My October Experience
I’ll say it here: I have grown exponentially this month of October. There were tons of challenges I had to overcome and new takeaways, I will try my best to explain them in this Newsletter.
Article
This month I finished my article on the math behind A.I. This was a challenging article; I went all in with the research and tried my best to understand the math as best as I could. A little background: I have never taken a calculus class in my life, yet here I am reading research papers chocked full of formulas that look more like Latin, than math. Anyways the article took a whole month to complete, but clicking that publish button was one of the most satisfying things I have ever done.
Here is the takeaway from this experience:
Have high standards and go deep into a topic
This article's whole point was for me to learn and understand the complexities behind these A.I. algorithms. At the start I was highly motivated and learning a lot, it felt like every day I was constantly learning. Yet, the more I went down the rabbit hole of machine learning and deep learning I started to get discouraged.
During the first week, I understood most of what I was learning. But after that initial buzz of information, when you go deeper you realize you don’t understand anything. See, learning was fun when I understood, but not when I was spending days on end trying to understand 1 concept that made no sense to me. I started looking for a way out. Instead of wanting to learn I just wanted to finish my article and get on with my life. After the third week, I noticed that I didn’t understand what I was writing down.
I could have gone two paths, either fill my article with things I didn’t understand or maintain high standards for my article and go deep enough to understand these concepts. I decided to do the latter and create an article that helped me grow exponentially.
Hackathon
For those who don’t know what a hackathon is, it’s when you are given a problem statement and you must come up with an idea from that prompt. I was in a team of 5 (from Europe, India and the states) competing against about 40 other teams. We had 36 hours to come up with an idea, create a slide deck, record a pitch and create a presentation for judges. It started at 6:30 PM EST on Thursday and you had to turn it in at 1 PM EST on Saturday.
The idea that we came up with was capturing carbon out of the air with algae and converting the algae into biofuel. Biofuels are fuels made out of biomass.
There were a lot of insights I took from this, everything from how to manage a team to how to think clearly and solve real-world problems.
Here's my key takeaway:
Embrace the suck
During the hackathon, my team was rushing so much to get the project done that I (who was doing the presentation) didn’t have time to memorize the script. Let’s flashback a bit. It’s 4 PM I get on a call with judges, I’m stressing out completely I feel like I’m losing my mind and will fail. I’m the last team to present so I mute myself turn off my camera and turn down the sound on my computer. It’s 4:10 I start trying to read and memorize my script, but it doesn’t work.
It feels like there’s a timer in my head, tik tok tik tok, 4:20, the first 2 teams have presented. I go into panic mode. It’s 4:30 I start feeling waves of emotions. Thoughts stream into my mind at the speed of light. “I’m going to fail”, “I should just quit”, “there’s no way I can do this”.
I had two options, go out there and embrace this challenge, or listen to that voice inside my head that was telling me to quit. This victim voice didn’t want me to embrace the hard challenges of life. I knew that if I wanted to get anywhere in life I would have to stop listening to this voice. My brain went back online. And at 5:45 I presented. It could have been better and it was not the best presentation there, but after all the struggle, and all the pain, I’m happy that I presented, and embraced this challenge.
It's not easy but sometimes things suck and instead of quitting or losing your head over it, embrace it. Embrace the suck. It’s going to hurt, but I could have easily gotten off the call and told my team my computer had crashed. I could of easily not presented, but I did anyways. Courage is not acting without fear, it’s acting in spite of it.
Batteries
This month I’ve been looking for the intersection between climate change problems and A.I. Mainly because I'm very passionate about climate change and A.I. is also one of my loves. I thought that connecting the two would help me create a meaningful project that would advance me forward.
I’m now researching lithium-ion batteries and how A.I. can help optimize them. That’s the topic of my next article. I've been contacting experts in the field and having calls with them. I've learned a ton about A.I. and batteries this month and will keep going deeper into these two fields.
Overall I had a great month. I learned a ton and became a much more resilient person by overcoming huge challenges. In November I'm going to work on furthering my skills in batteries and A.I.
See you next month!