neo's bizarre university and work and canada adventure: part 1
04/10/2024
although i've long dreamed of living in a foreign country, it was always such a distant, abstract future that i never really crafted a real plan for how to achieve that goal. it was always a problem for "after i graduate from university". well, it recently dawned on me just how close that reality is now and that i'd have to very quickly start thinking about how i'm going to start my life in Québec, as has been my dream for the past 2 years. i've had to think hard about what kind of career i wanna have and what steps to take to make my immigration possible.
this is part 1 of a two-parter article! here i'll bring some reflections on my school and work experiences. my long and roundabout trajectory in school is such an integral part of neo lore that i always seem to end up talking about it to anyone i meet. the more time passes, the less fun and the more distressing it becomes to talk about it.
i don't wanna make it sound like i don't realise that i'm privileged for not having had a job by age 25, of course i know it. my family (namely my father) always had the means to support me and ensured i had a good private education while also giving enough money for me to spend in indulgences without worrying about bills or whatever. as a result, i never had need of work to support myself.
here is one difference i very quickly noticed between brazil and canada: here, my understanding was that young people that work (either while or rather than studying) do so because they and their families need money to survive. in canada, a lot of folks start working part-time as teenagers, even if their parents do have money. people on average are poorer in brazil, so i always thought that working as a student was something you only did if you absolutely needed to. whereas in canada, it seems that kids get working fast voluntarily, to become more independent. it's one of the things that gave me a culture shock when i visited for the first time, and made me more self conscious about my position as a full time student for the past 10 or so years.
international relations and my first work experience
before i go into my plans for the future, i have to give context for where i'm coming from. so back in 2016 i had just entered university in a Materials Engineering course, which i picked more for the materials part and less for the engineering. my dream was to become a scientist, and i chose that degree because it was very Chemistry-focused while also being more profitable than pure Chemistry. whether in academia or in the private sector, i wanted to do research. however, poor performance led to depression which led me to do a school reset after lengthy talks with my family. that's how, in 2019, i started two new degrees at the same time: International Relations in a renowned private institution (where my sister studied Law) that had just launched the program, and Chemistry in the same public, totally free university i had already been in for engineering. the idea was that i could study my passion subject in the evening while also acquiring useful marketable knowledge in the morning. there were some things that interested me in IR, but overall it was 90% motivated by career prospects.
it was through IR that i got my first work experience. one day our IR theory teacher/founder of the school came to class and said he had some spots open for an internship. i immediately emailed his colleague and got accepted — to this day i'm convinced it was first come first serve, lol. the job lasted just one month, july 2019, and i was part of a team of research assistants tasked with building an Excel database to be used in the teacher's ongoing research. there were four of us, and each day we would go in the office with our laptops, open our PDFs and read through them, and enter all the relevant information contained within in our own individual databases. before going home, we would send our spreadsheets to our supervisor. we did about 30 hours a week and got paid what was basically a nominal sum, only 600 BRL, for all our work. research grants in brazil are ridiculous like that.
as someone who's quite methodical and likes to leave no stone unturned, i did really great in that job. i completed my spreadsheet efficiently while also making sure every detail about every document was included, writing notes in perfect portuguese (i only mention this because a shocking amount of people write quite badly) and keeping it as organised as possible. it was a short gig, but i was really proud of it.
unfortunately, i wasn't doing so great at some classes. on the second semester i got an actual 0% on a macroeconomics test, which made me have an honest to god breakdown. after class that day, i went to have a conversation with another teacher and talked about my ambitions for the future, what i envisioned for my career, and my difficulties with studying. that was also the day my dream of doing research died. he revealed to me the reality of academia, the suffering, stress and impostor syndrome that plagues every prospective author. i realised i could not possibly take on that burden. after that day, my visions for the future were shattered, and it took a long time for me to find a new way.
nevertheless, i still had my little database experience to ground me. our month-long internship served as a trial for the professor's research methodology, and given that it was pretty successful, he continued to built upon it: he recruited more assistants, transformed the offline individual Excel spreadsheets into a shared Google Sheets database, expanded the sheets to include more information, and set in place standards so everyone's work looked about the same. at the start of 2020, i came back into the project for another run. this time we were going to mostly be working from home and logging our own hours, an arrangement that worked surprisingly well for me (considering how easily distracted i am). i felt really proud that the project supervisors found my work so impressive that they wanted me back! i kept up my high standards of work and finished my workload fast enough that i was asked to help other assistants who were lagging behind on their own. at the end of the grant period, i helped my supervisor sort some document scans he obtained on a trip to the country's capital, ending the internship on a fresh note. our pay this time around was slightly better at 900 BRL a month, and i worked 3 months.
although short, only 4 months in total, this research assistant job was super gratifying, allowing me to develop and apply my skills in an interesting project that i still talk about with other people. some time later i got in touch with the professor to ask how the results were coming along, but from my quick searches it doesn't seem like he has published the paper yet.
once lockdown began around march of 2020, my IR school, with their vast resources and more technology-savvy professors, very quickly adapted to the new format; my chemistry school on the other hand took a while to get back on its feet. some teachers shared prerecorded lectures, others tried live meetings, and some just seemingly gave up on teaching at all. it became clear to me that i was gonna have to focus on IR full-time, especially since they multiplied their already high workload to compensate for no in-person classes. i gradually stopped caring for chemistry and failed all but one class. at the end of the semester, i dropped my chemistry degree (for the time being).
