On Saturday, I went downtown for something I never expected. Yoga. Well, a mobility clinic. Literally touching grass with others in tech.
NOTE: aliases are used here in place of people's names
I show up to a park and meet some super cool people. Creative Blocks is a coworking community mostly made for remote workers where they show up to cafes daily to do work in structured blocks, helping keep each other accountable and also giving people motivation by being in an environment full of others working hard. Tech Tank is a Toronto community that holds lots of tech events. Jasmine was the rep from Tech Tank and the reason I came, because I met her at CaseHacks earlier this summer, thought she was super cool, and wanted to chat more. Busy as she is, she tells everyone who wants to talk to come to events like this that she's attending.
The mind is strong and so is the body
I had a fantastic time learning that maybe I have been taking good care of my body by walking and going to the gym. I could even handle 1.5 minutes of plank at the end without too much trouble! I talked to someone currently applying for jobs about the pain of Leetcode, gave her younger brother advice on biomedical engineering from my own experiences and what I've heard from friends, and had Jasmine inspire me to post these blogs publicly because "what's stopping you [me]". I'm always grateful to meet people who challenge my thinking and push me.
How to meet a startup founder
After that, I met Elena who I've talked to a few times this past year. As a brief overview, I saw her hiring for a founding engineering on LinkedIn. I read the company pitch, loved the idea (and also felt very connected to her passion that bled through her writing - sounds like what I talked about last week haha), and realized the link to "chat or stay in touch" was broken. So I filled out the whole application, poured my own passion in, and said that I'm not actually looking for a job but would love to chat (and informed her that the link was broken of course). We talked a few times, I enjoyed hearing about her story, giving my own thoughts and having her thank me for the reflections, and I later introduced her to my Natural Language Processing professor because his domain in extracting meaning from words and personality in language clearly related to her work.
Wow, that overview was not brief. Moving on.
Chatting on Saturday, we finally got to meet in person! She's such a cool person and I always like reflective questions so asked a lot of those and learned more about her thoughts on how the business is going. Good chat, and I was honoured that she thanked me for making her think and reflect a lot afterwards. As we said bye, she invited me to do a user interview with her designer, and obviously I said yes! Then had a great time getting to know the designer, giving my feedback on the product, and hearing more from a design perspective. Although given that it is a startup, she's doing far more than just designing haha. Wearing many and all hats as they say.
Becoming a Teaching Assistant
On Sunday, I ended up making a new resume version to apply to be a TA! An exciting application of my new resume codebase, and it was for biomedical control systems which I really enjoyed last year. Mostly because the math made sense and I enjoyed the coding aspect. I even did every project in LaTeX.
New grad programs and what matters to me
During the week, I attended Scotiabank's TILT week - a week of calls where you learn about their new grad programs. Only for previous employees, anyone external gets to learn later in September I think. I doubt anyone will read this before then, so hopefully no one gets jealous. It's interesting hearing about the programs from people who have been in them for about a year, especially because the last time I talked to anyone in the program was more than a year ago. Fresh information is always useful. It's interesting because I think I'm more critical now, making sure that any opportunity I look for will actually bring value to me. Like give me the space to grow, make mistakes, learn from people with more knowledge than me, and surround myself with people who work hard. Luckily, I got that sense from the calls this week, so I'm grateful that Scotiabank is a solid option for me after graduating.
Other highlights
- playing pickleball with my parents and their friends and learning that I need to get better at placement and taking hard spin shots.
- writing a reference for someone I managed and them writing a reference for me! (still in the works but will hopefully be on LinkedIn soon).
- Preparing for a homemade k-bbq for my dad's birthday - he's wanted one for a while and I offered to plan the whole thing.
- Buying a domain and beginning to migrate some hobby apps to Nextjs so I could host them and begin using them in earnest (because who is going to use a personal helper app that you have to run on your laptop every time... much easier to make it mobile friendly)
Anyways, I feel like these have gotten very "what have I done with my summer" with less reflecting that I planned on. Unless I've actually reflected decently within each paragraph every week, perhaps I think more than I realize. As a takeaway from this week, meeting cool people is fun, and hearing from those in positions that interest you is always a good idea for personal and professional growth. Finally, challenging your thinking is good, and trying new things that might make you worried or uncomfortable can help expand your world and make you find it easier to experience growth the next time.