Several Lessons Learned from my First Co-op

Some good, some bad, mostly pointless

So, I've been on Coop for the past month, largely explaining my lack of any writing since last term ... but now I've decided that it's four in the morning and mathNEWS needs me! And so I decided I'd create a record of the pointless things co-op has taught me that Waterloo tends not to mention

I use more self taught skills than class taught

Seriously, the first thing I did on the job was get handed a book on perl and told to parse some files. Maybe it was a bit more clearly specified than that, But either way, all the CS I did in first year has amounted to about half as useful as one article on Regular Expressions posted in mathNEWS last fall (Thanks Thor!) So for any of you looking for an excuse to read mathNEWS and slack off, go for it! (Sector_Corrupt can not be held responsible for any sudden increases to your failure count) Oh, also had I not spend several months getting extremely comfortable with Linux I'd also have been fairly screwed, so if you are still using the monstronsity that has the gall to call itself an "operating system", Windows, take some time to learn a command line that doesn't suck.

Money is Awesome!

Having lived off the Student Budget (attending coop sessions and presentations that offer free food) I forgot exactly how awesome a wallet with those paper things with people and numbers on it are simultaneously sexier and less heavy than those shiny metal things. There really isn't anything I can teach you here, I'm just reminding you that money is awesome and doesn't it suck to be a poor student again?

Cooking for yourself is hard

Seriously if one more chicken breast fires flaming oil in my eyes I'm going on a worldwide chicken massacre and I won't stop until the Zombie Apocalypse (Scheduled sometime next Thursday). If anyone asks, I'm preemptively ending any new epidemics of Avian Bird Flu, since we're sick of Flus from Animals

Cambridge is really boring

If you needed an excuse to feel sorry for the Architecture students, take a fun-filled trip down to Cambridge. It's almost as fun as PDENG! (... yes I'm a Softie.)

PDEng Sucks

For those that don't understand how much PDEng sucks, just imagine a flaming hot multibladed instrument shoved into your eyeballs. Now imagine what kind of experience would make that seem like a decent alternative. Whatever experience you thought of? That's the one you'd STILL choose over PDEng.

I miss Waterloo

Seriously, for a school that haunts my dreams with Calculus classes from hell and a general "We will spit you out like the feeble peon you are" attitude they have towards that whole "Giving me marks and letting me pass things" concept, I sort of miss going to class and seeing my friends. Plus seriously I miss free pizza from mathNEWS, I'm writing this right now for no compensation whatsoever (Uness an editor would be so kind as to send a poor offstream editor a pizza? -CorruptED)

So, in conclusion, Co-op is sort of lame but that's why they pay me money instead of taking it all away, I want pizza, and I really don't want to go to work but I have no choice so oh well. C'est La Vie.

Sector Corrupt