An Open Challenge
On Thursday January 28, while I was in the act of a grueling 25 min walk through the heavy Tundra-like blizzard blowing viciously against my unguarded face, on my way from my apartment on Keats Way & University to my 8:30 AM lab in Chemistry-2, an interesting realization struck me. And that realization was so powerful it gave me a surge of motivation that allowed me to trudge forward, one footstep at a time. I had come to terms with what Waterloo Engineering had done to me. And what it had done to me could not possibly be undone no matter how hard I tried. I had been annealed, strengthened, and hardened in ways I had never thought possible, just 5 years ago.
Each year, thousands of to-be high school graduates try to decide which university they should go to. And every time preparation for post-university life was their most important criterion, I have whole-heartedly recommended Waterloo engineering to them. A lot of high school students are under the impression that if they can get through University, they should be fine after that. But there are really easy ways to get through University. And then, there are really tough ways to get through University.
What I'm proposing is that you pick the latter and take the tougher route. As one of my greatest mentors taught me many years ago, given all things equal, you should always take the harder and untrodden path whenever possible. The treasure chest, if one exists, is more likely to exist in an untrodden path, for if it existed in a trodden path, it is likely to have been pocketed by now.
When times are tough, the ones that are the most prepared, the ones who made it hard for themselves when they didn't have to, will be years ahead of those that got through University with the least amount of effort. This is because those who are prepared will already be pre-equipped with all the machinery needed to deal with the challenges of the future.
You want to treat university as a training ground. A place where you can learn all the skills you need in 5 years to succeed for the next 40 years of your life. If you don't extract every ounce of juice out of University, someone else will, and they'll be sure to beat you at it.
So if you are a grade 12 student and have received your acceptance letter into the University of Waterloo, I suggest you trash the passive approach of coasting through University by handling the sequence of requirements, one at a time. Instead, take a more active approach of challenging yourself as much as you can. Then after 5 years, when your training is finally complete, virtually everything you do will have a "been-there-done-that" feel to it, while everyone else will be scrambling to learn all these new skills they should have learned in University already.
To that effect, I propose the following open challenge to any high-school student who would like to attempt it. This challenge isn't for the faint-hearted. It will require significant levels of determination, perseverance, courage, and discipline to carefully plan and flawlessly execute. The requirements of the challenge are as follows:
You must be officially enrolled at the University of Waterloo as an engineering student in one of these six well-known to be hard disciplines: electrical, computer, mechatronics, software, systems, or nano. There are quite possibly other disciplines that are just as hard, or even harder, but I possess sufficient evidence only for these six. The work load requirements of these disciplines should be enough to teach you all the time-management skills you'll ever need.
The reason I pick engineering over other faculties is because this is the only faculty that makes co-op mandatory which automatically makes work term reports mandatory. The work term report requirements for the above engineering programs are a lot more rigorous. Furthermore, PDENG, at least in its current incarnation, seems a lot more annoying than PDMATH. The mandatory labs, pre-labs and lab reports can all get quite tedious. CSE requirements are a pain to fulfill. To make matters more interesting, the above six disciplines also have fairly rigorous requirements for their 4th year capstone/design project. Finally, the Faculty of Engineering is the only faculty that allows students to take extra courses for free.
The reason I pick the University of Waterloo is because I have spent nearly five years here. This place has a harsh-enough Winter capable of sucking the soul out of you, especially if you've never experienced it before. No matter what engineering program you pick, you will have to spend at least 2 winters here. So gear up.
Furthermore, Waterloo has a spine chilling prison-like feeling at times. This place can get quite depressing, stressful, painful, scary, and if you can deal with all that, I am sure you will find almost every other place in North America a paradise. You will develop excellent stress-management skills. You will also learn how to take advantage of everything around you to keep you calm and composed without breaking. This includes great music, healthy relationships and friendships, and smart mentors.
You must be an out-of-province student. The farther away from Ontario you're from, the better. Extra points if you're an international student with no relatives in Ontario. Metaphorically speaking, you will be parachuted into the university, and you will know not a single person around you within a 100-mile radius. You will have 0 friends to rely on, and 0 shoulders to lean on. You will have 0 families and 0 relatives whose homes you can go to in the weekends. You will start from scratch on a fresh slate, man-vs-wild style.
