The Pains and Gains of Education

Introduction

I had this rant stored in my head for the past 7 months or so – a rant that formed in my head as I was being a stressed student during a raging pandemic locked in my room trying to do work and watch lectures on Zoom. It was Winter Break of my senior year of undergrad. I had just finished an influential Fall semester’s worth of classes and was heading into the start of what would become a very tough and stressful Spring. I was reflecting on the past 4 years of my college career and thought about how much I had learned, not learned, and the wisdom I had gained.

Pains

My 4 years at Cornell were nothing short of stressful. I entered my freshman year with a confidence unrivaling that of an arrogant high school senior. My high school experience at NCSSM had made me very confident in my abilities to live in a residential environment on my own. Dorm life was something I was already used to – I had lived with 2 different roommates during my 2 years at NCSSM and knew what to look for when choosing a roommate, so I was confident that I would adjust well to Cornell. In addition to being comfortable with dorm life, I had already made the decision to join the Big Red Marching Band, and subsequently avoided any and all interaction with recruitment efforts after making the decision in April while visiting during Cornell Days.

Fall semester, I eased in to my academic life. I took 4 courses worth 16 credits. MATH 1920 (Multivariable Calculus), PHYS 1112 (Mechanics), ENGRI 1101 (Intro to Operations Research), an FWS (Freshman Writing Seminar). My first semester was a breeze. The two technical core classes I took were courses covering material that I had learned in high school. I even managed to get an A+ in Physics, which allowed me to finish off strong with a semester GPA of 3.5, placing me on the Dean’s List that semester.

When it came time to pre-enroll for spring semester classes, I was riding the high from fall semester and still carrying over the confidence from NCSSM. I decided to do something known as “chem-physing”. This essentially just means taking a chemistry and physics course simultaneously. As such, I enrolled in CHEM 2090 and PHYS 2213, both courses for which I have covered in high school as well. (If I had received 5s on the APs for Chemistry and both parts of Physics C, I would have been able to skip these courses.) If I had just taken those 2 core technical courses, I would have been fine that semester. However, even though I was able to take a break with the engineering math sequence, I told myself, “I want to get ahead. I can handle this”, and also signed up for MATH 2930 (Differential Equations). What ended up happening that spring was a course load of 5 courses that would make me regret my decisions and lead me to withdraw from the math course leaving a W on my transcript.

It was my first “failure” in college. It was my first “failure” in school. I had not met the expectations I had set for myself and felt like the most idiotic person ever. “Why did I think this was a good idea?” “Why did I let myself take 3 hard classes at once?” I kept beating myself up over this decision. I knew I was fine and was still on track to graduate, but I was worried about the effect of a “W” on my transcript. I even made a throwaway account on Reddit to post to r/Cornell just to ease my worries.

My freshman year definitely humbled me. However, it didn’t stop me from being stubborn and taking too many interesting and hard classes all at once. My next low point in my college career comes during my sophomore spring. At that point I had been doing research with Prof. Zhiru Zhang in the CSL for almost 1 year and was affiliated with the ECE major. Due to the nature of my academic interests, I almost couldn’t stop myself from signing up for the scheduled I did. I don’t really regret this schedule, but there were definitely some improvements I could have made that would have better helped me succeed.

Here were the “real” classes I took: ECE 3140 (Embedded Systems), ECE 3150 (Into to Microelectronics), MATH 2940 (Linear Algebra), ECE 2200 (Signals and Systems), and for S/U, AAS 1100 (Intro to Asian American Studies).

Nothing wrong with that schedule – aside from perhaps the fact that Embedded Systems and Microelectronics were perhaps the hardest ECE courses to take together, combined with the ineffective professor I had in Signals. This was the semester that fully allowed me to finally accept that I was just going to be an average student at Cornell. Why? Because I finished the semester with 3 C-range grades. It was an ocean semester.

The following two years after my sophomore year were about as good as they could get while doing school during a pandemic. The spring semester of my junior year was stressful, but saved by the pandemic and the allowance of no-penalty S/U course grades. My senior year was average, although my last spring semester was rough due to my decision to pursue an early M.Eng (Master of Engineering), and again, being stubborn and taking too many hard and interesting classes at once. Although, this time, I wasn’t as disappointed and sad about my grades. I definitely feel like the pandemic made it much harder to collaborate with friends and classmates, and thus, made it harder for me to succeed in class. I was fine with the outcome. I passed all my classes and successfully graduated.

Gains

While my 4 years were painful and stressful, I definitely gained a lot during my college experience. I will focus on my academic gains in this blog post and will not cover the social and personal gains.

As I have already mentioned, I was an ECE major. My undergrad degree is focused on hardware. However, as I pursued my undergraduate research experience, I eventually came to fall in love with Machine Learning and AI – specifically Computer Vision. I wasn’t good at it, and it definitely took quite a long time tackling the learning curve (as is the nature of joining any research project), but it was something that I constantly looked forward to learning. This newfound interest sparked my determination to take more CS classes and eventually finish a CS minor.

There was a time between my sophomore and junior year when I did consider switching and becoming a CS major. However, at that time, I was still wishy-washy in which direction I wanted to go, and was afraid of the difficulty of the proof-based classes in the CS department that I would have been required to take. Hence, I decided to stick with finishing my major and instead using the M.Eng program as a way to finish my 4.5 years of college education with something equivalent to that of a CS + ECE double major.

One notable semester of my undergrad was Fall 2020. I point this out specifically because I ended up taking 3 very fun and enjoyable humanities courses for which I used to finish my Liberal Studies requirement. One of them was COMM 3020, a Science Communication course. This was a very interesting class that allowed me to learn many different types of writing styles (blogposts, feature articles, etc.) and become aware of the importance of effective science communication. This actually would eventually spark my interest in tech education – which leads me to my current summer instructing job working with Inspirit AI.

Final Thoughts

Looking back, I definitely think that my 4 years in undergrad helped me find the direction I wanted to go. By the summer before my senior year, I recognized that I wanted to live a fulfilling life – one marked either by job satisfaction or by social satisfaction. I could thrive off of one or the other – either with fulfilling work and a mediocre life or with a fulfilling life and mediocre work. I think that my journey to where I currently am, a fulfilling summer of instructing work and a curious social life, I am quite satisfied.

Looking forward towards my M.Eng fall semester, I am quite excited to begin my full-time job search. I am fully aware that the fall semester will be tough and that the job search will be stressful at times, but I also have a very clear goal in mind that I want to reach by the end of December. These past weeks have given me the motivation to push through and face my fears.

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