Philomath

Photo of me taken at Palo Alto outside the Facebook campus after a friend of mine showed me around his workplace.

I have always enjoyed learning and being exposed to a wide range of different topics. For me, it equips me with multiple perspectives to understand problems in the world. I had enriching experience being part of the USP ecosystem, the teaching pedagogy, coupled with the wide range of interdisciplinary topic has exposed me to different methodologies that are completely different from that of an engineering school. Beyond USP, I have also taken classes ranging from communications, accounting, finance, and computing. Yet, these modules are the extra workload that I do not need for graduation. However, they provided me with pockets of experience that will give me a holistic understanding and assessment of the “operating system” of the world. To me, the purpose of a university education, besides knowledge acquisition, is to stretch my mind, deepen my understanding of concepts, hone my intuition, and to find a place to apply what I have learnt. With the education experience, exposure, and the challenge I have taken on, I am confident in moving on to the next stage, which is, contributing to the organisation that I serve in.

In a world that is rapidly evolving, where the technological growth and advancement continues to accelerate at a great pace, it is imperative to embody the spirit of lifelong and continuous learning in order to stay abreast of new information. At the same time, continuous learning will prime and prepare us to stay relevant in our work in an increasingly VUCA—volatile, uncertainty, complex, and ambiguous—world. VUCA has been a popular managerial acronym to describe the leadership required to navigate the increasingly complex world. More importantly, learning is important in multiple aspects: gaining an awareness of our knowledge or understanding gap, and acquiring new and useful skillsets that keep our experience useful.

“True wisdom comes to each of us when we realise how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.” – Socrates

Source: Digital Well Being

As I spend some time reflecting on his phrase and thinking about the significance of learning, I started wondering if there is anything that hinders our process of learning. In doing so, I remembered one of the sessions during the Senior Seminar (USR4002) class where we discussed cognitive bias. Going along the same thread, I did some research online and came across Dunning-Kruger effect, which is a cognitive bias where people with little expertise tends to overestimate the knowledge and expertise they possess. Intuitively, it makes sense that if the learner starts off with a distorted awareness and inflated perception of how much he knows, then this creates a stumbling block for acquiring new skills. In other words, if the learner makes no deliberate attempt to strengthen his skill set, the learner always remain in stasis.

As far as I can remember, during my time in NUS and USP, being stasis is never where I want to end up. At every juncture where I see classes that interests me, I would always take it up. However, very soon enough, I had my first taste of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” in action. In my year 3 special semester II, over the summer break as everyone was having their holidays, I took on Programming Methodology II (CS2030), again, out of the desire and curiosity to learn. Having done alright in the pre-requisite module and discussed with the professor who taught this module, I thought I would be able to handle this module, though I was self-aware that programming might not be my forte.

Year 3 Special Semester II results for the Programming Methodology II (CS2030) class that I took out of the curiosity to learn and understand more about programming.

On the result release date, I had my first taste of failure—getting an F grade for the module—in NUS. Immediately upon seeing my results, after checking it another time, I remember it felt like I had felt like I had fallen to the depth of the abyssal with no way of getting out. It was as if all the effort that I had expensed over the past few years were wiped out because of the grade took a HUGE toll on my cumulative average point (or grade point average).

In retrospect, the experience has helped me identify my weaknesses, taught me how to deal with failure, perceived imperfection, and more importantly, helped me re-examine and repurpose my learning. I remembered in many of the earlier conversations I had in school with friends around me is that a university is a place for me to learn. Yet, I was so deeply affected with failure, which I intuitively agree is part and parcel of experimentation and learning. That signalled to me that my end goal was the outcome (or the results) in university and not the journey (learning process) within NUS itself.

As I reflect on this event, there seems to be a tension between the goals I subconsciously desired (good outcome), and the goals I consciously articulate to myself (the process is more important than outcome). Often, that is the paradox of goals. We set out to achieve a goal, but at the same time, our subconscious mind desires something that is more meaningful than the goal we set. What I gleaned from this experience is that so long the failure is not too catastrophic to effect long-term repercussions, enacting and coming to accept goals that are more meaningful would allow us to deepen our self-awareness and gain wisdom through the learning journey.