Hello, my name is Matt and I'll be your tumblr for the evening. I'm 19, Canadian, and studying cognitive science at Carleton University. Since no one outside the program knows what that means, my two core subjects are linguistics and computer science. I'm also not very good at being brief! But I try to make my walls of text somewhat friendly.
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Decreasing My Misery Quotient
This post has been in the works for a while - part of why I haven’t posted in a while. I was originally going to write it as commentary on academic culture works. Then I questioned whether I could generalize like that, so I thought I would focus on my own behaviour. Then I saw a post on Facebook linking to an article by a student at University of Toronto touching on many of my own points. The article is slightly tangential to this post, since it’s primarily about mental health in perfectionist university students (who, contrary to what some people may think, exist at every university). But it’s a topic I would love to see discussed more openly, so please read it if you’re interested.
This problem shows up in varying degrees, obviously. There’s individuals like me and most of the people I’ve met - we want the best and we push for it. Then you’ve got people in programs like engineering or architecture, who regularly camp out beside their workstations. A friend with an undergrad degree in one of Carleton’s engineering programs used the same terms as the article does: it’s a “badge of honour” to work that hard. There’s a twisted form of glory in managing to succeed despite taking on far too much work. It’s a stupid thing to do, but we’re bound to respect anyone who studies more than they sleep.
There’s even a bit of shame, to a certain degree, in being less overworked and miserable than somoeone else. When people like me complain, it’s almost more like bragging - after all, we all know I’m not going to quit. But when you start complaining to somebody who has more reason to complain than you, well, they must be better than you. Not only are they working harder, but they’re likely getting better grades in the process. How dare you complain about getting five hours of sleep for a couple of nights, to someone who regularly sleeps three?
For the sake of argument, let’s say we want to quantify this. After all, there’s something to measure and compare. The way I see it, there’s four components involved:
- degree of success (inside and outside class)
- success in spite of oneself (“I started the assignment the night before and still got an A+!”)
- level of challenge (can be directly related to amount of work, but there are other types of challenge)
- amount of sleep
Taking inspiration from the misery index, and to make things catchy (which is important to scientists), I’ll call this value the misery quotient. MQ = (Success + SuccessInSpiteOfOneself) * Challenge / Sleep. Roughly speaking, it’s the amount of success you have per unit of sleep. More sleep makes for a lower value, with higher values being better. Granted, it might be more accurate to adjust the sleep values according to individual differences, and instead measure it as a percentage of what each individual ought to be sleeping. In this case, if we say I need 8 hours/night and only get 6, it’s the same as someone who needs 5 hours/night getting 3.75 hours - a value of 0.75. Keeping the same formula, higher values are still better, but you get way more credit for barely sleeping.
Anyway, here’s where I’m going with this: I’m tired of bragging about this. I hate that I still default to “complaining” about work. I have more interesting things to talk to people about than not sleeping, or working too much. That, and I don’t like being miserable. So I’m planning to change things up in the future, which will hopefully allow me to sleep more while still doing well and taking on interesting challenges. I could even have a bit of a social life on the side! It’s a simple change: I’m going to take four classes per semester instead of five from now on. That gives me three hours I would have spent in lectures, and whatever other time studying and doing assignments. It fits perfectly well with the timeline I already had - five years for the degree. I’m also working diligently on time management, these days, so I can make the most of the time I do have.
So here’s how I’ll end: will you join me in lowering your misery quotient? Can you find a way to do what you want to do, without depriving yourself of valuable sleep? It’s one of a small number of things that people need universally, but it’s not a direct survival need so we skimp on it all the time. Some people don’t need to socialize to stay emotionally healthy, and some people don’t need any recreational activity aside from work. But they still need to sleep, and you don’t know how much it affects you if you never take the time to catch up. Give it a try for a month or so, see how you feel on a good eight hours per night. You may not even be able to sleep properly, at first. But it’ll come, and once you’re properly rested, you’ll actually notice when you’re tired in the future. Or you can stay tired and work sub-optimally forever - it’s your choice, I guess.
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Kickback: All The Right Reasons
Years ago, when I would listen to songs that made me think of anything related to relationships, I didn’t stop to put into words what the song made me feel. I’d get a vague approximation of some thoughts, and I’d be appropriately happy/miserable/both, and that was all I needed. Now that I’ve got more time between myself and the relationship in question, I don’t get the same feelings, and so I literally can’t remember what it was that I liked about these songs. Listening to them now, I know there was something about the song, but can’t quite grasp it.
