The spring semester has come to a late end, and it is now time for a quick retrospective.
The semester
The semester started quite nicely for me, with interesting courses, mild weather and a lot of motivation. But this had to change with the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic. From mid-march onwards the physical lectures got cancelled and switched to online mode, and the campus became closed to students. Overall, the teachers along with the departments took appropriate steps to ensure a proper transition without discontinuity. Also, the IT resources were scaled rapidly and appropriately to accommodate the growing needs from all lectures. The Swiss government didn’t resort to a complete lockdown (maybe since people here tend to observe the rules more strictly?), but took effective measures by closing schools, non-necessary stores, bars, clubs, etc, and gatherings were limited in size to five people.
I decided to remain in Switzerland during the whole peak of the pandemic (≈3 months), along with some of my flatmates. The main changes introduced in our daily lives were working in our rooms instead of on the campus, and making the Wohngemeinschaft (WG) our primary (and often only) social circle. Contrary to what one may expect, it did not disrupt life in the flat that much, or at least not in a negative way. Since the flat is quite big and as we were focusing on our studies during the day, we were not forced to spend much more time together than usual, therefore not increasing the potential for conflicts. And when not working, we could enjoy social interactions and activities together, which made life brighter throughout this period and brought us closer together. I was also glad that I could go outside freely to do some sport in the countryside nearby. Hence this whole period, although sometimes a bit boring, was pretty positive and well-lived for me.
The biggest challenge for me was to adapt my learning methods. Some lectures could be followed only by reading the script as it was well constructed, which was quite convenient and time efficient. But other courses required watching the video recordings of the lectures in order to understand the material. The good thing about recorded video lectures is the ability to pause whenever desired to better understand certain points, instead of sitting clueless for two hours in front of the teacher deriving stuff on the board. But as a detail-oriented person, I was often tempted to “one-shot” courses by understanding everything at once, and although satisfying, doing so may have a few drawbacks:
- it takes a lot of time (from pausing a lot), which may lead to neglecting other courses.
- it removes incentive for spaced repetitions, which are usually very effective for learning (≠understanding) things.
- one may pay too much attention to unnecessary things and not synthetize enough.
Hence, I definitely had to find a balance between immediate understanding and learning efficiency. Another challenge was, despite my motivation to work not lacking, to maintain discipline and regularity in my work since there wasn’t much time constraint from the course schedule anymore.
The courses finished at the beginning June, followed by a two months revision period. The exams took place during August, which is the usual exam period for ETH.
COURSES
Control systems II (6 ECTS). This course builds on the knowledge taught in control systems I and focuses on the fundamental limitations in control performance, MIMO systems, and robust control. It is a really good course for anyone interested in deepening its control knowledge. Quite time consuming with weekly optional graded homework and a lot of material to learn from the textbook (Multivariable Feedback Control, by Skogestad & Postlethwaite).
Introduction to machine learning (8 ECTS). Course from the department of Computer Science. Probably one of the biggest courses at ETH (more than a thousand students attending), due to the recent advances in the field, high salaries and general (over)hype around it. The course is a thorough introduction to the field of learning systems, covering various supervised and unsupervised, discriminative and generative learning techniques. There are multiple graded team projects to apply the material to real life problems. The course quality is decent, although it could be much better organized to save the students precious time when learning (no pun intended).
Although I enjoyed learning the theory and ideas behind the buzzword, I found practical ML tasks to be among the least satisfying work one can do. It is a lot about testing different algorithms that are already available as packages, and tuning the parameters of these black boxes. The end result is just some metric that one tries to optimize. There is little causal relationship between the action one undertakes in order to solve the problem and the effect on the outcome, even if one understands the theory behind the models used. To give an analogy, solving a ML task feels like selecting and tuning a machine that will perform some work on your input, not by actually looking at what happens inside the machine, but instead by observing the output only. One has intuition of why it works from the theoretical knowledge, but in practice a perfect ignorant could get to the same result just by turning knobs and pushing buttons of the black box until it works fine. Conceptually interesting but practically not satisfying. At the end of the day, I do not regret having taken this course as I learned interesting things and I can knowingly decide not to pursue much further in this way.
