Mind Your Mindset

Throughout your university education and your professional career, you will be faced with things you have little control over. Perhaps you were sick right when you needed to work on something or attend an event. Perhaps you had some serious personal drama when you need to be thinking straight. Perhaps you were given really bad group members for a big project. Any of these things will happen to you and you will need to figure out how to deal with them. In cases like this, you may be tempted to crash out due to the terrible circumstances put on you. While being sad over these situations is fine, you will soon need to find a path forward despite these obstacles. Being resillient is a very important skill and it may save you from further problems.

Having a good mindset requires you to focus not on the problems you have no control over but rather what you can control in those situations, leading one to focus their energy on something productive: something they can fix. For example, in Engineering Strategies & Practice (APS111/112) you will not be able to control who is in your group. You may get people who have poor work habits and/or those who are very addicted to League of Legends. However, a proactive team member will attempt to engage with their teammates and attempt to find ways to solve problems in their team. A good team charter will make this clearer (by giving you procedures on what to do when a problem occurs and potentially whose responsibility that is), though APS111 removing roles in 2024 may make this slightly more difficult (I personally believe this was a bad idea).

A good mindset will also improve your chance of making good relationships. A positive attitude and positive actions toward your peers will make people more likely to see you as fit to handle real problems coming up in the work environment. That does not mean everyone has to be your friend, but it is good to increase the number of people with a positive impression of you.

Common Pitfalls

Plenty of students put too much emotional weight on their grades and might even take the dean's list for granted (perhaps crashing out when that seems unlikely). This is bad for two reasons: For one, your grades matter less than you think. While grad school sometimes cares about them, UofT starts considering you after a 3.3 GPA and I have been told by upper-years that a good working relationship with a professor is far more important than your grades. As well, you may negatively impact your own grades through perfectionism. One person I knew in fall 2024 lost marks on quizzes and exams multiple times due to them worrying the answer they were thinking of writing (or had written) was wrong and proceeding to not write or erase their work.

Attachment to grades also leads to resenting certain courses or professors which would make high grades difficult. While not liking what led to your situation is completely normal, avoid focusing too much on things you can not control. There are many people in first year who strongly dislike Engineering Strategies & Practice (APS111/112), particularly for the difficulty of getting a high grade and the inability for students to pick their groups. However, as noted above you have plenty of chances to control the situation which you should focus on during the semester rather than getting angry at the people running the course. That does not mean you should not try to change courses for the better, but respect the people running it and do not focus on it more than solving any problems you are currently facing.

Last updated: 08/09/2025