Three mistakes of my masters

It’s been eight months since I graduated with a Master of Science in Computer Science from Northeastern University, Boston. I have had a lot of non-study related learning experiences during my masters and in this blog post I plan to share three of those – the ones I think would have enhanced my Masters education substantially.

To give a background for the readers of this blog post, I arrived “in the new world” on 5th of August, 2008 as a candidate for masters starting in Fall 2008. I graduated in December 2010 with Masters in Computer Science with specialization in software engineering.

Now, that you have enough information about me, lets get started. You might find references to courses in computer science but this blog post can be generally applied to other fields too. Also, by writing this article, I am not making a new revelation – this is more like a thinking out loud exercise for myself and I hope it is helpful for the readers of this blog post.

Following trends – The first couple of days in the US, you tend to do what everyone else is doing. I did too. Like everyone else, I applied to the same on-campus jobs, took the same courses as others were and looked at the same areas or locations for housing. Dont! What I have found out is this country rewards you much more for being an individual that what I was used to back home in India. But, I have learned this the hard way.

The biggest mistake was that I took a course everyone else was taking about AND assumed that the course is too simple – merely by following the grapevine. When I came here, people were talking about a course called “Introduction to database management systems” taught by Prof. Zhang. The rumor was that the professor is too lenient and you are guaranteed an “A” grade. Well, there are very few things that are guaranteed in life and grades is certainly not one of them. It eventually turned out that I did not have any interest in database management systems and hence although the course was great, with great opportunities for interesting projects, I did not do well. I scored a B-

Hence, the moral is, be an individual. Do your own research and make choices based on your research and logic. Don’t be a member of a herd!

Optimizing Income – A bit of background information -  I fortunately got a job very early as a dorm proctor at the Residential safety office. The job allowed you to “work” on your laptops when you are not helping out people entering the dorms. When I started this job, there were more proctors and less amount of shifts. They also had a “swap board” where people would post shifts and if you are free you can pick up shifts.

However, since I started after the shift allotment schedule and all the possible shifts were allotted to people, I did not have any shifts to start with and I spent like a zillion hours looking to find shifts to work with. It felt like my part time job is my full time job and studies is part time. This might be true for certain fields (yes, that is true at NEU; if you manage to take the “right” kind of courses) but definitely not for Computer Science. This cost me dearly in terms of assignments and grades. I also found out that being able to use a computer at an RSO shift meant watching more movies!

Moreover, the shifts didn’t have equal pay; especially the night shifts paid more – of course, it didn’t matter then that it messed up my sleep cycle and I spent the next day in a “zombie” state which affected my studies and the time could be used to do something productive. Oh, well, I was a student then – productivity was an unheard concept!

So, I guess the moral of the story is, keep and do your on campus job purely for subsistence purposes and don’t make a temporary career out of it.

Choose your partners / team members well – I have been on both the sides of the coin, I have been a terrible partner AND I have had a terrible partner; hence I can’t emphasize enough, how important this is? This point also borders on a philosophical perspective! Oh well, I can get philosophical sometimes. Such is life!

The purpose of teams and project partners is to enhance and promote creative thinking and people can do better things with their projects – it is NOT supposed to be a host – parasite relationship. I am not sure, how people who depend totally on their partners or team members can sleep at night? I surely wasn’t! I had no satisfaction about the assignment, the course and hence the semester!

I know people who have finished their masters only by being support wheels to their partners or team members in projects and assignments. When it was an individual assignment or project, the course “encouraged collaboration”. When the course didn’t have both of the above points then the course was not worth taking! Ofcourse!

Do you really want to be one of those people? What is the point of spending $34,000 a year (at least that is what it was then) when you are not really learning anything? If learning was not your primary aim and you have no love for your chosen field – if you are here purely for the US Dollar to Indian Rupees conversion rate then I have four characters for you – GTFO.

TL;DR:

Hence, to summarize,

1. Be an individual. Do not follow the herd!
2. Don’t optimize income from on-campus jobs. Spend the time in learning something that will help you in your career. Eventually, when you get a full time job, the extra 2$ that you earned per hour or even the extra 150$ a month that you earned by sacrificing  your sleep time or study time won’t matter!
3. DO real work on your projects and assignments AND expect members to do the same. Choose team members to achieve this goal.