How not to EngPhys, or 'make sure your suffering counts'

David

For better or for worse, I graduated from UBC’s Engineering Physics program in 2022.

If you are here to learn how to survive and thrive in Engineering Physics, you have come to the wrong place. In retrospect, I consider my time then to be turbulent. I aced some classes and almost failed others. I led teams on complex projects, and also became a recluse. I carried the groupwork many times, and got carried more times than I could count. I became a shell of my former self but also its greatest iteration.

On one hand, I deeply regret many things and I wish I could go back in time to do things differently. On the other hand, I know that Past-me would have probably disregarded the rational advice of Present-me, just for the satisfaction of exerting his own freedom. He would consider me a well-meaning but condescending fellow, and in most things he would have insisted on making his own mistakes to learn from them properly.

Here are some things that I learnt along the way.

Approach work with a beginner’s mindset

From what I have seen and experienced, seniors like teaching and mentoring. It gives them an opportunity to fulfil their perceived duty towards their juniors, it gives them an outlet to show off their abilities after many years of being juniors themselves, and it is a way for them to meet new people when many of their peers and seniors have all gone their separate ways. In a way, they need you almost as much as you need them.

There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes the problem is on their end. But by not being rude, avoiding asking easily-searchable or repetitive questions, and refraining from demanding that they solve all your problems(like on Stack Overflow or on Github issues on open source projects), I think your chances of getting help are pretty good.

So, by all means learn from your seniors. They have taught me much in school, and in time I was able to learn a few things on my own and teach the next generation.

Fulfil your leadership responsibilities, but know when to step down

In my second year of university, I was elected to become a chair of the Power & Energy Society at the UBC IEEE, and in my third year, I became the software lead of the UBC Solar Car Design Team. The experience of leading was challenging, but it showed me parts of myself that I did not know about. For one, I learnt that I could be passionate about teaching and explaining and learning, but at the same time I learnt that I had an obsessive side and I struggled with delegating work to my team members.

I consider my tenure as chair of the PES to be pretty good as we had planned and delivered on our agenda and ensured continuity to the next generation. Being software lead was a more troubled process, however. In the months leading up to a competition, I spent almost every waking hour attempting to debug an electrical issue without a clear methodology, and it definitely had consequences on my health, academics, and my leadership. Fortunately(unfortunately), the 2020 competition was cancelled due to a pandemic and I could finally think about other things.

During a late night work session, I declared to my team captain that ‘if I could not take on the responsibilities of being a leader, I should not be a leader’. My experiences have taught me just how serious the consequences of assuming responsibility could be. Deciding that I needed to pass my courses too, I voluntarily stepped down after a very turbulent year.

Take incremental steps towards your long-term goals

On a spiral pad somewhere, an overconfident 17-year-old me sketched out a detailed and comprehensive plan for my entire life that ended with me sitting on top of a metaphorical pyramid like the villain of Blade Runner, having solved climate change at home and abroad. Steps 3 and 4 of the plan were ‘get good grades at university’ and ‘work in renewable energy’. I sometimes go back to that spiral pad, both recognizing that I am currently at ‘Step 4’ and also acknowledging how radically my mentality has changed over the years.

‘Solve climate change’ would be the phrasing that my younger self would have used, not recognizing the complex interplay of systems underlying the symptoms of the problem. In the following years, his sense of destiny would be challenged, after seeing setback after setback personally and witnessing bodies upon bodies pile up on the streets without cause or consequence. In the words of Rick Remender in his graphic novel “Low”, ‘I felt like a powerless observer at the end of my species’. Yet, I was still alive. What is there to be done?

‘Follow virtue and reject vice’?, ‘Do not lie to yourself’?, ‘Minimize suffering’? I did not know what worked and what did not, but I resolved to try to make incremental progress personally and professionally, nevertheless. I did research and changed my lifestyle accordingly, accumulated professional experience in renewable energy and studied in my own time. I’d like to think that my personal choices had a compounding effect to let me follow through with my long-term goals, but I’m sure that I was also very lucky. Either way, I would not have been able to benefit from the opportunities presented to me without years of incremental improvement.

