First year advice

So you’re starting your first year at Waterloo and you’re kind of nervous?

I read a lot of first-year guides before I came. They mostly cover imposter syndrome, the coop search, social events, whether to take the advanced math classes. I learned a lot from them, but a few pieces were missing, so I wrote up the things I wish I’d known.

I don’t know you personally, so take all of this with a grain of salt. I’m no expert, but I think I know enough to help out.

1The summer before

Audit the grad courses the tcs and combo departments are offering, don’t let your academic advisor find out. Those two subfields need the least background, don’t waste your time learning real analysis or number theory or something, you won’t get to the frontier fast enough.

Don’t email profs, that makes you look bad. Instead, solve an open problem they’ve been working on and approach them at office hours, or after class if they don’t have any.

21A

Take m145 m147 cs145, you’ll need to do fewer assignments and put up with less random bs from the graders.

The most important deadline in 1A is stoc, around two months in. Since recently you need the paper on arxiv before you submit. A first submission needs an endorsement from someone who already publishes in the category (ask the profs you met in the summer), and moderation takes a few days, so post a week beforehand. Get at least three in, with at least one of them contending for best paper.

After that you should be working on your startup:

Incorporate as late as you can, ideally right before your first enterprise deal, so the curve you show investors is as steep as possible. I recommend Stripe Atlas.

Do enterprise coop to get yourself out of the usual obligations next term. It counts as a work term, except you spend it on your own company.

31B

Spend all of 1B on your company:

• You want to get something called the Thiel Fellowship, it’s a good way to get a lot of likes and followers on twitter.
• Only take money from Sequoia or a16z. YC and everything else is low aura.
• Uncapped safe’s until the series a.
• Anything can be vibe coded in two days, so you want a shitty broken product and a massive enterprise sales team.

The o1 is the easiest way into the US, which is where the investors and the people you want to hire are. For the three categories use awards (your imo/ioi first places), published material about you (a news article about the best paper contender) and authorship of scholarly articles (the stoc papers). Don’t use original contributions, that one makes you argue the work mattered, which theory doesn’t.

If you forgot to apply to the Thiel Fellowship, start writing your mit transfer essays (due around two months in). You can mostly use ai for these, you just have to make sure your pipeline doesn’t produce ai sounding output. Also assume the reader is nontechnical and drunk.

If some of your papers didn’t get into stoc and you still need an o1, write some more and send them to focs in the summer.

4First year summer

Get tax counsel who’s experienced with acquisitions, ipos and qsbs stacking.

Then I recommend something in Atherton.

Congratulations on your acceptance. I’ll write a second year guide on terraforming Mars when I get the chance.