You can see the vague, unformed idea effect in some of the music posts I made back in 2010 - I’d post the song and the lyrics, but not say a whole lot about it. A prime example is this post about Kickback UK’s All The Wrong Reasons. I was listening to the song last night and thinking it meant something to me in 2010, but I couldn’t say what it was. At a guess, I’d say I felt like I was trying to help people so I could feel better about myself - the most cynical way of reading my behaviour at the time. There were a couple people I was “friends” with at the time mostly for that reason, and it took me a while to realize that wasn’t the way to go. But that’s only a guess - I can’t say for sure what I was thinking when I made that post.
What I can tell you is what the song makes me think now, which you will (hopefully) be glad to hear is much more positive. I was up late writing an essay for my Linguistic Analysis class, and I took the lyrics in a very different way. (Chalk it up to vague interpretations, I guess, when the same song can mean a totally different thing two years later.) I was feeling good about the essay and wanted to reflect a bit on how I’ve changed lately, and where I’m heading in the future. Moral of the story, for the tl;dr crowd - I feel like I’ve gone from “all the wrong reasons” to “all the right reasons”, and I’ve got big plans. Read on if you’re interested! Best if you take a stop by the old post, first.
”Head’s in the future, but your heart’s in the past” is an apt description of me circa 2010. Things were looking up, but definitely not all the way up. Which is a stupid metaphor if you try to picture it, but it works verbally. “And we’ve seen it all before, you’re holding out for more” follows from that, obviously. Neither of those things still apply to me, which is a good sign. Head and heart are both set on the future, I suppose. Getting to the future I want means working hard in the present, but it feels more and more and more natural as I put out work I’m legitimately proud of. Nobody’s ever going to look at the C++ assignment I’m working on right now, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t make it good and shoot for a mark of 110%.
The next line is what gets me now, and probably what got to me in the past as well. “When that call never comes it’s time to face what you’ve become - there’s no point doing all of this unless you know you’re having fun.” At the time, there were a lot of things I wasn’t terribly happy with. I wasn’t having a whole lot of fun with the work I was doing back then. Although it got me here, so I can’t complain - but it was all delayed gratification at the time. At least now I get some of that gratification! A little, anyway. Still lots of delay right now. But I’ve recently realized what I should be working towards, although I’d been thinking about it for a few weeks. I said I didn’t have many important goals for 2012, but I take that back now! I’ve got two, which I strongly feel I can accomplish, and which all of my work now contributes to:
- The first: have my name on a publication.
- The second: learn as much as possible, with an eye towards distinguishing myself from the competition.
Both of these are practical goals that will, hopefully, put me in a great position when I finish my education and set out for a job. So - “what have I become”? Someone who strives to be the best they can be. (Time will tell where I’ll fall on the sweet/awesome dichotomy.) I’m not necessarily having fun, but I’m seeing the big picture now.
From where I stand, that means a number of different things. Most recently, it means improving my writing consciously, the way I used to while I was in AP English. (If you’re interested in that writing analysis tool but not interested in Emacs, I can look into creating an independent version, with the author’s permission.) Going back a few weeks, I’ve started to really dedicate myself to programming well. I’m getting tons of inspiration on that topic as I dig up tidbits of information about Emacs, and inevitably get linked to some other brilliant piece. There’s Steve Yegge and Avdi Grimm over the past few days, who have both Emacs secrets I can steal and general programming knowledge. Meanwhile, Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman write about quality of life as a programmer - improving your tools, improving your office, improving your lighting, etc. Aside from that, I’m always trying to synthesize what I know about the seemingly-disparate areas of linguistics (at least, that’s what the separation in course content would lead you to believe). I want to say with some confidence that I’m a linguist - not some kid who “maybe heard about that in university, but didn’t think it was important”.
In a similar vein, I’m connecting all the dots in this “cognitive science” thing. Philosophy is cognitive psychology, cognitive psychology is neuroscience, neuroscience is linguistics, linguistics is computer science… And the whole conglomerate is cognitive science. I may not use every part of it for the rest of my life, but understanding them all matters. Even if I were to be a career programmer, I’d keep usability testing in mind. Even if I were a linguist for the rest of my life, I know for a fact I’d land in a crossover field - computational linguistics and neurolinguistics seem equally likely right now.
So what I’m getting at is: I know what I’m doing here, and I know who I am. I can’t tell you what I’ll settle on for a job, but I know what the core components of that job will be. This is where I belong. The lows may be low, but the highs are home.
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The benefits of outside perspectives
I’ve gotten some surprising compliments during the past week. Surprising in the sense that I personally don’t see myself the way they were describing me. Since I don’t see myself that way, I don’t talk about myself that way, either. A stranger reading my tumblr would probably think I’m a quivering, anxious wreck that never manages to get anything done. That’s a bit of an exaggeration from the reality, but since I prefer to chastise myself for my failures, failure becomes my public face. Although, the way I think about it, the negative posts are all waiting on a future post that declares my ultimate victory over the original problem. It may not appear today, or tomorrow, but it’ll come! Probably!
