Grade 12 is definitely the most stressful of all
grades. Grade 9 was getting to know the
people, grade 10 was all about having fun with friends, grade 11 was a reminder
that we are still in school and need to start batting down the hatches, and
grade 12…well it’s the most stressful of them all. You have to start thinking about what you
want to do with your life and with this on your mind stay focused on your classes. With all this stress do we really make the
best decision we can on choosing a post-secondary institution. Why don’t more of us choose a school out west
or down south? The majority of us who do
stray away that far from home are most likely on a scholarship anyways. Maybe you’re not ready to venture too far
away from your loving parents, or maybe the school of your dreams just happens
to be right around the corner from your house.
There are lots of factors that will either attract or repel one from a
school. I can imagine a Toronto student
applying would like to go to a university that is relatively large in size and
a student who was on student government all throughout high school wouldn’t
mind a school with lots of school spirit and a girl who liked having lots of
boyfriends would like a school with lots of cute boys, who knows? There are too many factors to count. The reason for this is last year when I travelled
to California and saw Stanford. I have
never seen a school so attractive. I
mean if you have the grades why not shoot for the moon and apply. I think too many of us narrow our preferences
to the point we just think of a school that is within 5 hours of our home. I guess whichever one you choose, you better
like it because the next four or so years this will be your home away home.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
It's much easier watching a movie than it is reading a book!
I’ll be honest I have watched a good amount of movies in my
day. And I’m not the one to stream it
either. 1080p and nothing less is pretty
much my moto. So you could say that I
know the difference between a good movie and a not so good movie. There are heartwarming movies that make you
feel good about yourself (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty). There are movies that are hilarious and not
one second passes where you don’t have a smile on your face (22 Jump Street). Movies that have you on the edge of seat
wondering, what the dickens just happened (Gone Girl). The ones that take place in history with a
cool plotline (The Imitation Game). And
then there are movies you have to bring up to your friends because they were
just so good (Interstellar). Every movie
mentioned I enjoyed and would watch again but, would I react the same way. With The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I’m
always going to feel good about myself and make we want to go do
something. 22 Jump Street is a movie to
watch with the boys and have a good time with, but if I were to watch it again,
I probably wouldn’t laugh the same way I did when I first watched it. Gone Girl was just a weird movie. That’s really all I have to say about that
one. Its main purpose was just to make
you think one thing and then by the end of the movie you’re thinking of all the
other 100 things that they maybe want you to think. Benedict Cumberbatch is at the moment, my
favourite character. I loved him in the
Shylock series and he was brilliant in The Imitation Game. And this movie made me want to become an
astronaut. I still do and it is only
because of this movie I want to. Space exploration
would definitely be one of the coolest things to do. And the fact of how small we are in
comparison to everything is truly just mind-boggling. My aspirations for when I retire to not to
travel the world, but space just like Matthew McConaughey.
The Leafs this year are entering an early Fall
My Leafs. My Toronto
Maple Leafs. Who really knows what’s
going on in the change room and on the ice for that matter? Year after year, Leaf fans are disappointed again
coming up short in the playoffs. I for
one haven’t watched the Leafs play since early January. Right around when Carlisle got fired, I was
off the bandwagon. You have to wonder if
all Leaf fans are like this, this just give up and wait patiently until the
next season when some new management, coaching staff or players join the
club. Basically you pray the new guy the
team hired can get the team to playoffs.
At this point, some people just might think the team purposely losses
just so they’re that one spot closes to getting the number one pick. I said to one of my fellow Leaf fans – my teacher
– “did you see the game last night…what a heartbreaking win”. That’s how I try to look at it because I want
the Leafs to come in last place and get first round pick so we can have some
hope to start off the season. It’s
especially hard to cheer for the home team when the team itself has thrown in
their jersey for the season. Maybe
wearing a Leafs jersey backwards at a game of refusing to purchase Maple Leaf merchandise
would be a better way of showing disappointment. Buying a $200 jersey and throwing it onto the
ice simply provides someone with a free jersey.
In the meantime, at least we have our Raptors to fall back on.
What is Facebook?
What is Facebook? It doesn't seem like a big thing anymore but, quite recently I'm giving them a big thumbs up. I can remember when I first got Facebook, it must have been back in grade 4 or so. See things were different back then, you would use MSN and not Facebook Messenger. A good majority of my friends don't even have Facebook installed on their phones anymore. Not sure why, we all spent hours on it back in elementary school. I guess Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram all have somewhat taken over Facebook. See, Snapchat is like Facebook's Stickered app, you can send a "selfie" to a friend or multiple ones. Twitter is similar to Facebook in the sense it is niche to just posting statuses, and Instagram is parallel to just posting pictures. So I guess you could say that all of these big social networking apps saw Facebook's individual purposes and decided to focus down on just one. What happened to Facebook Messenger? Hangouts and iMessage were born. Bringing this to a point I have broken my phone and at the moment using my brothers locked U.S. phone. This means I can't just transfer my SIM card to his. In order to communicate I must use FB Messenger. And this is when it starts to get good. See I suppose the board has decided to ban Facebook which I believe should be reversed. Banning Facebook has made such an inconvenience for me. My family and friends have Facebook Messenger so I can only communicate with them through that, but not at school. I thank FB Messenger because it is acting as the main conduit to communicate. Unfortunately, I am left frustrated becasue I am still unable to use it wherever with complimentary WiFi.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
What's the difference?
I have recently filled out my
subsequent application form for Waterloo and one of the questions was a) have
you taken a course outside of regular day school and b) what was the purpose of
taking it outside of day school. In the
last couple of weeks, it has become a habit of mine to read a blog written by a
prof. at Waterloo who administers the subsequent application form process. In it, he says they look down upon any
student who takes a summer school course.
