The beginning of my Toronto story

For the last four months I have been meaning to record my adventures and my trip out to Toronto. This is me finally getting around to it.

This all started 2 years ago with with a Computer Science course and a troublesome professor. The course was a disaster from the very first week. The professor was away at some conference and let a TA handle the class. The TA tried to explain the professors brilliant idea of reducing the grading scheme into to A, C or an F. The students nearly started a riot. Even after the professor returned and tried to calm things down, the class was hostile and the students just glared at the professor for the entire class, slipping in snide remarks and sometime outright laughing at him. The professor retaliated by making the assignments deadly and long. The hostility escalated on both sides and the class degraded into a war zone.
The course was a required for my degree, so I had little choice in taking it. Nor did I really have an option in putting it off. So I tried to make the best of a bad situation.

I managed to crawl out of that class with a passable mark. And thought I would have forever put that behind me and would never have to deal with it again.

My friend Grant, who is much more reasonable than me, started working for this professor. I thought that was strange, considering all the issues with that class, so I asked him about it. He gave a defense of the professor and explained how it was a bad situation and not really the professors fault. He went on to tell how good of a professor he was to have as a supervisor, and that he was looking for students to work for him.

It was right around this time that my parents told me they where moving. And that I was not moving with them. I don't blame them, I would want my freeloading son out if I was in there shoes.

With no real source of income, and no desire to work in something that was other than my field, I went back to Grant to ask about working for this professor. Next thing I knew, I was in his employ.

I talked my cousin into letting me move in with him, and soon I was living in the closet under the stairs in the basement apartment. I remember looking up at the spot where the spiders would crawl out of and thinking: at least the rent is cheap.

Working part time turned into a full time research grant over the summer and then into the topic for my honors theses again in the fall.

It was in the spring that things began to change. I had moved around a few times since then and was not so sure of my financial situation. Around this time my professor started to disappear. I never got the full story of what was happening, but he stopped showing up to our weekly meetings and there were rumors and whispers about him leaving the university.

By this time Grants project had moved out of the hands of our professor and had been picked up by IBM. It turned out that our professor had done some research for IBM in the past.

I met up with Grant in the halls in the spring of this year and we got to talking about out various woes. I was not getting enough hours from my professor and Grant's project was too big for one man to handle in the short time it needed to be done. If only I could find another research position to aid my funding, and if only Grant could find someone to help with his project.

A few weeks later, Grant got back to me and told me that, unfortunately, IBM would not be interested in hiring me on for this project. Instead they would like to take both of us on as interns for 16 months in Toronto.

There is the beginning of my Toronto story, stripped down to the bare essentials.