Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since my last post. Between that post and this post, I had an epic trip to Europe, got to think about things other than my thesis for a few days, and relaxed. Now that my inbox is caught up to date and I have had my first meeting with my supervisors since I got back, I think it’s time that I get back to blogging.

And this time, I am hoping it’s somewhat helpful to the incoming grad students. If you are not a prospective grad student for this year, but thinking about grad school at UBC, I just found out that Ambrose Chan,  my labmate and the president of MEGA(Mech Eng Grad Association — join our facebook here 😀), is featured on a recruitment video – woot, woot! Ambrose, you’re a super star!

If this video convinced you enough, or you didn’t need convincing in your decision to come to UBC, then this post may be of help to you. Because this course is on choosing courses.

I actually came across the same kind of questions from multiple prospective graduate students regarding courses, that I think it’d help you out in the registration process. I remember going through this process myself a couple of years ago as a prospective MASc student, so I will mainly focus on that. This is an improved version of answers I gave to a prospective student recently by the way (sorry, super lazy over here).

Alright, here we go.

First of all, I am guessing all of you are familiar with the Program Guide and Registration page on the mech.ubc.ca website. If not, it’s pretty helpful, so give it a try (http://mech.ubc.ca/graduate-students/program-guide-and-registration/). You’ll find out soon enough that you need to get at least 30 credits to get your MASc. It’s a bit confusing at first, because… of the 30 credits, your thesis counts as 12 credits. It’s also named under this weird course number, MECH 599B. Yes, you need to enroll in it to let the world know that you’re in the UBC Mech master’s program — and no, they don’t give you 12 credits per year for your thesis, so there’s on advantage of staying longer to finish your master’s. On top of that, you have this mandatory seminar course called MECH 598 that everyone need to enroll in. Unlike most courses, which gives you 3 credits per course, this course unfortunately gives you 2 credits. Why is it unfortunate? Well… to do the math, 30 – 12 credits is 18, and 18 is quite nicely divided by a bunch of threes (six of them to be exact), but 18 – 2 is 16 which isn’t evenly divided by a bunch of threes. So this means that, excluding the 12 credits you automatically get as a master’s student, you end up enrolling in this mandatory seminar course, and are left to fill up 16 credits with courses. Here at UBC, we usually get 3 credits for a 3 hour class commitment per week (I think it’s true for most North American university credit systems). So you see why things that nicely divide by threes are kind of important…

That means you need to take 5 (if you happen to take four 3-credit courses and one 4-credit course) to 6 courses throughout your entire master’s program in order to meet the credit requirements.

So, I took six 3-credit courses throughout my master’s, but spread out mainly across my first year master’s.  I know that in undergrad, people are used to taking five to six courses per term. So you are probably thinking, why not get all the courses over with in the first term? Yea… I don’t actually know anyone who has done that. I think taking more than three courses is a bit too much in grad school – although taking four is doable. I am not saying that to mean the course load is super heavy for grad level courses (it’s not that bad imho), but I am saying that because you end up working on and caring more about research than course work. Sometimes courses come with course projects, which can take up whatever time they take up (sometimes quite a lot, sometimes not at all). So I recommend doing the 3 courses per term in first year type schedule. I found that the seminar course (MECH 598) actually take a lot out of you on the second term of your first year because a lot of people stress out for weeks preparing for presentations for the seminar. I wouldn’t recommend taking any more than three courses during the first W2 term, but that might just be me.

On the courses I took.. I took three courses the first semester, two courses the second semester, and one course during my second year – if I remember correctly.

3 credits – CPSC 505 (Image), First year W1 term
3 credits – PSYC 545 (Stats), First year W1 term
3 credits – INDS 502 (Ethics), First year W1 term
3 credits – CPSC543 (User Interfaces), First year W2 term
3 credits – MECH520 (Sensors & Actuators), First year W2 term
3 credits – MECH522 (Controls), Second year W1 term
2 credits – MECH 598 (Seminar Course), First and second year, W1 and W2 term

So, as you can probably tell, I took quite a few courses outside of Mech. Part of the reason is that my research project is highly interdisciplinary. So I was able to find courses outside of Mech Eng that were quite relevant to my study and I think it worked out quite nicely for me that way.

Another thing to note is that, unlike undergrad course registration process where you make your decisions on courses as you like, in grad school it’s always recommended that you speak with your supervisors about your chosen list of courses. So, before registering for your courses and sticking by them, you should just send your supervisor an email saying “Here are the courses I would like to take. What do you think?” I think grad school is a bit more closed-loop with you and your advisors in the sense that they are like your research parents – them parenting your way through your research, including your course selections.

And it’s also good to contact people from your lab regarding the kind of courses that they have taken. That way, you know what you are getting into – i.e., you can filter out the courses that are highly discouraged by your future labmates due to hard marking professor, not an interesting course etc.

That’s it for now. I hope this helps, and happy enrolling everybody! 😀

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Time spent making choices are deceivingly exciting yet seriously dreadful.

