A university post-mortem

As I’ve been reading blog posts of friends and others and now that this stretch of my life is coming to an end, I figured I should write something about university and my experience. As I am sitting down and writing it though, it feels like uni is all I’ve ever known. I am always surprised at how easy it is to get into routine, am not sure if it’s a me thing or an everyone thing. One minute I am at home and I had my parents take care of everything for me, and the next I’m off to the other side of the world, figuring out how to do new shit, and it takes less than a month to get used to my new life, and another to make it second nature, making high school and my life back home seem like a distant past.

I guess the first thing that comes to mind is my friends. Despite having hated uni at times and wishing it was just over and done with, meeting my friends (now endearingly labeled the ‘Phan Club’) was a definitive ‘up’, I would do it all over again if it meant I could meet them again. This alone has made my time in university worth it. I got insanely lucky when some Asian guy called Ray tapped on my shoulder in the second class I went to and just introduced himself, and the rest was history. I very much enjoyed the freedom of being able to hang out whenever, wherever, and the spontaneity behind each and every hangout was something I very much enjoyed. Through this, I’ve been able to meet even more people, and I think I’ve been able to become more sociable and approachable, I’m able to handle meeting new people much better and am able to make conversation relatively well. All the while still being the otaku video game nerd that I always was. I’m glad I was able to meet such a good group of people, one that I can rely on, one which genuinely hopes and celebrates each others successes and encourages each other to be better, and one that I am able to hang with and will miss hanging out with so often, now that most of us are working adults.

I don’t like studying. I think learning is super cool, studying sucks. I will not miss having to study for exams and doing assignments a week before the deadline. Studying ended up being put on the backburner and crammed at the end of most semesters come exam season, and although I know this is a shared experience, I kept telling myself that I would actually keep up with the material every single time a semester started, said thing never happened. Getting carried away with the absurd amount of free time that I had (or time spent doing other endeavours such as part-time work) was way too easy, especially when I knew that I could just hit the books 2 weeks before exam season. I think towards the end I began appreciating the stuff I was learning, I would be cramming something right before the exam and would have a moment where I go “Wait a minute this is sick” and then I end up watching some more videos on said thing. There was a very real mindset shift between slogging through the material for the sole purpose of passing exams to get this degree, and learning some new stuff that is kinda cool and maybe finding out something more from what was said because you didn’t know how thing A connected with thing B or how the mechanisms behind thing X worked (still as a chore). Being able to appreciate this at the very least helped ease the burden that was studying, not only does it make it slightly more enjoyable, but also helps you do better. I highly recommend this to anyone who’s still studying. It’s not like you can force yourself to be interested in something you aren’t, but at the very least giving it a chance before completely discounting it can make a big difference.

My cohort was one of the first to enter the school after the pandemic, I actually almost missed half of my first year due to lockdown. My school decided to keep the method of study the same even after lockdown had since long ended, it was called Flipped Learning. You watch the pre-recorded lectures online like YouTube videos, and then having done that, you then go to the tutorials, which were meant to be supported by the material that you have seen, where they try to be more interactive, with the content that you’ve done. This of course means that, class was almost useless without having seen the online content. That being said, I didn’t go to class very much at all, with the exception of some mandatory classes which took attendance, I could sometimes count on one hand per semester how many times I went to uni for only class. At times, this did make me feel like I was getting a Mickey Mouse-ahh Khan Academy education from a top 50 institution globally (this was a common sentiment among the entire cohort), I actually didn’t mind it that much. I could watch the lecture videos whenever I wanted, and on 2x speed to save time. Moreover, the exams usually only required the lecture videos and slides, rarely ever anything else, so you would read the slides, take notes, do some practice Qs, and you were good to go. Something I did appreciate from the course was how practical it all was, at least a couple times a year you would actually have a coursework which involved actually writing code and making something, sometimes it was very behind what was the industry standard nowadays, but nonetheless it taught you how to code somewhat. As with any comp sci course though you can still absolutely pass this degree with good grades and still have no idea how to code, it’s up to you to do stuff to be more industry ready and even then you’ll probably spend 90% of your time being employed learning on the job.

Not only did the pandemic almost make me miss a whole semester and also changed up how content was delivered for the many years to come, it also meant that we were dropped into the worst job market this industry has seen since the beginning of the universe. It was an unholy combination of computer science entering the mainstream (the so-called AI craze didn’t help either) and a massive influx of gap-year students and newly graduated students applying to and getting into uni upon the pandemic lightening up and lockdown regulations loosening which caused this collective 2024-2025 graduate cohort to be absolutely massive. Every single tech company was absolutely spoiled for choice, and finding a job was near impossible. This meant that you had to grind for internships as soon as first year, and hope you land one every following year, or you’re in for a rough time come graduation. Fortunately I got two, and a return offer at the end of the second, but it has been frustrating seeing people who clearly are talented and deserve a position (especially those who need one to stay in the country) struggle to get even a single offer, job application success rates are genuinely looking like those horrible swipe charts on r/Tinder.

I’m not sure what else I have to write, but as of writing this I have received my results and will be graduating come 31st July. A feeling that I remember struggling with was the sense of feeling that I wasn’t ‘home’, of course I felt homesick during the first few months, but eventually that abated. However, a lingering sense that I couldn’t call this place ‘home’ remained. I think I had stopped thinking about that in the last year or so and suddenly now as I reminisce on that thought, I realise that that feeling no longer exists, and I cannot tell you what has happened for that to occur. I am going to be doing a bit of traveling before I start work in September, and weirdly I am kind of looking forward to both. I think university was definitely a worthwhile experience that I don’t regret, I’m not entirely sure if I liked it more/less than high school and whether I would’ve rather gone for an apprenticeship or the like, but hey after all, all’s well that ends well.