And yet, my success was attained through the eye of a needle, and it was only possible through the efforts of everyone who had improved my odds along the way. My future is not a yellow brick road, or a game of snake-and-ladders as my younger self understood it - there was, and still is, a wide spread of potential outcomes. Doors after doors, decisions after decisions, and rooms to change, reflect, and grow.

Know what burnout looks like

I think the hard things about being burnt out are (1) it is a gradual regression from well-being to struggling-day-to-day, and (2) the things that help to get oneself out of being burnt out are the same things one sacrifices first to overcommit to the thing making you burnt out. It is definitely possible to be burnt out for entire months without realizing that ones habits and commitments are in pieces. Some things I learnt along the way, in hindsight:

Have commitments on multiple scales.

Actually have a list of commitments and expected contributions to each of these commitments. Make them on multiple time scales, from daily to yearly. That way, I can ask myself if any of these are persistently not being met. Have a rigid criterion by which commitments can be amended, to allow for the uncertainty of real-world experiences while avoiding blatant goalpost-moving.

Plan the next day, today…

Make plans for the next day, today. A terrible feeling right after waking up late, is the realization that I have to make plans for the day. Being late to all the plans I made the previous day isn’t a great feeling, but it is still better than starting a day with zero momentum.

…but do not overplan.

Being spontaneous about things, even loosening certain restrictions about commitments, can keep the ball rolling. For example, while working, I was able to maintain an exercise routine by loosening what time of the day I did it. I also like to spontaneously clean my apartment or cook when I have no motivation to do anything else.

Sleep deprivation is (usually) counterproductive…

In university, I met several classmates who boast about going about with 6, 5 or even 4 hours of sleep each day. At the time, I felt an irrational shame for requiring 8.5 hours of sleep, and I tried to plan each day with stricter limits on sleep. What I should have realized is that sleep duration depends on so many variables that there is no point in comparing. Furthermore, being fully awake for 16 hours is far more productive for learning and mental work than being sleep-deprived for 18 hours. The extra 2 hours of wakefulness is not 2 extra hours of full productivity, but rather 4 wasted hours of rereading the same lines in the textbook and not getting it.

…but sometimes it must be done.

Staying up late can be very productive though, as long as the level of required wakefulness matches the mental and physical intensity of the task at hand, and the consequences of not completing the task are great enough. Some tasks that may warrant being sleep-deprived are: assembling formula sheets before an exam, writing software unit tests and boilerplate, penning down a very rough draft of an assignment, and cramming if you haven’t studied.

Recognize the symptoms of hyperfixation

Like a long-running process on a computer that eats up CPU cycles and memory until all other processes grind to a halt. I was once responsible for debugging an elecrical issue on a PCB caused by intermittent electrical noise, and at the time there felt to be no way out except to day after day, week after week, exhaustively try out different permutations in the hopes that one of them is the solution.

Learning to mitigate insomnia

Insomnia could be a medical or hereditary issue, but it could also be caused by easily preventable issues. Not being able to sleep properly probably negatively affected my grades by a lot. Here are some things I did that helped.

Managing light, sound, dust, and temperature

Once my eyes have adjusted to a blue-ish light source right after turning out the lights, sleeping becomes a challenge. Usually, this comes from external light filtering through the window blinds, LED lights from an internet modem, or a light indicator on my laptop charger. I used black duct tape to cancel out the most offending sources. Keeping a very dim red light on suppresses any perceived blueness as well.

Deterministic noise, such as that from a ticking clock, doesn’t really keep one awake. Random noise, such as that from an electric fan, rain, or lightning and thunder, doesn’t keep one awake either. In my experience, it is semi-deterministic noise, such as that from a lawnmower or leaflower or leaking faucet, that really makes sleeping difficult. Suppressing ambient semi-deterministic noise with a source of random noise therefore helps one sleep.