The first set of compliments came from an extremely astute co-worker, when I mentioned that Robert Biddle initially assumed I was a graduate student. She said that wasn’t terribly surprising, given that I genuinely enjoy what I do and I’m dedicated to my work (unlike some people my age). Later, when I offered to put in a couple extra hours of work, she said she’d find someone else “because I work hard enough as it is.” Given that I’m taking five classes, running the lab’s current projects, and developing new projects on top of all that. Not to mention maintaining and updating older lab work and making it as “perfect” as I can.
When you put it that way, it paints a much more flattering picture of me than the one I present. I’ve been disorganized for months now, but I’m still pulling in 90%+ grades on almost everything, as well as managing my work in the Language and Brain Lab. I genuinely think I could be doing more, but that’s just the (probably unhealthy) work ethic I’ve picked up over the last few years. I keep telling myself to do better so I don’t fall behind the difficulty curve, but so far I’m still ahead of the game. Obviously I’m doing something right. Not only that, but as far as tuition and various other costs go, I’m soon to be financially independent entirely because of my own hard work. It’s not like I’m raking in The Big Bucks, but it’s enough that I’ll likely graduate with zero debt. Looking at it a bit more objectively, I feel a lot better about what I’ve accomplished and where things are going from here. Which is a good feeling!
She also noted that I carry myself like a grad student, as I’m comfortable in my own skin and bold enough to approach professors and ask to work with them. I actually had someone else recently tell me that that they think I’m outgoing, too, so apparently I can make a decent first impression. While it’s a kind thought, I don’t think I really agree with them. Truth be told, I mostly manage to seem “comfortable in my own skin” and outgoing by keeping myself distant (at least, emotionally) from people. Which sort of defeats the purpose, I think. Granted, Google’s definition of outgoing is “friendly and socially confident”. I can see how someone might think I’m outgoing, from that point of view (but I usually associate outgoing with extroversion). I’m perfectly happy to talk to people once a conversation’s been started, so there’s a slightly-qualified version of the friendly part. As for socially confident, that’s definitely just a matter of appearance. It’s not like I’m confident in my social skills, and starting conversations still freaks me out. I’m mainly just surprised that it’s not utterly apparent to everyone involved that I’m shy and frequently awkward.
All that aside, I’m doing alright. Lots of work to do, just need to juggle it the right way. My difficult/time-consuming classes are at least interesting this semester (introduction to brain and behaviour, programming in C++). Sadly, I have one class that’s a bit of a mystery. Thus far, it’s been almost entirely review of other classes I’ve taken. The prof isn’t giving much in the way of hints about what the exams are going to be like, and he’s not a good enough teacher to consciously emphasize important topics. In fact, he regularly says (and I quote) “they told me not to do this in teacher school, but I do it anyway”. Yeah. So either the exams will be completely trivial, or I’ll be blindsided by questions about unimportant details nobody in their right mind would put on a test. The midterm is a week from tomorrow, and I expect it will be an exciting adventure - just like every other time we enter that classroom.
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Summer job!
I have exciting news! The title probably spoiled it, but the news is this: I applied for a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council summer research grant with Dr. Robert Biddle as my supervisor and we were accepted! That means working full-time at Carleton for four months, starting in May. Also nice is the fact that the award is enough to cover my tuition and books for next year, assuming I keep my entrance scholarship (I will, if this semester goes as well as the last).
Here’s the story: I found out who the eligible supervisors were, looked up their research interests, and contacted a few. I saw “Games and Hypermedia” on the side of the HotSoft webpage and that was pretty much all I needed to hear. Although, I had seen Dr. Biddle’s name before on a pretty neat project involving security and some awesome hardware, which would also be fun to work on too. I wound up walking over to the lab, knocking on the door and asking to speak to Dr. Biddle. After talking for a while and providing a transcript, we did our respective paperwork and found out a week ago that we’d been successful!
I dropped by yesterday after officially accepting the award and got a bit more information on what I might be working on. The initial plan is that I’ll work with Elizabeth Stobert, a PhD candidate working at the lab, on experiments related to security and usability. Later on, I’ll probably take a more active role and possibly start a project of my own. All in all, it should be pretty awesome.
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On an unrelated note, I’ll also be working on a computational linguistics project with a linguist doing his PhD in cognitive science. He’ll bring the linguistics, I’ll bring the computational. This is probably the area I’ll have my eye on in the future, though usability testing is a fascinating field as well. If all goes well, I’ll soon have exciting news about that! If it doesn’t go well, the exciting news will just take longer.
