I met a really great professor this semester, who, outside of technical knowledge, gives me some hyper impresssive quotes about education and engineering. Here are 6 quotes from him.

University is the only place where we pay to be silent. That is a waste of money. In classes, ask questions because that [i.e., knowledge] is what you paid for.

This hits me hard. Oftentimes, when I am not confident that my answer is correct, I keep silent. But that actually hinders my learning. I paid to go to school (in one way or another), and I should not be shy to ask for what I paid for.

CS stands for CommonSense. A lot of tricks in Computer Science are actually just commonsense – very simple [given you understand the language].

Given my limited knowledge in a few CS areas, I concur. In web development for example, most of the knowledge is built by atomic logical design decisions that, in hindsight, are very trivial decisions to make. Same for other system design fields, like Operating Systems and Computer Architecture. However, these fields are still pretty challenging to learn because (in my opinion) there are so many terminologies, so many layers, so many moving pieces that should be comprehended almost at once.

A related question: Is every intellectual field a combination of a dry heap of terminologies and a beautiful narrative underlying them?

Don’t be content when you are paid 120 thousand dollars a year to write program to calculate factorials. When you are paid a lot to do only simple things, please worry for yourself because you jobs can easily be taken. Lean hard things (like vi, ctags, gdb) because one day you will need it.

This relates to the previous quote. When most things are CommonSense, people who can do hard things are more valuable. One of the goal of my undergrad capstone project was to replace such easy/CS jobs. I used to joke with my friends that I would become a PhD to write an AI that replaces software engineers. Although I won’t be doing it because I am in a different research topic now, tech giants will eventually do it to some radical extent, I believe.

In a classroom, when a student keeps answering questions from the professor quickly, the chance to think is taken away from other students.

Sometimes my chance is indeed taken away like that, especially in exploratory courses during liberal arts undergrad. In those course, I could not think fast enough even if I tried very hard, because I am new to the subject.

On the other hard, sometimes I took that chance away from others without noticing. Especially, there was a class where I always answered first to get the attention from the professor. My excuse was that everyone else seemed quiet. But now I think I had some reason to give them a chance to think.

A mediocre idea with good execution is much better than a great idea with bad execution.

This is similar to saying perfectionism is usually bad. It is true for engineering fields like CS, where practicality defines the value of a project, an engineer, or a whole organization. I love thinking hard about a problem and seeking a perfect solution for it. But ultimately, I want to be helpful to people around me. Regardless of how hard I think, if I don’t help improve something real, it is then wasteful.

In class, don’t keep looking at the computer. I don’t want to treat you as kids and ask you to close your computers, but being a teacher in such a class [where everyone is looking at their own screen] is really demotivating.

I was actually one of those screen starers lol.

However, to be fair, in a lecture, I enjoy imagining it to be a direct conversation between me and the lecturer. I may visualize a dark room where classmates disappear, and I am talking one on one with the professor. The result is that (1) I won’t suffer that shock when moving some the audience mode to the direct conversation mode when actually talking with the prof outside class, and (2) it makes the lecture much more enjoyable for both me and the prof (because I actually pay attention).

That’s it! The professor I am talking about is Dr. Sridhar Alagar who is teaching me about Operating Systems. His RMP score is 3.3 and I don’t know why. He walked us through an unprecedented amount of code right in lectures, and cares a lot about our understanding of the subject.