Sadia Khaf

I Forgot My Studies

Sadia Khaf -

Yup, you read that correctly. That's exactly what I mean. I forgot everything I studied😲. Chances are, you don't remember much from the fifth-semester Electromagnetic Field Theory (EMFT) either (was it the fifth semester or sixth?). I'm a Ph.D. candidate at the moment, and I had to do some derivations that required the knowledge of Lagrangian, some basic derivatives, and integrations. I couldn't do it.

A friend asked me what programming languages I know because he wanted to learn some. I listed all the ones I knew and then I realized I don't really know how to code in any of them. These days, I'm just using Python, and that too is a hit-or-miss scenario most of the time 😒.

So What's the Point😒?

Asking what's the point of studying all that is a valid question at this point. If I don't remember a word of what I studied in undergrad or master's, then what was the point of spending 7 years of my life studying it? I have a theory but I'm not all that convinced. Bear with me.

Was it All About Options🤷‍♀️?

Most of the math I use today is either from 12th-grade math, early semesters of engineering, or googled stuff. To do exactly what I'm doing today, which is the application of reinforcement learning to cognitive radio networks, I could have done without a lot of things I studied during my undergrad and masters. My Electronics 1 and 2 don't exactly contribute to my current research. To a large extent, my MS research doesn't contribute to my current research either. Theoretically, I could do what I'm doing by taking only five to eight courses. But WOULD I be doing it?

Very few people are born with their Ph.D. topic clearly defined in their heads. I certainly wasn't. I always had a broader sense of what kind of work I wanted to be doing in my life, but it was nowhere close to applying machine learning to spectrum sensing and spectrum allocation challenges. As a result, most of my education has been a process of elimination.

Rather than knowing "this is what I want to do", it has been "this is what I definitely don't want to do".

Right now I absolutely love what I'm doing. Was 7 years of intensive study worth figuring out what I want to study in my eighth year? Who knows if I'm even going to continue doing that after my Ph.D.? Most of my peers didn't; they always tell me they learned everything on-the-job.

Did I Gain Any Particular Skillset🤔?

I did gain two highly valuable skills during this whole process.

  1. How to think like a programmer
  2. How to google stuff

Trust me, if you have those two skills, you can do my work without having a bachelor's or master's degree in electrical engineering. It might take someone longer than it takes me, but they can do it.

Am I Particularly Smart🙄?

A lot of people around me think so, but I'm not. I just told you I forgot my entire education🤷‍♀️. I have had an exceptionally bad memory for as long as I can remember (pun totally intended), but I have a slightly faster than average information processing speed. I can look at a bunch of simple equations, optimization, and constraints, and in some cases, do the math in my head and find an answer. A lot of people around me usually take longer so they think that I'm smart. I can tell you, I've been around MANY people who can do it faster than me. The rate of information processing is different for everybody.

Another parameter that makes people think that I'm smart is my problem-solving ability, which again, comes from the two skills I listed before. I'm simply skilled at breaking down problems into smaller problems, devising steps to solve them, and googling how other people solved them.

How to think like a programmer, and how to google stuff are skills that are acquired and practiced. No one is born with them.

The BEST part😃

How to think like a programmer and how to google stuff are skills that you can apply to everything in your life. Here's how I have applied them in my life.

  1. Stocks, ETFs, and Crypto trading
  2. Relationship problems
  3. Saving dying plants
  4. Home IoT projects
  5. Cooking
  6. Fitness

I'm sure the list goes on. The best part is that they are transferable. These two skills have made my life tremendously better, so I want to transfer them to as many people as I can. What would be the best way for me to do that? I need smart people such as you to tell me that. Is it teaching a course on "How to think like a programmer" and "How to google stuff" somewhere? A masterclass? A YouTube series? A book? If you're reading this on my website, ping me on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter and let me know what do you think I should do🤔.