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Western's first year computer science courses are pretty easy, there's not much prep you need to do for them. That being said, university-level mathematics can be a pain and since it's a skill that you kinda learn for life, you could start learning university level calculus, algebra, and geometry.

Rather than prepare for academics though, I'd prepare for the challenges that are university as a whole. I'm gonna give a bunch of advice, some questionable, some maaaaybe offensive, and some tame. IMO, they're all good advice though you may have to pick and choose depending on your home situation.

• I'll start with a really questionable one off the bat. If you see yourself drinking at some point in the future (even if it's like one glass of wine for formality at a banquet), I'd recommend figuring out what level of alcohol you can take responsibly even if you're academically rigorous. FWIW, my first year roommate who maintained a high 90 average in medsci had two nights where he let loose between then and now. If your parents are chill or only school-strict, ask them to supervise you (drinking scotch over a nice movie is pretty fun). Otherwise, find a day where you can sneak to a responsible friend's place for 12-14 hours. It's better to know that you can only handle 4 shots/4 beer cans going in than to have a rough surprise of getting knocked out by 7 shots or alcohol poisoned at 9.
  
  
• If your parents don't set you up with an allowance or if they're strict about how they let you spend their money, pick up a part time job over the summer. It sucks to have money as a constraint. If you can put away even $4000, then you can put a bunch of that towards your OSAP loans AND still have some "fun" money left over. Having $500 to do whatever with in first year is amazing, after that it's somewhat marginally-diminishing, but it's better to have than have-not when your friends are haves.
  
  
• If your parents aren't on your case all summer long, then be honest and analyze your habits. Do you wake up at 11 every day? If so, I can make a bet with you that you will hate 8:30/9:30 classes. Just because you had them in high school doesn't mean you'll be disciplined enough to go to them in university. If you're (honestly) a morning person than take morning classes, but otherwise don't set yourself up for pain if you can avoid it. This will also help you figure out when your body enjoys having lunch and dinner, like for me I'm a 2 PM lunch kinda guy so that's when my breaks are nowadays. You could be similar without realizing it.
  
  
• Everyone's university experience is different, but frankly, Hollywood tends to get various aspects about the college life and people-in-general right. Watch 90s-00s acclaimed films and observe how the actors act. I found that my mannerisms were all really adapted for my local area - I was somewhat awkward in this new region-diverse campus at first. It takes most people some time to adapt, but you can get a headstart by watching non-franchise movies starring very high profile actors like George Clooney, Robert De Niro, and Tom Hanks. I believe 90s-00s films were the most honest about how people are and that's why I recommend that time slot specifically.
  
  
• I said it once, I'll say it again. Learn and review some math. It's so damn crucial to computer science and lots of other faculties if you choose to transfer/dual major. The average calculus mark is a mid 60, yet so many degrees/majors are barred if you score under 75% or 85% in calculus. Don't let yourself be in a situation where you're forced to do a 5th year because your calculus mark wasn't good enough.
  
  
• If you had no hobbies in high school, the summer is the best time to pick something up. Your summer is at least 2 months long, 60 days. If you find 2 hours a day to practice/learn some easy hobby, you'll have something to impress people with when you arrive to your dorm and you'll have something to pass the time on days where your bored and your friends all have midterms. Really easy, cheap, and impressive hobbies to pursue can be things like card tricks (and magic in general), sports like basketball or volleyball, photography (okay maybe not impressive AND cheap if your phone is over 3 years old but it's just one idea). Go search on askreddit for easy/cheap hobby threads if none of these are interesting you to you, there's a thousand suggestions on there.
  
  
• This isn't academics, but it's incredibly relevant to you since you're pursuing compsci. If you're trying to become a software engineer, you need to understand that you're going to be a tiny fish in a ginormous pond where everyone will have stuff on their resume. Since you're not at an Ivy league-tier institution nor at Waterloo, just having high grades won't cut it. It's important that you start building your resume yesterday. This is a beautiful post I saw a while ago, I've had it saved even though it's not step-by-step applicable to me. Read it, understand it, and follow it. THIS is how you get a $150K USD software engineering job at Google or Microsoft or Apple:
  
  https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplyingToCollege/comments/7mk6z3/guide_so_you_wanna_work_for_google/
  
  
• Develop a thick skin. If you're a libtard, watch FULL videos of Ben Shapiro explaining his points. You don't need to agree with it but you should at least be able to understand where he's coming from so you understand where your opposing peers next year will be coming from. If you're a cuckservative, look for the smart people that give outrageous dumb soundbites (your media exposes you to a lot of them) and watch full talks by those people and understand where they're coming from for the same reason. Outrage culture isn't as bad in Canada as it is in the USA, but there's still a fair number of morons on both sides of the aisle here so you'll want to prepare yourself ahead of time so they're not a surprise to you.
  
