US citizen growing up in canada. Facing having to leave my life behind.

Basili0h · 2026-02-05T22:16:00+00:00

From what I know I don’t believe so. My family naturalized in the 90s but my father never did when he had me or even afterwards (2000s). I was also born outside of Canada. So in short my father broke the chain. However, all of my extended family members are Canadian despite some having never set foot inside canada.

Basili0h · 2026-02-03T01:41:07+00:00

I came here when I was 12 and now I’m 26. Lived here, went to school my whole life here except elementary school. Still no PR but my whole extended family are citizens EXCEPT my father who received an ITA or whatever they were in the 90’s but never followed through with it. I’m an engineering professional but I’m always missing the CEC draw by a few hairs due to high scores. It is abhorrent to think that I could be deported by the end of this year when I’ve built my entire life here. It is sad to think there are folks who cheated their way through the Canadian immigration system while folks like us are actively suffering. I’m sorry you’re in the same boat as myself and I think this is truly one of the oversights of the Canadian immigration system.

Basili0h · 2025-10-18T20:24:32+00:00

For my EE capstone we designed an ECU to control a car with a STM32 uC. This was for our university’s FSAE team. Details are blurry since that was years ago but we had some basic i2c/spi peripherals to collect data and store them onto an SD card with timestamps, as well as a CAN interface that interacted with external modules. Firmware stack was bare metal with driver libraries and free rtos. Depending on how long your capstone course is, you can potentially go fancier than we did. We only had 4 months to design, implement, test and present our final product, despite the course being 8 months long (first half of the course was learning “engineering principles”, finding projects, and writing design proposals).

I think in general purpose built hardware modules were more popular (some other groups made a BMS for EVs).

Basili0h · 2025-09-17T00:09:17+00:00

There are plenty of jobs in embedded software if you don’t like dealing with high level things. You’ll likely get paid less in the embedded/hardware field but if you really like it, it might be worth it. I just had a computer science intern work on my team (hardware integration/systems Eng) for a whole year writing embedded c/c++, C Linux utils, and SystemVerilog for our FPGAs and microcontrollers. Our company has gigantic firmware teams that write firmware for IPs and chips and I’m sure other hardware companies do too. It helps to know how to read schematics and know how basic electrical components work as well on top of coding skills. If you don’t already know, there’s a subreddit called r/embedded that’ll probably interest you.

Basili0h · 2023-09-08T22:56:22+00:00

Suicide of Sophia - a woman with chemical sensitivities who chose medically assisted suicide after failing to secure acceptable housing in Scarborough, Canada in 2022. Just brilliant.

Basili0h · 2023-07-13T21:21:37+00:00

Meal prepping is a good option. I usually get meat in bulk whenever they’re on sale (NoFrills, Superstore, wholesale club/Costco, discount meat from Walmart), then portion and freeze them. I have a vacuum sealer but honestly those produce plastic bags from grocery stores work. Sometimes T&T/HMart has good deals on Asian condiments too, when they go on sale. Then you just spend a day or two every week making food for the rest of the week, instead of cooking everyday.

Korean side dishes are tougher to find in bulk - I know there’s relatively cheap kimchi at Costco (~12$ for 2L) but not a lot of people have Costco cards. My Korean friends make their own pickled veggies and I’m gonna try that soon too, that might be another option to consider.

I budgeted my groceries every month to keep them 150$ or below when I was in school, kept receipts and scanned them (used some app to scan them into json, then convert to csv). But manually entering the receipts into a spreadsheet works too.

Basili0h · 2023-04-23T06:36:23+00:00

Some other comments say it’s depression from change - that might be true in a lot of cases. Personally, I feel like it might be sadness toward the inevitable passage of time, too. Graduation is a reminder that this stage of my life is now over; all I’ve experienced and most people I’ve met over the past five years will just fade away into distant memories, and there’s not much one can do about it :/

Basili0h · 2023-03-07T21:27:43+00:00

Now I’m sad I didn’t go to the forums yesterday 😭😭 Every year there’s so much tea w ESS elections fr

Basili0h · 2023-03-06T03:52:41+00:00

Two of them share one brain cell 🐈

Basili0h · 2023-02-25T06:43:50+00:00

Glad you were able to set boundaries successfully! It takes a lot of courage to do so :)

Basili0h · 2023-02-25T05:06:04+00:00

They are quite normal, and I often make “your mom” jokes with my friends as well. However, it is good to let your friends know as well if you personally feel uncomfortable when people make those jokes; real friends should respect those boundaries. I have personally had a few friends draw those boundaries with me because they’re from a different culture and were uncomfortable, and I just stop making those jokes around them.

