An Unconventional University Co-op
By: Nicolas Abou Sawan
Tags: Exchange, Software Development, Product Management, Internships, Video Game Development

There are certain things that school won’t be able to teach you, these you can only pick up when you are in a real-life situation. The opportunity to join a big company and work towards a massive, expensive project is very intimidating, especially if you’re not “fully trained” (i.e finished your studies and graduated). I mean, sure, I worked on school projects or participated in hackathons but those were low stake opportunities — there were no big repercussions for mistakes. Working for a major video game company and working on products with real-life impact was somehow different. It really put my skills and confidence to the test. I was definitely skilled and capable of completing the work — I just didn’t believe I could. Taking on an “atypical” co-op experience was an opportunity to challenge myself academically, professionally, and personally. My atypical pathway gave my answer to “Why am I in university?” a whole new meaning.

So, what makes a degree, a good degree to pursue?

Is it the clout of the University? The co-op opportunities or future job prospects? Is it that the content that you’re learning aligns with your interests? Is it for the sake of getting a degree and moving on?

For me, it is the ability to learn a wide variety of things and being able to define my own learning experiences.

I am currently pursuing a Joint Honours Management Engineering and Computer Science degree (B.A.Sc/B.C.S) at the University of Waterloo. I started off in Nanotechnology, but quickly found out it wasn’t for me and transferred into Management Engineering. I found myself wanting to try so many different things and there was not one program that could allow me to learn about the wide variety of things I was interested in. I was exposed to a few computer science courses throughout my degree and started to like that work. This led me to “upgrading” my degree to the joint honors that it is today. With my management engineering degree, I am learning the fundamentals of data analysis and process improvement. Our goal is to find inefficiencies in the “system”. We use modern techniques, such as programming and automation to make things work better and faster. With my Computer Science background, I can build on my skills as a Management Engineer to make systems simpler while being able to do more! I can put on multiple hats and have the skills to approach many different problems from almost any industry.

Over the past few years I had the opportunity to work in the public sector, as a project manager, and to undertake a data science research position. I have been a student for the past 3 years, but I haven’t been at Waterloo studying for half of that — especially the past year. (almost 16 months!)

– Why?

Well that’s because I have been defining my own opportunities outside the program structure of my degree.

I found opportunities to continue to learn and work towards my degree requirements but in different ways. Last September, I went on an academic exchange in Switzerland for a semester and took courses while I traveled Europe. I worked with Electronic Arts in Vancouver as a coop student as a Software Engineer for the past year (yes, a yearlong internship — something that is atypical for a UW student)

I joined EA in early January 2020. Only one week after I landed in Toronto from my travels from Switzerland, I had to get on another plane to make my way to Vancouver. I worked on the FIFA 21 development team as a software engineer. In particular, I worked on the FIFA Ultimate Team’s server. This was my first coop as a developer working in a big team of software engineers. It was an overwhelming experience — the number of times that I thought I would get fired or that I would do something wrong and shut down the servers worldwide (which is impossible, by the way, since the work I was doing was not even public) was too numerous to count. I knew that I might have been over-exaggerating how incapable I thought I was versus how incapable I actually am but for some reason, I still second-guessed my abilities. (TLDR; Diagnosis: Imposter Syndrome)

Experiencing and overcoming imposter syndrome, I think, is part of every student’s professional career (throughout coops and post-grad). You end up worrying that the skills that you picked up throughout university might not be relevant or not substantive for you to be successful in whatever role you’re in. You might be thinking that your team is secretly unhappy with your performance and can’t wait until you leave. For me, every time I had a check-in with my manager, I expected a laundry list of mistakes I made throughout the past sprint, and when that wouldn’t happen, I would start to overthink. I would constantly need validation from my team or manager. I would excessively ask for feedback which is arguably just as bad as not being proactive and not asking. When the feedback would come back positive, I would assume they are trying to “protect my feelings” and in reality, behind my back, they really were not happy with my work (which was NOT the case). Initially, I didn’t feel like I earned my place to share ideas on implementation, raise concerns or call out potential bugs. The funny thing is, my team always fostered an open and collaborative environment and always treated me as if I was a full Software Engineer so there was no reason for me to think the way I did. This was all an internal negative feedback loop that was running through my head regardless of what my team did.

