from an interview by Sung Hon Wu in The Iron Warrior
June Lowe’s office is just a little behind the WEEF Lab. As usual she is wearing a bright dress and doing some programming, for an assignment a couple of weeks from now. She stops her work and gives her full attention to this very tired interviewer (studying for exams does that).
IW: Tell us about your background.
June Lowe: I’ve been here (at Waterloo) for 30 years. I was born in the "atomic" town of Canada, where they made the first CANDU Reactor, which is Rafton, Ontario. I lived in a town of 28 people, and I knew every last one of them.
Halfway through high school my father got a job with the UN in Iran, so I went to Iran. Spent a few years there, taught English (a lot of English). I started up doing 1st year University in Beirut, Lebanon. So that was nice, I did not have to go through all that you guys go through.
Then I came to University for my 2nd year in Ottawa. Then I went for a year at Queen’s, then I went back to Ottawa. Then I taught high school for a couple of years, then I worked with the government for a year, and finally I came here.
IW: Your job title is "Head TA" what does that mean? What is your role here?
JL: When I was hired, they had a lot of professors who were a lot more interested in their research than in teaching. My job here was to bring up the level of teaching, make it more important, and make it a priority.
Part of teaching is getting TA’s online so they know what’s going on, working with instructors, filling in the gaps where professors leave off and students begin. There is a big gap there sometimes, little gaps other times, and my role is to get that gap narrowed. I do whatever needs doing to get students through; so my purpose here is to help students. I am not involved in research at all.
IW: What is the most enjoyable part of your job?
JL: Students. Encouraging them, getting them out of high school ideas. Making men out of them, or women, that is what I enjoy. Getting them onto the road of success. The difference between here and high school is big.
IW: You seem to mention that high school is lot different from here. So what is the difference?
JL: Well there are a couple of things. Firstly, in high school you do not have to try very hard. You were comparing yourself to people who were generally inferior, less smart, less energetic, less enthused about school, and so you could get through easily without doing much work. Plus, the teachers there will give you a second chance, a third chance, a fourth chance, knowing that you are the cream of the crop.
Here you are one of the masses, so you have got to fend for yourself. You’ve got to make sure you know it, or else find how you can know it. Part of the problem is not getting help. Most people fail not because they are too dumb or too behind, its because they don’t recognize they are beyond their depth and they don’t have enough gumption to go to a TA and say "Please help me, I am behind…" or "Please help me, I don’t understand this stuff…."
There are so many students who say, "Well if I stay up three days and three nights I will catch up." Well, it does not happen, you cannot stay up three days and three nights, and if you went and got a little help from your TA’s you’d probably only need a night and a half.
The other thing is trying to do it all yourself. In high school you could handle everything all yourself and then some. You could play basketball, take umpteen courses, and join this club and that club. Here, you are hard pressed to get your work done, but if you try to do all the work yourself it is going to be really difficult.
What you need are some friends, some study buddies, so that they will learn something and teach you, and you learn something and teach them. Together you’ll get twice as much work done in one and a half the amount of time that each of you would have taken to learn from scratch individually.
So that is another aspect of changing your life around. If you do not get a handle on the time necessary to get all you work in, all you will be doing is swimming against the stream. You can succeed swimming against the stream, but it is a tough life.
IW: You have been here a long time, what is the biggest difference between engineering students back then and engineering students now?
JL: They are younger now, 30 years ago, everybody was 19 or 20 when they came from high school. Now they are 17 or 18. More than half of this year’s frosh class cannot drink!
Another thing is many, many, many more people are from single child homes, so they are a lot less tolerant of the noise other people make, or the interference other people make. They cannot work when someone else was whistling, they could not do things in a group and live in a group. Years ago, if someone cooked a big plate of spaghetti, eight people would eat it with you. Now I see one person makes his own, sure people share and do things together but you plan it, you do it rather than just a spontaneous thing.
Another thing, you guys have a lot more money. This university used to be the poor man’s university. The reason people came here was because of co-op and that was because their parents had so many children that they could not get money for tuition so they had to work. So this aspect has changed a lot. Now you guys have cars nicer than mine and you all have computers.
IW: You seem to know a lot about computers, do you have any interesting experiences involving them?
JL: I was part of putting together some of the C++ stuff in 1988. I did a sabbatical in Washington and I was consulted on some of the university and learning aspects of what went into the language. Everything I told them they ignored, but I was at least consulted.
I also had a very good contract one time in the U.S. I redid some COBOL code for a county government. They had a little program with something like 500 lines of code, but it was crashing and it did not work very well. So they paid me a couple of thousand dollars to redo this code. I think I did it in C with 29 lines of code! So I went and I gave them 29 lines of code expecting a couple of thousand dollars.
They were not very happy of course. But I got the next contract too, because my code was good and solid. The next time they told me, "Oh, you’d better give us a good price for this one because we overpaid you last time!"
IW: So outside of your job what do you like to do?
JL: Well, I built my own house, which is always fun. I fly, I am a pilot, and also I like travelling. I have travelled to quite a few places around the world.
IW: What do you think is the biggest difference between upper year and lower year students here?
JL: Enthusiasm, upper year guys just want to get out of here, just putting in time, they want to get all the marks, get out of here and start making money. The frosh are here and they want to learn stuff and do stuff. They are enthusiastic, energetic, and they want to conquer the world.
IW: What do you think makes Waterloo special?
JL: You work harder than you will ever work in you whole life, before or again. Somehow that is just somewhat satisfying and very frustrating but you will never forget it. But you play hard too; when you have parties, they are good parties. Everybody pitches in, does everything; they cook and do whatever needs doing. Party hard, work hard, and just do a lot of stuff.
Enthusiasm is basically what it is. You know one of the biggest things, best things about Waterloo engineering? In 1A, you get put in a group of 20 people. You get their photographs, get to know who they are, and you make friends very quickly.
In other places, you wander around from room to room, do not have a class, do not have a homeroom, you never get to see the same person. It might go five weeks before you see the same person, and because of that you get such long, lonely time with nobody. Often in other programs a lot of people often drop out in the first six to eight weeks because they are lost and lonely. They are overwhelmed with university because they do not have anyone to pal around with, call at 3 in the morning, to make life interesting other than just going to lecture after lecture.
So that is one of the nice things we do.