You must complete all 6 co-op work terms even though the requirement is only 5. These jobs can be obtained in any manner possible, using Jobmine or not. However, each of your co-op terms must be in a city outside of both KW and your hometown, ideally somewhere that requires you to take a plane from either of these places. Also, you will have at least one well-paying full-time job offer before you graduate.
You must not fail any of your PDENG courses even once. This constraint forces you to turn PDENG into an optimization problem, instead of an easier hit-and-miss one.
You should pay for your tuition and living expenses yourself. Loans are acceptable, but you will pay them back when you make that money back during co-op terms. You only get a laptop and some clothes for free when you arrive. When you graduate, you should have a net positive income in your bank account. If you are paying international fees, you will pay back what a local student would've paid. These constraints force you to find jobs that are the most well-paying, to excel at your interviews, to be fiercely smarter than your classmates, to live frugally during your study and work terms, and to manage a tight budget.
You will take a minimum of 10 extra courses for credit to master advanced time-management skills. These extra courses must come in the form of options or minors (like economics) which force you to plan your academics well in advance. Try to take at least one of these extra courses at the 300 or 400 level with a course code of CO, PMATH, or CS. None of these extra courses should be taken during your work terms. You may attempt to, but you'll be wasting money that way, which may make it harder for you to stay net positive. And of course, you are not allowed to fail even a single course you take or withdraw from any course after the no-penalty drop period. In taking all these extra courses, you will have learned to exploit technology to its fullest, and you will become a pro at scheduling and triaging.
Out of these minimum 10 extra courses, one of them will be taken not for credit. You will not enroll in this class, but will simply attend all lectures and complete all assignments. CS courses are particularly well-suited to this. Try to take a course that you will teach you a lot just by attending lectures. So ensure the prof is a good lecturer. In completing this challenge, you will learn a skill that only a handful of students will ever learn.
Oh, and did I mention you need to maintain a cumulative average of 80%+? You want it to be high anyway otherwise the highest-paying employers are not going to interview you. And keep that job offer you get; you'll probably be taking it since your GPA will be much lower than your classmates to apply to grad school because of all the extra courses. And besides, no decent grad school will take you without prior research experience. Well, they might.
Finally, you must graduate successfully and come out of all this with no addictions whatsoever: coffee, tea, caffeine, pop, alcohol, chocolate, sugar, drugs, or nicotine. You may consume these stimulants occasionally, but if I took these away from you for a week, you should still be able to perform at a decent level.
The last rule is that you must not tell anyone you are part of this challenge except for other people who are also attempting (or have attempted) the same challenge. The first rule of fight club is, of course, to not talk about fight club.
And then what? Once you have completed this intense 5-year challenge, you will have obtained all the necessary skills to deal with most, if not all, realities of life: pressure, stress, incompetence, bureaucracy, inflexibility, and many more — all vital skills very-much needed in the real world today. Most importantly, you will have learned so much about yourself, your strengths, and your capabilities that this knowledge will in itself become invaluable in every single future life decision.
Here's to the best Grade 12 students. Let the force and Suhosin be with you.
You'll be needing it.
Pull Versus Push
I've never been a fan of push-based knowledge systems. Think about it. You go to a lecture. The prof regurgitates a bunch of "knowledge" you may not care about one bit. You then take 30% of that "knowledge" home, unsure of what to do with it. Congratulations, you are now the 7 billionth victim of a crappy push-based education system.
I've always been a fan of pull-based knowledge systems. It's a system where you wander around a topic on your own, guided by your own interests. Ever wondered why we're so effective at our hobbies and the things we teach ourself, yet so crappy at our jobs? Our jobs were taught to us, while our hobbies were taught by us.
I once had an epiphany. In it, I was the world's best lecturer. Essentially, a present-day Socrates. However, my lecture halls would contain only 3 students tops, usually just one. And even though I was the best lecturer the world had ever seen, I could never be caught lecturing. The world's best lecturer never lectures, what?
Instead, I would sit silent in my chair and wait for my students to ask me questions. And when they did, I would answer them as briefly as I could, usually in a sentence or two. If they wanted more detail, they'd have to ask me more questions. Then I would give them a bit more detail, but only a bit more. After a few iterations of this, the students would smarten up. They would realize that the better their questions were, the more they could squeeze out of me. So they would often take an entire minute or two to craft their questions. Each question had to be like a needle in an acupuncture therapy: sharp, and to the point.
