Work opportunities come at surprising times...

This evening several businessmen from a subsidiary of London Drugs stopped by the senior Computer Science lab. They were on a tour and their guide didn't know much about the labs, so they asked me some questions. We talked for a while, and I was as attentive as I could be. As they left, one stopped to hand me a business card and say to me: "If you need a job over the summer, contact me." It pays to communicate well.

Everyone has different skills in communication. I've found this year that mine are everywhere except the written form. For over three weeks I struggled to get anything done on my Capstone/English-research-paper. Weeks. On the day of a group presentation in English, which I had forgotten about until that very day, I made preparations within half-an-hour and was voted as the best presenter.


All the talent in the world isn't worth a nickel if you don't apply it. Not knowing where to apply it can be just as bad, and to inflict that situation on yourself is a particularly bad pickle to be in. Years of living like a hermit has left me without connections, and little hope at this point of breaking into radio. The only hope for people like me is to work as hard as we can while we're in academia, even if we fail at everything every time, if only to be noticed for our tenacity by some passerby who then opens the door of opportunity for us.

Whatever you're doing, even if you have no hope for succeeding at it, keep at it. Even if in the rush of exam week, you're left with only a few hours to study for one; do it anyway. Those few hours will at least make a bit of difference, and you'll have some practice at defying the inevitable. If you learn to do that enough, you'll eventually find that a lot of these challenges are like the Wizard of Oz; big and imposing at first, but small and timid when you've gotten past the curtain.

We're university students. Look what we've already done. No matter how insignificant it feels, we've really displayed more quality than most of our generation. Even if things like UNIV 101 feel useless, even if they are useless, even if you were to leave Trinity Western and forget everything that you were supposed to learn; so long as you remained tenacious at your work, you'll find yourself in a better position than you'd otherwise be in.


I've only got access to a small netbook, which has had hard-drive troubles since this morning that endanger all the data I have. I no longer can run my Windows partition, and I'm running Ubuntu as my emergency OS, and scrambling to finish things. There's really no hope of getting higher grades in anything, but no one will be able to say I gave up.

Most importantly, I won't be able to say to myself that I gave up. When I face problems in the future, I'll be able to look back and remember that I was able to force myself to work on things I didn't really value. When a day comes that I'll have something that means a lot to me, and I'm tempted to throw in the towel, I can rebuke that thought and bring to mind the time I scrambled to prepare a Nutrition Analysis for HKIN 190. If I could wrestle with FoodWorks in a desperate 5-minute rush to get SOMETHING done, I can hammer away at some last-minute life-saving task in the future.