  
• Work out. If you're a fat guy, do cardio, lose some weight while building muscle. If you're a skinny guy, do cardio, gain some weight while building muscle. If you're in the middle, I'm jealous of you and still do cardio and build some muscle. If you're a girl, same thing as the last sentence but replace guy with girl. No, you won't look like Jay Cutler or Chyna after one (or even multiple) summers of lifting unless you're taking supplements, probably roids, and spending hundreds of hours a year lifting and researching nutrition/bodybuilding plans. It's good to be healthy, it's good to be fit, and it's a habit that thousands of extraordinarily successful people recommend. A summer is enough time to build a habit, a habit will turn into a discipline, and that discipline will help you spawn discipline in other subjects while making you healthy and good looking at the same time.
  
  
• There's going to be lots of times where you have trouble understanding people. Maybe your technical-writing professor has a super thick Mongolian accent. Maybe you're at a party with loud bumping music and you're trying to talk to a cute guy/girl. Or, maybe you're talking to a guy with the worst case of Scarborough mandem-talk. This won't help as much for that last case, but something that helped me with situations like this is toss on really unintelligible rap-music or soca and try your hardest to follow along with the lyrics. Eventually you'll get good at it, and likewise you'll be able to easier understand people who don't talk like you.
  
  I'll come back later to update this post; got some stuff in runescape I must attend to now. If you've got any questions, ask and I'll respond. If it's case-specific or personal, you can PM me and I'll be helpful, honest, and descriptive. And if anyone has any criticism, I'm more than happy to defend any of my suggestions.
  
  EDIT: More advice!:
  
  
• If you're coming to Western with a friend as your roommate, consider planning to throw a party early into the year. I'm not saying to host Western's next Project X themed party, but it's really easy to make friends if you throw on chill party-vibes music and invite your whole floor to come over to your room/suite. Personally I wouldn't recommend doing much that could break rez rules since you haven't established a relationship with your future RA yet (so don't have a beerpong table out and if you have drinks, be discrete and especially don't share during O-Week). I'm not advocating you do this during O-Week since it is a dry week, but when I was a soph, I did let it slip that that was the best time to meet as many of your floormates as possible ;)
  
  
• This is really a big me thing, but I spent a week in the summer looking for the pencil and now I have a pencil that I've exclusively used for anything writing. Never broken down once! You're gonna do a lot of writing so you might as well find a really comfy pencil :) I recommend the Uni Kuru Toga. They're somewhat pricy, but imo it was a great investment on my part.
  
  
• If you've spent the last 12 years studying at home, schedule 3 consecutive 8-hour day this summer to read an acclaimed college prep book. You're gonna have at least one bad week where you'll have 4 midterms when everyone else is having fun. You should know how to study in a public space since you may have to do that one day.

Cool. I read your other answer. I'm not sure I see a connection between teaching English abroad and interactive design. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do them both, but it just doesn't make sense to me.

If you just want to travel abroad and do it a lot, then I'd get into the job market right now. I learned far more by doing work than being in school and you will continue to learn a lot for the rest of your life in any knowledge worker job anyway.

Traveling, or doing whatever else you love, is really easy to do once you're a highly paid expert at whatever it is that you do. So, consider this as an alternative to teaching abroad if it's the travel part you're more interested in.

As someone in the IT industry, we barely care what your education is. When we hire people we want to know:

1. What have you done for other people?
   
   
2. What can you convince us you can do for us?
   
   So, if you just want a job in interactive design then I don't think it's worthwhile to do your masters either. If you just love being at Western and want to continue that, then that's understandable... definitely do the school thing as long as you can, it's an awesome lifestyle.
   
   Otherwise, your best chance at getting a job is by making your own job. Go to the CS department and see if you can study or improve some of their sites. Become familiar with applications that help you study/record/understand how users interact with programs/websites. Find some developers who are working on projects and offer to help them improve their design. These experiences are your resume, use them and you will get a job. If you try to get a job on education alone, I wouldn't hire you.
   
   Also, for a completely different idea of working and getting a job, I suggest reading this book.

The SDC on campus runs skill development workshops you can register for (career central, under the co-curricular record events) which focus on academic tactics, if you're budgeting your time already and feel that sitting in for a 50 minute talk is a bad idea then you can still access the handouts that they use during these events on their website : https://www.uwo.ca/sdc/learning/selfhelp/skill_building_handouts/index.html

this link will lead to their catalogue of skill building handouts.

Other studying tips would be to adopt the cornell style of note taking, it dramatically improves readability if you get messy while note taking a fast paced lecture and it's really boosted my grades when it comes to fact recall for short answer questions, https://www.amazon.ca/FocusNotes-Notebook-Quarto-White-90223/dp/B002HG0JDS/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3C5EPRBPH17PE&keywords=cornell+notebook&qid=1568157102&s=gateway&sprefix=cornel%2Caps%2C172&sr=8-2

\^\^\^ link to the one I use, I normally split up the pages into 5 chunks and colour code the edge with a highlighter and it lasts me a term.

