How I Learnt To Learn

Who am I?

I’m Shourya. I’m a student at the University of Surrey enrolled on a 4 year bachelors in Computer Science.

Before I attended university, I had never taken classes of computer science, or studied programming in any real capacity. So it makes sense to most people that when I started my course on October 1st 2018, I felt incredibly out of my depth. Many hours in the first few weeks were spent going over lectures multiple times, with my time spent working on lab assignments growing. I always felt I never truly got a grasp on the subject and my solution to this problem was to keep trying, in the hopes that at some point it should all just ‘click’.

Looking back, I can see that this thought process, this impostor syndrome that I had picked up didn’t change as time went on. There were definitely waves in which I felt I was able to carry out work to a good standard, but I never truly felt that I had the ability to be a computer scientist.

What changed?

In February 2020, I became involved in a group coursework in software engineering. I had always attempted to work at a level which would get me a result I thought I needed rather than a result I wanted. The software engineering coursework was based around web application development: one of the few areas in my degree so far I had felt that I had a vague understanding of. And although this may sound like the obvious key to success, I decided to actively put time and effort into this project.

At this point, people will normally say, “Of course you should put effort into the work you do.” And to this, I would agree. However, in my attempts to speak to fellow university students, I’m trying to say I understand that this doesn’t always happen. Of course I can’t talk of other people’s experiences and trying to generalise why certain students are able to place more time and effort than others would lead to poor advice. What I can do, is aim to explain what it was that stopped me from enjoying and taking part in my degree, and how I am working to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

I always struggled to put more time into a project because I felt I had nothing more to offer than the result I was seeking. I looked at modules as a means to an end, with the end being a 2:1.

So to change the way I performed, I had to change the way I think. Once again, a lot of this advice is very obvious, and I’m not reaching for something magnanimous. What I will attempt to do, is explain how to act upon the advice I’m giving, mainly through the examples of how I chose to act.

Take pride in your work

This is the kind of statement everyone will say to you. I know I definitely heard it during talks from lecturers. It’s tough to explain how to apply this, and the process will likely be different for different people, but I chose to look back through my past coursework to see if I felt it was done to the best of my ability. Oftentimes, I found the answer to be closer to no, rather than yes.

The principle is incredibly simple but when it’s applied effectively, the end result has a much higher standard.

Enjoy what you do

I always found that this advice was easy to give, but hard to implement. To stray from the path of generic advice, I’ll therefore give an example of how I’ve achieved this in the past.

One piece of work I did in June 2020 involved creating several different AIs that could take in an image and print the letters inside the image to text. Part of this involved creating an extractor that would take letters from the training data submitted to it and extract each individual letter. However, most of the extractor was provided by our lecturer, and I (along with a few other students) felt there were several ways in which it could have been improved. In addition to this, the AIs were initially only configured to recognise letters. This meant that capitals, spaces and line breaks were ignored, and the resulting output would be very different to the input. Whilst this still met the requirements for the coursework, the project itself was not enjoyable to me, and as such was being done to a very low standard. As a way to find it interesting, I decided to improve upon it by incorporating solutions for all of these issues.

When the coursework was eventually submitted, the extractor was configured to recognise capital letters, words, and even line breaks. Each AI was scoring with an accuracy of 90% or higher. Weeks of work finding out how to implement these solutions led to me gaining a deeper understanding of OpenCV, the computer vision library I chose to use to replace the original code.

The point here is that there’s always some way to find something interesting to do with the work you’re set. Always try to find that.

Summary

I’ve only started applying these lessons for the past 9 months but I’ve found that not only do I enjoy the work I do far more, I also have a greater understanding of the content I interact with. There are still times when I feel I shouldn’t be working on a certain project, but the ideas expressed above allow me to keep improving.