Agree in general - though I'd stop short of questioning if the person needs to re-evaluate whether or not they should be in the program.

A lot of high school students come into university with no job-finding skills, which are going to be critical to their future success. Job-finding, interview, and general industry skills are hard won through experience.

Like failing a course, failing to demonstrate rudimentary job skills should hold you back until you can gain these skills. For some people this takes longer than others (1A + 1B unemployment at Waterloo is somewhat rare), but repeatedly being unemployed is not necessarily a sign that someone doesn't belong entirely.

Knowing little about his friend, my first reaction is that maybe he should've stuck it out. Waterloo is a tremendous place to gain job skills - there is no more fertile ground to test resumes and interview skills at volume than it - I personally had over 70 interviews under my belt by the time I left that school.

I'm not saying they need to leave the program, just that whenever you are struggling with something like this it is a good time to ask "is this for me?". Sometimes you do poorly at something because you lack skills, sometimes because your heart really isn't in it.

If the answer is yes, then next thing is to figure out how to improve in that area.

I agree with you. It wasn't that we were lazy, there were literally no opportunities to gain employment in high school for us. For example in my case I landed an internship within one month of joining University even though I was far away from silicon valley, they only used my academics and I turned out to be really good for them. Same cannot be said for canada where its a lot more competitive. I learnt a lot without having to take any risks as my uni life was independent of my proffesional life.

> "Same cannot be said for canada where its a lot more competitive. I learnt a lot without having to take any risks as my uni life was independent of my proffesional life."

I disagree strongly. Literally thousands of 1A students at Waterloo get placed every single semester, and while 1A unemployment rates are higher than any other term, still only a minority of students cannot find a job that term.

And nearly everyone finds something by their 1B term, putting them nowhere near at-risk from being held back.

Finding someone willing to let you intern as a kid fresh out of high school and only a few months into university is hard, but it is not insurmountably hard. This is an opportunity, not a burden - you gain far stronger job-finding skills than you would if you already had an impressive background.

Waterloo taught me more about hustle, presentation, honesty, spin, negotiation, and many other skills I'd never have learned had I already had strong credentials. The experience has made me a much, much stronger interviewee than most of the population, and has helped my career in huge ways.

A friend of mine literally drove down highway 401 with a pile of resumes, stopping at local factories and engineering shops to personally hand it to a hiring manager. This is the sort of desperation - but also hustle - that most people are never faced with, especially in our field. It is also the type of hustle that keeps paying even after you have a long and impressive resume.