When I take notes while reading my textbook I usually try to condense and reword any concept down to the most imperative information, take a paragraph and squeeze it down to point format or just a sentence etc., etc.,

If your textbooks have any 'study break' questions USE THEM. They're honestly an amazing study tool.

Set up a course Quizlet and quiz yourself on your own 'chapter summary', doesn't have to be a huge deck of questions, just 5 or so that help you recall the main topics of the week, you could also make a deck of defined terms/concept glossary from the week.

Also, another big tip that'll make assigned readings easier would be to start studying for exams from day 1, this helps keep you on your reading schedule and it'll put all your readings in perspective, relating them back to the course and the stated course outcomes. I set up an exam study guide in OneNote per each course and fill it out week by week so that once exams come up I'm really just reviewing with no extra work involved, never had to cram or catch up on any readings since adopting this method. An exam study guide is a great place for you to summarize your textbook chapter notes.

The library is also a great place to really focus, you could keep a list of related texts/books per course and their call numbers on hand and then study in that general area of the library, if you ever need extra clarification on a concept you could check a different book's coverage of the material, maybe you'll add on some important information to your notes or find something interesting to discuss with your prof.

I've also heard you could bring your textbooks in to the SDC/learning centre or so and they would sort through the best study tactic per textbook depending on how it's structured.

Practice makes perfect and the more you take notes while studying, the less you'll actually be writing because you'll know where the important information is.

> I don’t know why people have to bring each other down like that.

I've found this to be a thing at Western. There is a big crab bucket mentality at Western and in London, Ontario in general. People love to pull each other down and talk behind peoples backs.

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Also, I'll add that academic success isn't always forward a forward-looking indicator of having a successful life (in terms of profession and income). Some of the most book smart people I knew who received great marks in uni struggled to find career-type employment after university and some are working service type jobs close to minimum wage (and shackled to lots of loan debt)

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I received pretty mediocre marks (high 60s, low 70s), yet I've succeeded professionally in my mid/late 20s (working for a great firm, take-home pay just over six figures, working internationally) because I focused on networking, marketing myself, and honing my soft skills.

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/u/DizzyNeedleworker, your worth as a person isn't determined by a number on a piece of paper, so don't stress out too much. Do your best and focus on Learning how to Learn.

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A great book I'd recommend reading is A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley. Math wasn't my strong suit either, but this book really helped me and it might be of value to you as well.

hi there, for first year science youll need a Sharp EL-510RNB Engineering/Scientific Calculator (or a similar model) https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B00000JBMA/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_7EAtDbS2AVBJ7
wait until you get your course outlines to be totally sure, but this is the calculator we used in chemistry, applied math, bio, etc last year!

For chemistry you'll have to purchase the course workbook AND lab book from the Bookstore. Other courses, like applied math last year, provide the textbook. In other courses like Calc, look around online for the edition you need (with solutions!!) before purchasing it because you might find a pdf :)

I just did a big laptop search for the same reasons, I'll be starting comp sci this september.

Something to consider if you have no desire to buy a mac book, is that using a unix based system is alot easier for software development and related things. I find macbooks to pricey, so I'm planning on dual booting a linux os on one of the following computers. Ive currently got a 2014 Alienware M17 laptop, but gaming wise, is past its prime.

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If you can sacrifice gaming performance, then you'l get a slayer laptop at a reasonable price with the lenovo think pad line, 32gb ram and a newer i7 processer, should handle anything will throw at us: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DQB3RGG/ref=ox_sc_act_title_3?smid=A1J8MPDWORMV3O&psc=1

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If you're going big instead of going home, then this will cover every base imaginable: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N77CPPH/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?smid=APTJB2SEQO65W&psc=1

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lastly something like this from system 76: https://system76.com/laptops/oryx

Looking at other options after the corporate world. I was surprised at the number of Ivy league graduates in the US military (check out http://www.amazon.com/One-Bullet-Away-Making-Officer/dp/0618773436, great read).

I get the whole IBD circlejerk, but there are definitely a host of options after HBA, or down the road as an aspect of your career.

I have a pinched cervical nerve from a car accident and cannot work at all in the library cubicles... I feel your pain, I was in agony after an exam in NSB 145 earlier this term. As this other person suggested, working from home is definitely the way to go if possible w/ a chair that you can raise/lower to your liking. I also recently purchased a lap desk at home that I find comfortable as well (I prop myself up in bed w/ a few pillows behind my back and under my knees). https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00HUEZ7W0/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This is also amazing (https://www.amazon.ca/Rain-Design-mStand-Laptop-10032/dp/B000OOYECC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492399508&sr=8-1&keywords=macbook+stand) if you are working on your computer for long periods.

I have a pair of these and love them: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B004K09H32/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Graham Smith

this is $30

An "actual quote" from a professional who works with survivors of sexual assault. Are you speaking from experience, have you been sexually assaulted? Have you worked with these men and women before in criminal or civil court?

Rape culture is a thing and as a student you should read up on it before you summaryily dismiss it because you just dont agree with the conclusions.