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On the subject of research, I’ll be posting a little blurb soon with details about my work at the Language and Brain Lab during the fall. Plus some snazzy photos of me looking like I actually belong in a research lab. It’s a bit more esoteric than computer security and usability, but I think it’s genuinely awesome. Stay tuned, folks.
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I had a prof last year for COMP 1005, the first programming class for non-computer science majors, basically just an intro to Java. I thought she was great, even if she demanded we actually know stuff in order to pass. Plus, she’s very personable, poking fun at talkative students and stuff.
I’ve got her now for COMP 2001, and again, she gives people the marks they’ve worked for. Apparently, the same goes for COMP 3004 (a class I’m not taking), where 75% of the class is failing. This is a month before the term ends, by the way. Apparently, her angry tirade was so vicious that it inspired the above image. Somebody put it on their facebook, and it’s made the rounds among all her prior and current students.
I know you won’t find it as funny as I do, but it had to be shared.
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Give me a break.
So, I told myself I wouldn’t pull “Condescending Second-Year Science Kid” in my PSYC1001 class. BUT. Butbutbutbutbut.
The first-years on WebCT are so annoying.
“You know guys, it’s not high school anymore! We have to step up our game!”
Step up your game? He gave you 20 pages of reading, sweetie. Come on.
If my PSYC 1001 course is any indication: Wait for the deluge of messages from people asking for notes. “My computer got a virus and crashed so I like lost everything”, or “I got super sick for the last six weeks and since the midterm is coming up…” or “Somebody stole my laptop!” Sometimes they just post on the message boards, but other times they take the slightly more subtle route and just send a message to everyone in the class roster. Often, they’ll post on someone else’s topic and say “can I get the notes too plz”, or not include any way to actually send them the notes.
It’s awesome because I know the names of a few people who were too dumb to keep checking my website even after I sent it to them once. And some of them are in my classes this year. Good luck out there, you trooper, you. Glad I could give you notes for three of our five classes. Hope you know how to write an essay by now.
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Cognitive Science at Carleton: Year 2
Classes for the fall
PSYC 2001 - Intro to Research Methods in Psychology
PHIL 2501 - Intro to Philosophy of the Mind
LING 3002 - Phonology I
COMP 2001 - Intro to Systems Programming
CGSC 2001 - Intro to Cognitive Science
Classes for the winter
PSYC 2700 - Cognitive Psychology
PSYC 2200 - Biological Foundations of Behaviour
LING 2005 - Linguistic Analysis I
COMP 2004 - Programming in C++
CGSC 2002 + tutorial - Theories & Methods in Cognitive Science
[edit: I wish tumblr would put multiple spaces between paragraphs to make my walls of text less intimidating, because I’m bound to write them anyway]
I’ve been surprised before, but officially, I actually only have the one tutorial in the winter. I expected to have a tutorial in COMP 2004, and LING 2005, while LING 3002 is a strong candidate too. Won’t be surprised if I come to class and they tell us to sign up for tutorial times, anyway.
The one problem with my schedule this year is that I couldn’t fit the french course I wanted into my schedule: FREN 2401 - Mechanics of language: French (liberally translated from fonctionnement d’une langue: le français). Basically, studying the structure, sounds, and so on of both Canadian French and French from France. France French. First of all, I thought it would be interesting, but it would probably help with my french too. In a grammar course, they mainly just tell you “this is how it is.” But a linguistic analysis could tell you why it is that way. The other thing is that I still want to do a minor in French and for that I need four credits, or eight classes. FREN 2401 is a full-year course, and both of the available times conflicted with classes I need for my degree. There are more french linguistics classes beyond this first one, so I’d take those later and fill out my required credits.
So anyway! Instead of taking some french courses I wasn’t particularly interested in, which is a recipe for disaster and apathy, I grabbed a couple more programming courses. Considering how many jobs I couldn’t apply for because I didn’t have experience with C++, I thought it would be a good idea to get some. Unfortunately, COMP 2001 is required for COMP 2004, which also means I wouldn’t be “learning” C++ until january. Applying for a job that’s asking for a year of experience with C++ and saying “well, I’m taking the course right now…” probably wouldn’t go over well, I’m going to use the wonderful resource that is the internet to introduce myself to C++. I probably won’t have any time to actually work on a project with it in the fall, between class and helping Mako, but I’ll start reading all those AltDevBlog posts about C++ and learn some pro tricks hopefully. Then COMP 2004 can (well, hopefully it will) teach me the rest. And I’ll keep up with Java a bit, because why not? If I do get a summer job as a programmer, it doesn’t matter a whole lot whether I’m using Java or C++.
