The lows are low, but the highs are home

As part of my new job, I’ve moved across the country to live alone for the first time in my life. I’d never been to Alberta (a province, for the non-Canadians) before, much less Edmonton itself. I’ve also never lived alone, unless you count a week maximum while parents might have been away. I’ve never gone hunting for accommodations, or debated the pros and cons of living in one house vs another. And I’ve never been this far from the people I love - a $400+ flight each way is a much higher barrier than a 5-15 minute walk or drive.

        So, this is pretty big for me.

        I was set to start work on May 1st, and my mom helped me book a direct flight early that morning. We were expecting to pay a lot, but apparently we were right in time for a sale, because the flight cost just shy of $300 after tax. We got a direct return flight, too, for the end of August - just at a slightly higher price. At any rate, even if it was as cheap as $600 round-trip, I don’t know if it’s worth it for me to go back home. Living expenses are cutting out a huge chunk of my income (nearly half, even if I’m frugal).

        Thankfully, parental contribution means I’ll get at least one visit from my girlfriend… But I’m already feeling a lot like a bachelor after being here for a week. Eating the same pizza for supper three nights in a row, anyone?

        Anyway, so that’s how I got here. In terms of putting a roof over my head, there happened to be an info session in Ottawa for the UARE program. Just a few days after I found out I’d be applying, in fact! When I went, I found out about the housing “board” run (in part) by the university’s Student Union. Through there, I found a room to rent in a house just one kilometer away - a 15 minute walk, essentially. It’s $650 a month, compared to $500/month for places further away - but I also get a private bathroom and a fridge to myself.

        So far: no regrets on the pricier place. I’m loving the location. I can wake up and get to work within an hour if I want. The extra $600 over the course of the summer will be entirely worth it, I think. I love being able to walk whenever I want, instead of having to obey the bus schedule (something I’ve never gotten used to, even after three years in Ottawa). Even though I’m theoretically 30 minutes away from campus in Ottawa, in practice it tends to take an hour for the trip. So there’s a triple benefit of freedom, exercise, and reduced transit time.

        On the last point: if we say I travel to campus 20 days out of the month, I’m gaining 13 hours each month in exchange for the $150. Not a bad trade, I think.

        I haven’t been here long enough to really evaluate my job itself, but I can say a few things about the University of Alberta campus. First of all, it’s really big. Or at least, it feels big, because their quad is a gigantic, flat, open space. They also have an indoor mall on campus, and today a food cart set itself up in the middle of the quad. I mean, you tell me - do those sound like things that would happen on a normally sized campus? (Though I’ve just realized that the one floor of their mall is probably equivalent to the four floors of Carleton’s University Centre, just horizontal. Still.)

        I do need to figure out an ergonomic situation for using my laptop at home, though. I also need to… maybe… meet some of the other three(?) tenants. Find out which name goes with which person. Maybe have one or two conversations with them, even. I’m debating paying for fencing classes while I’m here, though sadly they’re not within walking distance. Still, it worked for me in first year to get a bit of social interaction after I moved to Ottawa. Anyway, those are both aspects of getting settled in.

        The other thing where I don’t feel totally settled is food - I’m wary of buying too much, but I’d also like to have some variety. I’m kinda binary when it comes to how much I feel like cooking, and a parent’s well-stocked cupboards at home can support that. The space under the counter where I keep my food, not so much.

        Anyway, I just have to treat living alone and moving away as a set of exciting new challenges. The former is tiring to deal with at times, and the latter has left me lonely and restless at times, too. But it’s all part of the grand plan of my life, and four months can go by pretty fast if things are going well.

        Speaking of which, I haven’t written anything about my experiences this past school year, or summed up my thoughts about the summer of 2012…

[[Granted, most people close to me are well aware of this, so it’s not exactly breaking news. To be fair, it’s only been about a month since the job was confirmed. This post isn’t that far past its expiry date… unlike some of the other drafts I have in the works]]

I’m officially working at the University of Alberta for the summer of 2013! I’m part of the inaugural Canadian group of the University of Alberta Research Experience program. In particular, I’m working for the summer with Professors Greg Kondrak and David Beck on a project that was listed on Kondrak’s website. It is, in a word, awesome. It’s going to be great experience, and it’ll be awesome to have references from another university. Also, it means living alone in Edmonton, which I’ll talk about in another post.

But, for now, I’ll settle for talking about how I got the job. A life lesson, so to speak. Step 0 is to know that these kinds of opportunities exist - so you’ve got that one covered, dear readers. In Canada, NSERC and SSHRC have summer internships, the details of which vary from one school to the next - but the basic gist is you need to find someone with funding, and offer to work on something with them. The funding agency (or the school, if the program is like UARE) will cover most of the cost, and the professor pays a much smaller portion of your salary. It’s a pretty good deal for them, too.

For my job last summer, I got started just by asking the head of my department who had funding from those agencies. This year, I told my supervisor, Robert Biddle, that I wanted to work on something that would take me closer to computational linguistics. He racked his brains and realized that he knew of someone at University of Toronto who did work in the area, Gerald Penn, and helped me with my introduction and asking for a phone interview. We spoke, and Penn told me about UTRECS at UofT, as well as UARE. Unfortunately, the deadline was long past for UTREC, but I get the feeling most of Penn’s work isn’t really undergraduate-level anyway.

So then I googled “University of Alberta computational linguistics”, and found this page. The rest, as they say, is history.

And that’s how a plain old interview (which I fervently hoped would turn into a job interview) indirectly got me a job! Networking, y'all. Well, no, networking involves actually building a network. Audacity and asking questions, I guess.

Whatever you call it, the point is you don’t have to graduate from university without any experience. Continuing from above, here’s some steps to follow:

1. Pick a thing you think might be interesting, like computational linguistics for me, even if you don’t know the first thing about it. You’ll learn as you go along.
2. Then use the internet to find people working in the area, and send a really nice e-mail telling them how great you think they are.
3. Tell the great person you’d like to work with how great you are. First, don’t lie. Second, tell them interesting and only slightly off-topic things like “I use Emacs” and “I think Haskell is cool”, which (in my opinion) make you sound genuine and help you stand out a bit. Third, if you’re lucky, have some kind of reference they can contact (can be as simple as mentioning who you’ve worked with before, and on what).
4. Admittedly, Step 3 isn’t exactly a perfect set of instructions. Ask someone to look over your e-mail before you send it! They’ll tell you if you sound desperate. Hopefully. Consider asking another academic, like a professor of a class you took, what they’d like to hear in an e-mail from a random student.
5. Don’t assume your first attempt will work out, or any of your attempts really. If you get multiple offers and they have conflicting deadlines, be clear with everyone involved where you stand - there was no problem with me saying “hey, I’ll accept this for now, but if I hear back from University of Alberta I’m going there”. Odds are they have backup candidates who are a bit less great than you, but will do an alright job anyway.

You probably won’t be so lucky as to find a professor with a webpage that says “hey, here’s things I’d hire you for” but they may still have something of the right size for four months of full-time work. If you’re feeling shy about contacting strangers, it may help to remember that if you do wind up working with them, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. If it’s not going to work out, they probably won’t even reply, or they’ll just say “no” and not much more. And that’s okay!

Anyway, next time I’ll talk more specifically about the job and what it’s been like moving out to live on my own for the first time. Spoiler: I haven’t died yet, but on the other hand, I only ate two meals today. Oops.