When I talk to prospective graduate students, one of the questions I often get is “How, and when did you decide on your research field/project?”.  But more often I get comments rather than questions of the same sort, “you’re lucky that you have a project you really enjoy. I don’t have a project idea yet, so I don’t even know how to approach professors and whom.” (i.e., they’re envious that I’m signed my life away with a project, and don’t have to make a decision about it.) This of course is assuming that the professor does not have a fixed project for you to take on.

The truth of the matter is that making the decision to do some sort of research in itself is exciting. Pondering on the quest to new knowledge, imagining yourself coding away while someone happens to watch you in admiration, picturing yourself in front of a room full of people talking about new things that the audience never knew but know now because of your work…. the glamour, the excitement, the journey!!

Although I dread at the thought of living a student life for the next four/five(?!) years as a PhD student starting next year, I still jump for joy imagining all the things I could do as a PhD student/candidate and (hopefully, one day) as Dr. Moon (LOL, oh wow, I can’t help but to laugh every time I think of this title).

But there is this factor in our decision making process that makes the journey painful. It’s called making the ‘right’ decision.

We feel that we need to always make the best decision possible because, otherwise, we will look dumb. Especially for someone who has an undergrad degree, and is considering to pursue higher level education, it feels important that you don’t make obviously dumb decisions.

So we ask ourselves, numerous, and never ending list of questions: what exactly would be useful for the world? What exactly can I do that will be cool, and will make my time worthwhile? What on earth would I be devoting years of my life for? What dopeople think is cool anyway? Do I just want a fun project? Do I want to go to a big school? Should I stay in the same school? What about the so-called inbreeding factor? Do I know all that I should know before going into this field? etc etc.. the list goes on.

There are good decisions and bad decisions. But you can’t ponder on it for ever.

Sometimes when you find yourself hesitating to make a decision, that’s because you can probably live with any of the available options (i.e., too much freedom on your hands). If there was a clearly bad choice, and a clearly good choice, you won’t have to ask too many questions before you make your decisions isn’t it?

I realized this just now as I looked at my clock and noticed how many hours I spent looking through specs and reviews of tablets. You know, iPads, Galaxy Tabs, Optimus Pads, etc… the fancy devices that don’t seem to have a particular purpose to many, but are hard to resist for some consumers.

I have been pondering over picking out which tablet to purchase since… oh, I don’t know.. Thursday? Yes, that’s right.

On Thursday, I made the decision to go to Europe by myself for the first time. I shall leave on the 4th, and come back on the 14th after having attended a roboethics conference I have been really wanting to attend. It took a couple of painful hours before I clicked on that ‘Complete Purchase‘ button to buy my flight tickets, although the price was really good, because the airline has ‘No Refunds‘ policy.

Then, I started shopping for a tablet to take with me to Europe, because I don’t want to be carrying my 30-minute battery life  >2kg (?? I’m probably exaggerating, but you know what I mean) laptop with me. My plans are to take one backpack, and an internet enabled device of some sort without much planning. That way I would be able to book hostels on the fly, book trains/flights on the go, and also be able to know where I am without needing to carry dozens of maps and guide books.

The possibility of convenience with a tablet opened the Pandora’s box inside my brain: which one should I get? should I get one as a replacement of my current phone? which carrier do I want to get it from? do I want a contract? how much do I want to spend on this? do I want the giant screen or a smaller one? buy into Apple or the Android world? etc etc..

Then something clicked in my brain — an aha! moment.

I remembered that went through the same kind of painful thinking process when I was super stressed a week or so ago.

My stress was somehow redirected to me making a decision whether to cut my hair or not. I spent hours trying to decide, looking at photos of people who has similar facial features and the type of hair I may want to try, trying photoshop etc… Then, when I realized how much time I had spent on making such a tiny decision, I had had it. I realized that I won’t stop thinking about it if I don’t cut it.

So I cut it.

It didn’t matter whether the hair was to be perfectly beautiful. It didn’t matter whether it was a good idea or a bad idea. The point was that these decisions are actually small when you think about it. I can be happy whether I cut my hair or not, but that I was happier once I cut it just because I didn’t have to think about it anymore – the damage was done and irreversible.

I think most of the time, we try to weigh the pros and cons of things that we don’t really know how to measure. We don’t know what to expect, yet we try to blindly predict things so that we can somehow make better decisions.

I think decisions regarding research is kind of like that. Unless you know exactly what you want, you can ponder on and on about whether a project will be really THE project for you, or whether you will have made the right choice in going into a particular field of research. But the truth is, you won’t know it unless you try it out. And chances are, if you have the will, any project you take on will be an epic project for you regardless of whether it’s the next hottest thing on earth or the technology of the former generation. Because you’ll make it an epic project.

On that note, I think I’m going to get a Galaxy Tab, just because it’s cheaper, and move on to the things that matter more (things that don’t occupy my time with weighing pros and cons forever).

And now, here’s a TED talk to go with today’s theme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTO_dZUvbJA&feature=youtu.be)

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