My graduation ceremony took place earlier this week on Tuesday in U of T’s Convocation Hall. It seemed like a very hectic day, because I was always moving non-stop. I remember moving from place to place taking photos with my parents, getting the gown, gathering and following the other graduands, walking up to get my handshake and furry hood placed over my head while watching my step and keeping pace, picking up the diploma backstage, and going for further picture-taking.

Most of the ceremony was rather boring, the one thing I do remember was that Douglas Wright, who reminded me of the bald spectacled scientist from the original Half-Life computer game, recieved an honourary Doctor of Laws degree at our ceremony. Apparently there is an entire U of Waterloo engineering building named after him and he had some large role in shaping current government policy. I remember he gave the usual career advice to follow our interests and abilities.

If there is anything I have learned here at U of T, it’s a deep appreciation of the first part of that advice, the interest aspect. I found that when I took a boring course such as some of those mandatory courses that I was not particularly interested in, I always ended up taking a billion times longer to actually finish the work such as an essay for that course, even if the work was simple. This is bad, because it means time that could have been spent on the more fun work, is being eaten away by time spent on the boring work. And it even brings down my total marks for all courses. Despite the greater time spent on the boring work, the boring work always brings low marks, while simultaneously, the inadequate time spent on the other more fun work means less marks for those courses as well.

In economic lingo, doing work you are not really interested in, whether for school or in your career is actually expensive, in terms of Opportunity Cost, the only worthy measure of expense. It costs you time out of your life that you could have been spending on doing something more fun, worthwhile and more productively, so that your total fun and productivity output goes down. So, I believe I should always strive to do what I am interested as I will accomplish the most when I do.

Returning to Douglas Wright, he also talked about being unconventional, and more importantly said “I recommend that you be ambitious”. After four years in this very traditional university academic environment and coping with barrage after barrage of endless essays, it was refreshing to hear someone talk again about being unconventional, and about being ambitious. I never forgot, but thanks anyway for the refresher!

Photo thanks to Alan.