Pride

It’s been quite a while since I last posted something; this semester is my most hectic semester yet, with several projects piled up my neck. NUS education has always been just mindless mugging with brute force work done till wee hour in the morning, so I didn’t expect to learn much other than the usual dead stuff, and I end up viewing my projects as “yet another project”. But the very viewpoint that I have taken is the lesson I’ve learnt this semester.

All the while, I thought my projects are just very simple projects, projects that have almost zero complexity; I had no pride in what I was doing.

But during my 2001 project demonstration, I found out that isn’t entirely true; I was surprised by how impressed my peers are, I was really happy with all the “wahhh” that I heard. To be honest, a great deal of credit is due to CK, he was the one who spent one entire week putting such an awesome model together, I was very impressed myself when I first saw the model.

 So I thought, wow my project is useless, but at least it looks really awesome. But that isn’t true as well, my project really had substance. The most crucial point is when assessors are impressed as well.

Quoting some of the comments:
“This is quite an elegant system”
“The touch screen is quite responsive”
“This (Pseudo-Mobile) looks nicer than the PCB”
“The RF communication is quite stable”

That was when I really felt pride in my project. At that moment, my team had a glimpse of hope at getting an A. But of course, we know that the final demo is only 20%, getting an A is still quite a distance.

I haven’t mentioned anything about what I was working on in my blog this whole time, so a little background: the Pseudo Mobile is an attempt to simulate an actual mobile phone communication via RF communication as GSM module was too expensive. There is just one problem, and the problem lies in the backbone of how it is supposed to work: RF communication is extremely hard to harness. I had a lot of trouble getting the RF to work and I really thought my part of the project is going to be scrapped. But luckily, with an algorithm modified from the suggestion of the EE god AZP, RF finally worked at the very last minute.

The part on the touch screen: the touch screen was done by JY, but when my portion integrated with hers, the system hangs. Long story short: I spent one night working until 3am to rewrite her entire program. It was really tedious, as the flow of the program is quite complicated; handling each state and action had to be planned properly. But hearing “The touch screen is quite responsive”, it all paid off.

In the entire semester, there’s just once setback after another. At a certain point, I was so discouraged, I keep saying that we should just stare at our project and cry; I didn’t notice how hurtful and disrespectful that can sound to my teammates.

It is really funny that I’m talking about taking pride in our work, given that extraordinary high amount of ego I have. Then I realized, I was hiding behind my ego. I've been told that I am arrogant, I don’t deny that. But the thing is, I know how capable I am, and I can gauge if other people is more capable than me or not. For example, there is this salesman I worked with last holiday, and he was trying to show off his tech knowledge (particularly in android system) in front me. Although I am green in my field and not even graduated, I know how much of what he said was true, and he was just trying to impress the girls. I agree that correcting him was the manifest of my arrogance, but the fact stays: my competency larger than his. Hmmm, to think of it, pitting me against a salesman does sound quite degrading now.

Anyways, in this case, the project was at the point in my circle of competence, I thought it was out of circle of competence, and hence it went out of my circle of confidence. I underestimated my own level of competency.

Having pride in what you do is not easy, even with my theories on confidence, I lack that confidence at crucial moments. Project is one, interview is another. I had an interview for my summer vacation internship recently, the reason why I didn't get the job is likely to be administrative issues, but I did quite badly for the interview. I take pride in my social skills, I talk a lot, but it was really funny how I had nothing much to say for the interview, I should have had a lot of things to talk about. The good thing that came of that is the experience: I didn't get the job, but the exposure put that into my circle of confidence now.

Enough for the great wall of text, here’s the pictures of my 2001 project:
 

Main model

Pseudo Mobile