Setting the room temperature right, and wearing the right clothes for the temperature, is very important.

I once had a randomly-occurring, but persistent case of itchy hair in the middle of the night, even though I washed my sheets and hair regularly. It turned out that the headboards were dusty.

Having real commitments in the morning

Having a job that required me to be somewhere in the morning also helps. I noticed that my sleep schedule would resolve itself when I had concrete responsibilities to someone else in the morning, and would worsen when my only responsibilities were to myself. I think I feel a greater responsibility to finish a task even if it takes the night, rather than to wake up early, so I must mitigate by having somewhere even more important to be in in the morning.

Mitigating “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination”

“Revenge Bedtime Procrastination” is deliberately wasting time right before sleeping to make up for an inability to control one’s daytime activities due to daytime responsibilities. In a way, it is a vindicative act of self-hatred, but it can also be a cathartic release of unrealized creativity. Some nights, I feel an inexplicable will to live and love and suffer unconditionally, to study and to build beautiful systems and structures, and the routine company meeting I must attend in the morning loses all importance. Other nights, I regret all the what-ifs in my past and worry about tomorrow. The rest is just doomscrolling.

The four ways I’ve tried to mitigate this is 1: To do so much in the day as to be too tired to dream, worry, or doomscroll at night, 2: To exert creativity throughout the day by playing music, doing research, or working on personal projects, 3: To mitigate anxiety for the future by getting up and working on the anxiety-inducing stuff until exhausted, 4: To counter past regrets with a more positive self-image, which is generated by a real, tabulated list of all the noble and great stuff I’ve ever done in my life.

Conclusion

Growing up, I’ve always held a certain disdain for self-help and self-improvement books, and for employing any 3rd party to write my thoughts out for me, be it college admission consultancies or large language models. I have never put the exact feeling into words, but to try now, the idea is(completely ripping off Dostoevsky and so many other philosophers):

The attainment of self-knowledge is a process so deeply personal, so reflective of one’s approach to life itself, that for someone else to be able to precisely characterize one’s way of thought in pages and to be able to provide a prescriptive solution to one’s most serious problems, one’s unique life experience is reduced to be able to fit within the pages and framework of the mind of a stranger.

There are definitely parts of a person that are purely mechanical. Physiological problems can and should be properly understood and fixed through other machines and prescriptions by physicians. Neurological disorders can be mitigated with surgical procedure, drugs, and electrical stimulation. However, psychological issues, though they have a physical basis, cannot be characterized and treated purely by prescription and machine, and they require prolonged interaction with therapists, friends, family, nature - other peoples - to mitigate. Self-help and self-improvement books provide a kind of ‘mirror’ for one to address issues on this level.

Then there are the highest problems, of what one should do, what one should value, what one should believe in. If a person, book, or even a machine, can provide prescriptive answers for us humans here, it is either the creation of a higher being or that the human experience isn’t more profound than that of a machine(which I sincerely hope otherwise). And yet, self-help and self-improvement books, while providing a ‘mirror’ to help us work through these problems, often carry overt prescriptions to these extremely personal problems, problems which touch on the high and spiritual. It is one thing for an author to illuminate their characters with their personal responses to these highest problems, another thing to prescribe one to the reader.

No, if there is self-knowledge and knowledge of the highest problems to be found, knowledge that can move a soul, it can only be authentically gained by living as a person and through other persons, in relation to the higher beings, through joy and suffering and struggle.

Now, all the observations I have tabulated above as reference for personal self-help and self-improvement are psychological, no higher. In a way, I’ve made my undergraduate life unnecessarily difficult in order to learn these lessons as I would study a higher mystery. However, I believe that I can only truly own these lessons through life experience, instead of receiving them as prescriptions from anyone, even myself.

Past-me can never, and would never, listen to Present-me. But Present-me would be a complete idiot to not listen to Past-me.