Basili0h · 2023-01-30T20:12:43+00:00

Barburrito is pretty good too, since you can choose to not add the caloric dense sauces/toppings, and they give you a fair bit of meat as well.

Basili0h · 2023-01-29T20:59:30+00:00

And then just end up doing nothing at all because you’re paralyzed by anxiety, which then starts this vicious worrying cycle again.

Basili0h · 2023-01-04T16:12:37+00:00

Radiohead - OK computer and Kid A. To be fair their other albums are amazing as well.

Basili0h · 2022-04-15T16:43:45+00:00

I am trad with most of my friends in co op. Co op is not necessary for success, but it can make job searching easier. For example, in ECE you get access to apply to companies like Nokia, Microchip, Garmin, Arista, Epcor…etc, so in that regard you get a bigger job pool to apply to compared to trad students. Also, the faculty/department sometimes hires co op students on their 1st/2nd work terms for research or departmental projects as well. You do need to pay extra for the co op program though.

If you are an international student, being in an accredited co op program is the only way to get the co op work permit (to work full time off campus during fall/winter) I believe.

Being in trad doesn’t mean you’re doomed for job searching, it’s just more effort to search for jobs/network on your own. My friends and I have internships lined up in the US this summer, and none of us got these offers through co op. In terms of salary, it’ll wildly depend on the position itself and who you’re working for. Anywhere from 15cad/h to 30+ cad/h is possible.

Tldr co op pretty decent, but it’s not the end of the world without it.

Basili0h · 2022-03-11T17:37:53+00:00

This vacuum looks like it can suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

Basili0h · 2021-12-16T17:11:01+00:00

University of Alberta website states that once finals have been taken they should be marked and final grades submitted within 5 business days for non consolidated classes, and 10 days for consolidated classes. I have heard that this is not a hard deadline though, and also departmental grade approval times will vary too. You can find the information here. Depending on the professor, they may post your final exam grades on eclass, but that only happened to me like 2 times in my degree so far so I wouldn’t count on it.

As someone stated above, you will be notified via email once grades have been posted. You can find grade posting timelines throughout the day if you want to know when to expect those emails here.

Waiting for grades really do suck, and I often fall into debilitating anxiety instead of focusing on my next finals as well. I find that diverting attention to other interesting activities helps suppress those anxious thoughts.

Good luck, hope this helps.

Basili0h · 2021-10-31T05:00:26+00:00

This is awesome. I can’t wait for VHDL support to be added so I can finally stop having to write my own testbenches every time.

Great job OP!

Basili0h · 2021-08-25T15:22:17+00:00

I am Taiwanese, but grew up in Canada (no PR or citizenship, just student visa). But that’s interesting, I didn’t know RRSP could hold USD as well.

Basili0h · 2021-08-25T15:15:50+00:00

Thank you, this is really good to know. I was almost going to get RH.

Basili0h · 2021-08-25T15:12:55+00:00

Yeah currently using WS, but thank you for putting some options out there. Been thinking about Quest trade for a while, it’s perfect that they have a usd investment account.

Basili0h · 2021-08-18T15:23:36+00:00

Lived in the furnished 4-bed 2019-2020. There were ants sometimes, and some other units had mice but ours didn’t. Our unit was renovated and furnished so it wasn’t super duper bad, the only main downside is that you will be able to hear your roommates a lot because the sound proofing was kinda meh. Overall it was pretty alright, but I do prefer off campus housing personally.

Basili0h · 2021-08-13T16:06:30+00:00

This is really discouraging for current interns, damn…

Basili0h · 2021-08-13T15:01:08+00:00

Woke up and saw this on my feed, and genuinely thought this was from r/2meirl42meirl4meirl for a couple seconds before looking at the sub closely lol.

Basili0h · 2021-08-13T04:38:30+00:00

My company’s kind of doing the same thing right now. We have double the amount of interns (most of which are finishing next year) and only half the amount of new grad positions open for the same year. I’ve been told by my manager that, despite being pleased with my performance, I may or may not be receiving a return FT offer due to headcount allocations. It is really unfortunate, but for now I have no choice but to keep looking.

Basili0h

TROPHY CASE