chemistry and my second work experience
evidently, this situation did not last. while at first i enjoyed the cozy feeling of waking up on a cold morning and getting on Zoom in my PJs and a blanket, i became overwhelmed by the amount of assignments and group projects (oh my god the group projects). i began to miss classes, not retain much from those that i did attend, and i was just putting in the bare minimum effort. by mid-2021, i'd had enough: if i was going to not learn anything at school, i may as well not learn anything in a free university rather than one that cost a fortune. so i did my big switcharoo, dropping IR (definitively) and returning to chemistry. this move made it so my classes became all desynced since i re-entered in the middle of the school year, but ultimately it's all worked out and i'm on track to finish this year.
luckily for me, unlike engineering and IR, my chemistry course does not have a "capstone project" at the end, which is great because i'm not sure i could handle it lmao. instead, we're only required to do an internship at a company in related fields, or at a laboratory in our university. last year, in 2023, i had a brilliant class called Coordination Chemistry which i really enjoyed, and i got along well with the professor. i thought that was my chance to get my internship done, so i asked him for a project and he offered one, so on the second semester i started my "scientific initiation", as these student internships are called here. it's possible to have a grant for these, but that topic was never brought up in our discussions.
the topic wasn't really something i was very interested in, but i wasn't in a position to be too picky so i accepted it. i was to continue the investigation of a material their lab had developed, picking up the research where a previous intern had left off. what made it kind of cool was that it was a material with a pending patent, so the professor always emphasised that we shouldn't disclose details about its synthesis and functioning. i received a vial containing the previously synthesised material, and was tasked with conducting experiments to assess its potential as a remover of pollutants in water.
the practical part was quite simple. i made a calibration curve for a solution of methyl orange dye by preparing flasks with known concentrations in a gradient and correlating them with their UV-vis absorbances using a spectrometre. using a fixed mass of the solid and solutions with different concentrations, we can verify how much solute was adsorbed by the solid (aka how much of the dye the material can "hold onto") after they have mixed for some amount of time by comparing the UV-vis absorbances before and after the mixing. the expected result was a curve called an isotherm (usually a Langmuir or Freundlich one), which rises quickly and then reaches a plateau after a certain concentration.
well, that was easier said than done. i could not figure out why my experiments were not giving nice isotherms like i expected. for weeks i redid the same steps, tweaking parametres such as the concentrations of methyl orange and the amount of time i left them mixing for. at one point, i left them in the spinning machine for like 3 days. i wasn't staying in the lab for very long each day, only about 4 hours, but it was still disheartening to do everything over and over and at the end of the run discover that the curve still didn't have the look i wanted. i guess that makes me a bad scientist, to be so attached to an expected result that for a long time i couldn't fathom that perhaps it just wouldn't follow the theory at all due to factors out of my control.
the professor that gave me this internship barely got involved with my activities, rather it was another researcher at his lab that followed my progress. i told him a few times that i was getting increasingly exasperated by the results, until after several weeks of trying i decided that i had better just move on. upon later reflection, i realised that i probably should have deduced sooner that the material would have poor interactions with the dye i was working with, due to their chemical natures.
but after that series of stressful lab sections, i started the easier part of my project. i would take a sample of the solution post-adsorption and run it through a gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy machine, in order to identify what compounds the material was turning the orange dye into. this task was as simple as waiting about half an hour for the machine to get into working conditions, injecting a tiny sample into the machine, waiting for the 20 minutes it was set to run for, save the results and then wait another 30 minutes for it to reset for the next sample. it was a lot of waiting around! this was a more qualitative analysis, so i wasn't too worried about the results; whatever compounds came up in the software's matching algorithm, i could explain in one way or another.
once i had gathered enough results, i wrote my report and handed it in, obtaining a 70% grade and just like that, being done with the mandatory internship. honestly, i don't feel like i contributed much to the project and it could have gone much better had i just been more flexible or creative, but i learned how to work in a lab on my own, how to plan out my protocol and ensure i had all the data i needed, and even use the software our teachers like to use for more professional looking graphs. i also got friendly with the other researchers at the lab, and having a little community there definitely helped to lessen the pressure i put on myself, and make my trips to the lab a bit more fun.
roundup of part 1
so it's clear that i don't have much professional experience. my first job, 4-5 years ago, was only 4 months long in total and had nothing to do with the studies i ended up pursuing. my second experience i don't even consider a real job; it was unpaid, lasted about the same amount of time as the first, and really just felt more like a regular class than any kind of job. what's more, it was basically effortless for me to land those opportunities. as of writing this i have tried applying for a few jobs and got the taste of rejection that all fresh graduates are used to, but until this year i never had to work my ass off to get a job.
my roundabout higher education journey and meager work experience are starting to make me nervous about my future. i've wasted a lot of time in these past 8 years due to a lack of effort, mental health struggles, loss of direction, and as mentioned at the start, perceived lack of necessity to work.
so this has been a summary of my activities since 2019, when i restarted university and tried to expand my knowledge toolkit by taking two very different degrees, only one of which ultimately worked out, but which both gave me some modest work experience. in the next article, i'll talk about how this journey is influencing my plans to move to Canada and what my current strategy is!