Recursive estimation (4 ECTS). This course is all about state estimation techniques (i.e. one has a system with inner “hidden” dynamics and wants to track them with probabilistic estimates using both measurements and knowledge about the system). It covers Bayesian filtering, the Kalman filter, the extended Kalman filter, and the particle filter. Definitely one of the courses I enjoyed the most so far, because of both its quality and the importance of the afore-mentioned techniques in engineering.
Intellectual property (2 ECTS). Course from the department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences. It is a really interesting introduction to the main existing intellectual property rights (patents, copyrights, trademarks, designs) and their implementation at different levels (national, regional, international). I definitely enjoyed it.
Project Management (3 ECTS). Course from the department of Management, Technology and Economics. It covers the usual unfolding of projects, analyses the necessary (but often not sufficient) factors for project success, and introduces project management theories, frameworks, and methods (classical and agile). Despite the topic being very interesting, certain concepts introduced were sometimes a bit hard to grasp or seemed a bit “empty”, since I still have a limited experience of project work (scale, duration, complexity, etc) to reflect upon. But I am convinced that this knowledge will prove useful to me later on, whether as a team member or as a team leader. I see it as a first conceptual framework to guide me during project works, which I will be able to expand and enrich through experience and learning.
OTHER SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE
Web coding. As you may have noticed, mrimlinger.ch has a fresh new outlook. The old version of the site had been made using a “pre-fabricated” blog framework (Hexo), which although convenient and working fine, did not leave me with much control over the website’s appearance and functionalities. Therefore I learned web coding with HTML, CSS and JavaScript to shape my blog into something more personal. It now sports a more minimalistic outlook and has a pretty neat gallery feature.
German. I kept making progresses in German thanks to immersion and interaction in a German speaking environment. In particular my speaking and listening capabilities have improved a lot and I enjoy speaking German more and more. I also started replacing English and French entertainment with German one (books, series, streams, etc). But there is still a lot of work ahead of me to improve and make less mistakes.
PERSPECTIVE ON MY STUDIES
Learning. I generally find a lot of pleasure in learning, and maybe even more now that courses can be chosen freely and that they focus on specific topics. As time goes on, I am able to better see what certain subfields of electrical engineering are about and how they connect with each other, whether on a theoretical or on an applied level.
Examinations. When it comes to examinations, I am getting tired of certain types of written exams where one is tested rather on his ability to calculate fast, instead of his understanding of the subject (typically highly time constrained MCQ exams). With such exams, one of course needs to work and understand the material in order to pass. But it is only a necessary condition. The actual grade one becomes is not so much correlated with the depth of understanding. As said before, it depends on your ability to calculate fast and how much you “overfitted” to the exam by training on previous ones. Such exams were very typical during my bachelor at EPFL. Back then it wasn’t bothering me that much since the choice of courses was not free and we somehow had to prove our cognitive abilities by being “benchmarked”. In that case the topic, interest in it and depth of understanding were important to me but secondary behind performance. Now at master level the sense of the effort has changed: I still want to perform, but not just for the sake of proving my cognitive abilities. I want to acquire knowledge in a field that I purposedly chose, and perform in it / show expertise. Hence the disconnection between the sense of my effort and the way it is evaluated is getting increasingly frustrating. That being said, I still get good grades and all is fine; I am simply annoyed by this always repeating exam session emotional roller-coaster (satisfaction of good work -> optimism for the exam -> disappointment of oneself during the exam -> frustration and senselessness after the exam -> relief from the grade). Hence in the future I might try to take more courses with oral exams as it is more rewarding and in line with my way of working where I seek to reach a thorough understanding of the topics.
Theory and practice. Although I really enjoy the courses, I sometimes feel like I am “stuck” in the world of ideas and theory. I increasingly desire to apply all this knowledge to practical problems, and therefore I am really looking forward to the semester project that I will do during the fall semester.
