid this entire thing was. I should have just slept! At least that way I could’ve been awake during the exam. Instead, I pretty much guessed the entire thing. My only solace was that it seemed like the test itself was rather difficult. Even LP had a hard time with it. 

What added salt to the wound was that I was doing so well in that class too. I had walked in with an over 90% average from 2 very easy midterms. All I needed to do was pass the final to average everything out. But that was the key point. I needed to pass the finals to claim the 90%+ average I had because passing the finals was a requirement.

Then, after a few weeks post exam, a few friends of mine reached out to me and told me a rumor. They said that the CHEM102 finals went so badly that they may be bell-curving the finals. My eyes lit up. It’s just a rumor, sure, but it was still hope. I got a bit curious about how this may play out. I asked LP a few more times about some of the questions on the finals and found that I may have had a bigger chance than I initially anticipated. I had guessed a lot but it wasn’t blind. There were a lot of calculations on the finals, and our professor, being the lovely man he was, had left on more than one occasion, different units for the multiple choice answers. Which means, as long as you know chemistry enough, you can already narrow the answer down a lot. As I got my hopes up for a passing grade, the marks updated. I took a deep breath then looked on QUEST, our online transcript generator. I passed the class with a 74% average. 

I did a bit of math and found that I had passed with around a 60% or so on the finals though I’m not sure if that was a bell-curved grade or not. I was eccentric. Sure, this was my lowest grade in first year but hey, I’d take a 74% over a fail any day. Thinking back, I really wish this incident would have taught me to manage my time better. It is with a heavy heart that I have to tell you that the lesson I learned was instead, “how to pull proper all nighters”. 

P.S.S. For those who want to know. The trick was timely use of energy drinks and coffee. Followed by constant hydration.