Everything I just mentioned is all a mind game that your brain concocts to mess you up. This is a personal dilemma that everyone eventually needs to overcome internally. In the end, you have to learn to be confident in your skills and eventually self-validate your abilities and your value to your team. You should be able to identify when you have the knowledge to speak up and contribute meaningfully to the work. The only way that this can happen is by continuing to do your job, relying on the support and feedback from your team, and constantly reminding yourself of your capabilities. Also, remember the fact that you wouldn’t have been hired if they didn’t think you could do it, so cut yourself some slack. One more thing, when you ask for feedback and the response you get is positive — own it and be proud of the fact that they are praising you! It is not in your employer’s best interest to hide constructive feedback from you. I don’t know if I just had an extreme case of imposter syndrome or there are other people that think like me — but it took me a while to trust in “I only have positive things to say about your work so far”. This is not something you’d be able to learn in university because you very rarely are put in a position where you are working towards an outcome as a team to achieve something other than a high mark. This will come as you do more co-ops or positions and will be something you will learn from — it’s part of the process.

Once I overcame that — working on FIFA has been one of the best experiences ever! My confidence in my development skills improved, I learned new software skills and worked on a massive worldwide game — something that school is not able to offer. I felt that I was learning so much, arguably more useful stuff too, by working and learning on the job — all while being remote! As August came around, I began to wrap up my time at EA. This was also the time when school was transitioning to online delivery.

I was expected to go back to school for the fall term and continue my studies, but I wasn’t ready to go back yet. I knew I was ready for a change, but I wasn’t sure if school was the change that I wanted. I knew there were more things that I wanted to explore before going back and hitting the books again. Also given how uncertain the COVID pandemic has been, I wasn’t ready to leave my internship and risk not being able to find another job for a future co-op. Fortunately, an opportunity came up at EA where I was able to transition to another position that I really wanted to try — product management. This was a position that I have never held before nor was I fully aware of what product managers do — you could say I was unqualified (or so I thought I was). I had some idea of what a PM does, but not enough to know if I would like it or not. All I knew is that it was something I wanted to try doing and I took my shot. Long story short, my new team took a chance on me, and now I am a Product manager co-op on EAX working on some pretty interesting features using my skills that I learned at UW in ways I didn’t expect.

Product Management is at the cross-section of many domains — Design, Data, Software Engineering etc. It is a field that can best be learned by doing, not just by studying. Good product managers come with a lot of industry experience and leverage a variety of skills. Industry experience is not picked up from the textbook in school — it is something that is learned through exposure to the real situation. Sure, theoretical knowledge is important and a foundational understanding of a variety of subjects (Business acumen, technical understanding, data skills) comes from school. However, PMs use the foundations from a variety of fields simultaneously and use their understanding of the industry and their customer base to understand the problem spaces that they face. The ability to effectively use all the skills from all the different subjects at the same time comes with practice and iteration on real-life problems with real-life solutions — not some case study in a course.

TLDR; PMs are experts at being non-experts — which is something that is not easily definable in school but becomes more clear as you continue to work with real-life examples.

In just 2 months, I grew from someone who had a rudimentary knowledge of what product managers do, to managing two multi-million dollar features on the EAX team. It is fascinating to be able to work on a problem and really understand who the user is and what we, as a product team, need to do for the user to help solve their problems. Finding the right problem to solve is arguably the hardest part of the job and to be able to go through the iterations of problem discovery and action on feedback in each round has tremendously improved my abilities. I have a better understanding of what skills I need to continue to refine and now, going forward, I can customize my learnings to target subjects that I am deficient in. This could be taking more CS courses to improve my technical understanding, taking more business courses to gain a better business acumen, or taking statistics courses to familiarize myself with fundamental data management theories.

I could have gone back to school, stuck to the status quo, studied online, and hoped that I got another job when I was expected to go back to coop but I found the opportunity at EA to be more advantageous and worthwhile that I was willing to risk delaying my graduation in favour of working more and experiencing different things. Now I plan on working at EA for another two terms and then next year splitting my time between school and work. I expect to be back to school full-time in Summer 2021, but I am ready for any curveballs that may come my way!

School is not just checking off degree requirements and following the path set out in front of you. Take the opportunity to define your own pathway and customize your studies to meet your needs. I learned so much from my exchange and my extended internship that I would have never been exposed to if I just went back to school. Try new things if you are unsure of what you want to do or find opportunities to refine those skills as you work towards your end goal. Sometimes following an atypical pathway may be more rewarding than following what may seem like the most logical or straightforward thing to do!