Orientation. When I arrived here at ETH, I knew that I was in the right place with the opportunity to learn about a lot of subjects that are of interest to me, but I didn’t know quite well in which subdomain I should specialize. This year of taking courses with a relatively loose overall focus allowed me to find new interests (e.g. control), deepen my knowledge about existing ones (i.e. applied physics and optics), and rule out certain options (i.e. machine learning, digital circuits). I now have a clearer picture of the different subfields within electrical engineering, and from now on, I will specialize in optics and photonics.
Goals and passion (1) - Having one and misconceptions. Related to the discussion on orientation, I realized that desperately seeking for having (not even attaining) an objective, a leitmotiv, is not a suitable approach to striving in life (at least for me). I tend to really admire people who are passionate about something and fully dedicated to it. However, I might not be meant to be such a person. Indeed, I am generally curious and interested about any topic, but none seems to really sticks out from the others as “the one”. It is rather the opposite, where I just identify things that I really do not want to pursue, while the others are fine, just fine. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and perhaps I should just accept this situation and go along with it. But what is even more important is that I might have a pretty big misconception about those people who are passionate about something (1A) and what passion actually is (1B). First (1A), I idealize those people as not being faced with choices and uncertainty because they have this passion as a guiding principle above them, telling them what to do. This is false because these people are obviously faced with difficult choices just like everyone else. And furthermore, their passion for something neither defines them, and nor it is eternal. They might enjoy other things aside from their domain of expertise, and in the future they might interest themselves in something different. Which leads to addressing my misconception about what passion really is (1B). It is not an objective that one has and act towards; instead, it is just a state of enjoyment of the present work. And as it can be limited in time, one should always remain curious and open to new things to keep it going and avoid boredom. Good for me then, I might actually just be on the road towards passion. Furthermore, what enables passion may not only be the topic / field itself but also the nature of the work, the environment, etc.
Goals and passion (2) - Focus and opportunities. Related to the previous point, an important thing to consider are opportunities. If one only has one goal, then one may miss a lot of opportunities on the way by being too narrow-sighted, too focused on that goal. Sometimes one just need to follow the flow without overthinking things, and be open to / pay attention to opportunities as things unfolds. In turn these opportunities can lead one to experience and learn new things, and perhaps enable the emergence of passion. Furthermore, when taking into account the general uncertainty about the future, one who desires something too specific has a much higher chance of being disappointed because one did not reach the goal, in comparison to someone else who is more flexible and detached. [!] It does not mean that one should not aim high, but what “high” entails should be broad enough in scope to be attainable under uncertainty.
Goals and passion (3) - Success. Also, I think that we tend to envision people who are successful in a field as having strategically planned everything towards this specific objective that they always had. But picturing it that way is false. For sure these people for sure had a direction and were driven. But them getting to that spot is a combination of hard work, talent, luck, hazard and opportunity-seizing. The successful spot that they find themselves in right now was very likely unknown to them in the beginning. There is no 100% certain recipe towards success (whatever success means), only good approaches and attitudes towards it. Life paths only make sense in retrospective. Even this whole blog post is about making sense of this semester in retrospect. :p
Goals and passion (4) - Conclusion. The take-home message for me is really to find the right balance between:
- A. Having a general direction, but not desperately wanting one and expecting too much from it.
- B. Navigating the uncertainty, adapting the immediate trajectory given immediate constraints and opportunities. This discussion should (I hope) more or less close a long period of troubled soul-searching in my studies. Of course, there will come much more important decisions to be taken as life unfolds, but at least I have now a healthier approach towards those issues.
SIDENOTE: LIFE IN ZURICH
I notice that as I increasingly adapt to my environment, so does my perceived quality of life and general well-being! I am probably stating the obvious here, but it may be important to remember it the next time I change places and have to re-adapt / face hardships during the first few months.
And during the summer Zurich is quite amazing. It is warm, dry and peaceful, with plenty of nature and places to bath 😊