And I thought this would was completely unfair. I know from my own experience, it was to
lighten my load in my grade 12 year, so I could especially focus on the more
math and science focused classes and to be able to take electives like the one
currently in. However, Waterloo believes
that all of their applicants should be taking their classes during regular
school hours because summer school is notoriously known for being easier. This is very untrue. My friends took summer school English in
class. Their teacher had a PhD in
Literature and was an English prof. at Harvard for 10 years. It is a very debatable topic one I find to be
just as debatable as school uniforms vs. non school uniforms. There are very good points for each side, but
what I believe the university is judging unfairly is why they are down grading
their applicants who take summer courses.
For students who receive a higher grade in summer school than what they
would achieve from their own school offered course, should students who have
tutors then not also be deducted who take school regular hours. In both cases, the student is receiving a
higher mark than they normally get in the regular school offered course. This is what I find to be debatable so
debatable I started a thread on reddit!
D.R.E.A.M.S.
It’s my second week back from the
Dominican Republic. Me and group from
school went down to the Mountains of the DR…well I guess up, depends on how you
want to look at it to help build homes.
The program, D.R.E.A.M.S., (Dominican Republic Education and Medical
Supplies) is in its 16th year and has built close to 50 homes. Having four older siblings who have recently
gone on the trip, I had a good idea of what to expect: poverty just about everywhere, no
electricity, no running water, etc…just about everything you would expect from
a developing country. And the school
presentations, every year the students from the trip go around to feeder schools
and tell about their experience. I knew
the program so well that I was even asked to go and present to one school, but
tell the experience from a point of view of someone who is looking forward to
going on DREAMS. Now that I have gone on
it for myself, I understand how eye-opening the trip truly is…sounds cliché, I
know. I mean everyone has that moment
when you say “wow, this is really life changing for me”. I was waiting for that moment all week, but
it didn’t occur to me until I left the village I was in. Usually when the group leaves, the girls are
crying and the kids are chasing after the truck waving goodbye. However, when I left something caught my
eye. There were three young boys, all
around the age of 10. They were your
typical 10 year old boy. They were 100%
all boy. They had been with us every day
at the work site and so after the week, me and a couple of the guys gave our
work glasses away to them. These were
tented glasses, so they looked like sunglasses more than anything and when we
were leaving I saw one of the boys wiping away tears from his eyes, trying to
hide the fact that he was crying. That
was my life changing moment. After I had
thought about it, it came to me, what these kids will do after we leave. They would continue their regular schedule, which
didn’t include too much since they didn’t have much to do. And that’s when it hit me, that these kids
will miss us more than we will miss them.
We offer so little of our little time and everyone there is so appreciative. It will definitely be an experience to
remember.
Hockey: A Game You Will Never Perfect
I have played hockey ever since I
can remember. I enjoy playing hockey. What some may find questionable is that I
find it to be a stress-reliever, most of
the time. My team has always done
well, one year we even won provincials.
But I’m not sure what happened this year. So far our record is as bad as the
Leafs. We have about 4 wins under our
belt with the rest with losses hanging on.
Individually we have an alright team, nothing that will win the cup, but
good enough for us to have more than 4 wins.
I bet my boot straps that it’s our team chemistry. In past year, my uncles were the coaches and
knew who to pick a team that could perform together as a team. I think my coach this year, tried to pull a “Money
Ball”. No matter what kind of drill we
do at practice or game plan we have, we just can’t execute. In my mind that this would be my last year of
hockey, I decided to step up to the plate and take on a leadership role. Although knowing only 1 person on the team, I
knew that it was necessary to do this for the team. I have taken on the leadership role at my
school so I have some level of knowledge on how to do this sort of thing. It was really difficult for me to do,
especially since some of my team mates I have never seen in the league
before. It was the first time I have
ever had to do this, since when growing up I grew up with the knowing majority
in the league, and in the past years switching leagues and having my uncles as
coaches. Am I happy and proud of myself
doing this? Absolutely, because now I
know what I am capable of, how to tackle difficult situations, and we are now
undefeated in the playoffs!
Who's Your Competition?
Computer Science is taking over
society. Literally. If you can code, you can get a job. And there are thousands of those jobs being
filled every day. But like most people,
including myself, they ponder over how to get there – that is – how to snag a
spot in Silicon Valley. When my brother
was applying for co-op positions a couple years back, he decided to shoot for
the moon and apply for an internship down in Palo Alto, California, home of
Facebook. He was a mediocre student,
nothing really to his name.
Surprisingly, he snagged that one spot from over 130 applicants that was
narrowed from over 1000. Did they make a
mistake? Is this really happening? Why
would he get that position? I blame it
on Waterloo. What is unique about
Waterloo is that it is maybe the most unattractive university, yet it attracts
thousands from around the globe. Yes,
they are known for their engineering, but what they now are being known for is
there well-respected co-op program.
Truly, Waterloo blows other schools out of the water in terms of
co-op. UofT, a brother to Waterloo, has
just as good as a program for engineering and better grad program, but can’t
even kneel down to Waterloo in terms of co-op.
What tech companies want nowadays are people who can learn on the spot
and be able to produce. They don’t care
if you studied at Harvard or Caltech, they care if you have had experience in
the field and know that you can
handle the pressure. And that is exactly
what Waterloo offers, opportunities in the field, so that when their students
graduate they already have an advantage.
So this is where I am left sitting…typing…
knowing what I have to do in order to reach Silicon Valley, but stuck in
traffic waiting for that exit so I can reach my destination.
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