Since the students would spend so long thinking about their questions, they would often obtain answers to most of their questions on their own using their own heads, eliminating the need to pose the question to me in the first place.
This process would carry on for hours until my students were happy with the knowledge they had gained that day. This epiphany was my first voyage into the beautiful world of pull-based knowledge systems. In fact, we use this kind of pull-based knowledge system almost everyday: the students are none other than common people like us, and the best lecturer in the world is none other than Google. Every Python, Ruby and PHP programmer who has done quick Google lookups in the middle of an in-depth programming session knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Forcing knowledge on to other people without them asking for it is perhaps the worst thing you could possibly do to them, besides maybe murdering them. If you're knowledgeable about a topic, it's okay to let people know that, but don't start lecturing on it to every single person you meet. If people want help with your expert opinion, they will come find you.
The same is true for this very blog and this very blog post in particular. I might have made it easy for you to get to this post by publishing to your news feeds, but you still had to click to get here. And you still have to put in the effort of reading what's being described here. And if you're not interested in what I have to say once you click, you can read just the paragraphs that interest you while skimming or skipping the rest, or you could just close the tab and move on with life. You're in control here, not me.
You can't do that if I catch you in person and start lecturing you about the topics I am most interested in. I'd simply bore you to death. You could walk away, but you probably won't do that in an effort to be courteous. The internet allows you to walk away from anything that doesn't interest you without hurting anyone's feelings. Pull-based systems are as beautiful as they can get: you ask for the information, and I give it to you; I publish what I have to say, and you subscribe only if you're interested. No force, no pressure.
Two weeks ago, my friend Sarah shared this youtube video where Peyton Manning describes how it was precisely a pull-based system that made him good at what he does. Had his father Archie Manning tried to push football skills on to his son, the results could've ended up being quite disastrous.
Giving without someone asking is something I strongly try to stay away from. Especially when it comes to advice and help. The reason sometimes even good advice is so poorly regarded is because it is given without anyone asking for it. Same goes for help. I never help anyone unless they've explicitly asked me for it. And the people who receive my help after they've requested it seem more satisfied with it. My gut feeling is that in 99% of the cases, most people don't want my advice or help. Thrusting help or advice upon them is actually quite a painful thing to endure from the recipient's point of view.
My dad may be a pretty good tax planning accountant, but imagine if he lectured every person he met on tax planning. He'd have 0 friends by now. It is precisely because he withholds his accumulated knowledge and delivers them only upon request that makes him in demand. Elementary ECON 101 at its simplest.
The reason why the Socratic method is so effective is precisely because it is as far away from a push-based system as one can possibly hope for. Had Socrates been a university lecturer instead of an inquisitor, Plato would have been fast asleep by now. But the Socratic method isn't a true pull-based system either. It's not Plato who asks the questions in a Socratic dialogue, it's Socrates!
Pull-based knowledge systems are perhaps the next revolution in modern next-generation education systems. The smartest of the smartest, the true thinkers, the modern intellectual revolutionaries and mathematicians, the star athletes of our times, the ace politicians and foreign policy advisors, the next breed of Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry and economics — all of them are going to be educated and trained using pull-based knowledge transfer systems for education, training, reinforcement, inspiration and advice, not push-based.
If you are the victim or perpetrator of a push-based knowledge system, it is time you start asking yourself the right questions.
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What's happened in the past year reverse chronologically?
- Found a job! Got employed as full-time Software Engineer by Zynga Games Inc., Dec 16 '09.
- California Interviews: Headed to California for on-site interviews with Zynga, Heyzap and Facebook, 5 Nov '09.
- Back at Waterloo!: Commenced my 4A term, Sep 12 2009. Just another 8-month stretch to get through, then I'm done with University!
- UW Daily Bulletin Feature: My blog post "The Case for Waterloo" got featured on Waterloo's Daily Bulletin! 14 Aug '09.
- Share in Google Reader: Reader is becoming very popular, so now you can share my posts in Google Reader directly. Look for the "share" link at the bottom of each post! 9 Jun '09.
- Vancouver: Headed to Vancouver, BC to relax (!) for a long weekend, Jun 4 '09.
- Contact: New contact page! May 26 2009.
- Continue at Tagged: Going to be at Tagged Inc. for another 4-month term, May 2 2009.
- Tagged: Started work at Tagged Inc. in San Francisco, Jan 4 2009.