Oops, this is getting pretty long. Well, the rest of the classes are pretty self-explanatory. All required for my degree, and they should all be interesting, so yay. Linguistic Analysis II is only offered in the fall, so I’ll be doing that next year and that way I won’t forget everything I did in Analysis I. The tutorial for CGSC 2002 will probably involve Python somehow, because Jim Davies is teaching it. Otherwise, I can’t imagine what we’d be doing. I don’t think we’d be doing actual research in an undergraduate class, that’s all.
And, of course, my notes will be up on UniNotes as I take them. When classes actually start, or when I go pick up text books (because it would take thirty times longer when classes have started), I’ll be able to tell you more interesting things.
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ok look java I know we’ve had our differences in the past
but we’ve had some great times too
so please stop making all of the blue objects in my game go backwards
I don’t even know how you could screw that up
but the red ones work just fine
so yeah
edit1: fixed the blue ones, now the red ones are going backwards
it’s a problem with the sign, if you move something in a negative x/y, the sign gets lost amid all the pythagorean calculations and whatnot
brb fixing it for good
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You win some, you lose some
It’s a good thing I’m never going to be making charts in Java, because I would probably be screwed if someone thought Excel wasn’t good enough and asked me to write a new chart program. We’ve had two tutorials now on working with these chart program, and in both of these tutorials I’ve spent an hour and a half trying to get past the first instruction. It certainly doesn’t help that every step in the tutorial is meant to somehow summarize half an hour of work - there are only four or five steps in each. Why couldn’t I just spend ten minutes accomplishing the same work with a little more instructions?
It’s not like the notes are any help, either. Here’s the entirety of our notes in the “Graphics” chapter. Think you could make a graphing application out of that? So we have bad notes that probably teach less than the Java documentation does (educate yourselves hurr hurr and we’ll just take your money), and we have unclear instructions that are written with the understanding that you’ll waste your time doing it wrong for a while until you figure out the problem through trial and error. What makes it worse is that every tutorial begins with you downloading at least five pre-built classes and then trying to fill in missing functionality. Last week’s tutorial had… 14 classes to download. Most of these have variables like X_AXIS_OFFSET and YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH and they’re used in a few places without giving you any real explanation of how it’s meant to work.
Last week’s tutorial was to draw the chart, and I couldn’t get that working. This week was to do some mouse stuff. Anyway, the chart drawing code was supplied this week, and here’s the formula for the (x,y) of the points on a graph that I spent an hour and a half trying to figure out:
X: ORIGIN_OFFSET_X + i*YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH
Y: Y_AXIS_OFFSET + DATA_HEIGHT - DATA_HEIGHT * histogram[i] / maxValue
The code I had, which was drawing everything slightly off for no reason I ever figured out:
X: (i*YEAR_SEPARATION_WIDTH)+ORIGIN_OFFSET_X
Y: Y_AXIS_OFFSET+DATA_HEIGHT-(aDVDCollection.yearHistogram()[i])
Why does that multiplication happen? What’s wrong with my code? I could have asked the TA to write it for me, but that really doesn’t help anything. At best I finish the tutorial without learning anything. Or, wait, what was I supposed to learn? How to use the drawLine() method? Or was I supposed to learn how to make a mediocre program after inheriting someone else’s code? It’s the destiny of your average software engineer, after all. Really, though, it’s not really a useful learning experience.
So what I’m getting at with this boring little rant is this: last semester, I learned stuff in our tutorials and by reading the notes. They were written by the same guy. Clearly he just gave up trying to teach the second course, and figured we’d learn what we need to know through hours spent working on assignments. My instructor (a different guy) isn’t really teaching us a whole lot during class time, either. I mean, there’s some stuff he tells us that’s great, but he’s a professional programmer, not a teacher. If you’ve ever done any programming, you’ll know what I mean by this. You can probably figure out that watching someone do that for three hours every week would be boring as hell.
So as for the title of the post, last semester was definitely a win, and this semester was pretty much a loss. Doing the assignments and looking at example code from class assignments and the notes has taught me plenty, but did I really need to pay six hundred bucks for it? Technically yes, because I need the course to graduate, but realistically, no. Sometimes you just don’t get what you paid for with post-secondary education. That’s the unfortunate truth.
All in all, this just reinforces my decision not to specialize in computer science as part of my cognitive science degree. I may as well just teach myself everything I need to know with a tutorial and the official documentation. Maybe I should steal a few of the assignments for the other courses before they’re taken off the Carleton sites to give myself something to work towards…
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