Alex Zhu

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a Y Combinator event hosted for Waterloo students interested in entrepreneurship.

Quick post to recap what I learned during my exchange experience!

I wanted to share five impactful learnings I was lucky to discover during my co-op at Shopify, one of the biggest tech companies in the world and one with a great engineering culture.

Fun fact: Ontario, Canada has over 330 provincial parks and more lakes than anywhere else on Earth: 20% of the world’s freshwater supply is stored in Ontario’s 250,000 lakes alone!

The University of Waterloo Debate Society had the incredible opportunity of competing at the Panama World Universities Debating Championship 2025.