Waterloop 

When Elon Musk first announced the hyperloop pod competition in 2015, hoards of engineers from the University of Waterloo congregated to make a team. Two years later, they had 60 members, a workshop, a prototype, and a tangled mess of financial records.

I was brought in to clean that mess and create a finance team from scratch. It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the project and devote all my free time to it. Within a month, I had proven myself to such a degree that I was nominated and elected to be the Team’s Co-Lead.

I was now managing 30 of the brightest students across the Finance, Sponsorship, Logistics, Web, and Safety teams. We were building something new, complex, and unproven, and that gave us flexibility to think big and try new things.

At the same time as I was spending 30 hours a week on Waterloop, I was also working as a full-time accountant at BlackBerry. Needless to say, I was busy. But I became obsessed with what our team was trying to accomplish, and it became my mission to support them in any way I could. I quickly realized that everyone on the team was intelligent and self-motivated, and that the best thing I could do was get out of the way.

— Top 5 Accomplishments —

1. I orchestrated a launch event for our Goose I pod that was filmed by Discovery Channel, CBC, and CTV. (pictured)

2. I raised $40,000 for our Goose I and Goose II pods and gathered support from the President’s Office at UWaterloo.

3. I designed a Facebook post that went semi-viral after UWaterloo shared it on their Facebook page. Two years later, it still remains their most-liked post. (pictured)

4. I led the administrative teams that supported the engineering teams, allowing us to compete at SpaceX’s first pod race in Hawthorne, California.

5. I convinced the President of Communitech to let our team into the tech hub, giving us free office space in Google’s old Canadian HQ.

— Top 5 Lessons Learned —

1. Find talented teammates, and give them complete freedom — Nothing beats having a teammate who is self-motivated and passionate about what they do.

2. Tool migrations can be deadly — We tried switching from Slack to TaskWorld for better project management, but it was poorly executed and we ultimately switched back to Slack.

3. Design is everything — We had a team of architecture students who created beautiful renderings of our pod. That gave us lots of sponsorship material, and helped convey our team’s mission.

4. Foster future leaders — By the time I left Waterloop, the stars of the team were in second year. They had be closely mentored by their leaders and were dedicated to the team. They subsequently brought the team to new heights.

5. Learn to love learning curves — Everything we did was new and complex. We developed a culture of “diving into complexity,” which was hugely beneficial as we realized how easily complex material could be understood.