In high school, my life had been synthetic: my academic and social lives were blended together harmoniously, despite my parents’ attempts to disrupt that harmony. In university, I was forced to live essentially two separate lives, and had to divide my attention between them. I suffered greatly through the first two years because it wasn’t until third year that I managed to somewhat integrate the two halves of my life again.
I think that my parents chose a program with such a heavy workload because they believed that it would force me to focus on the subjects that I needed for graduate school while preventing me from having the free time to devote my attention to subjects which had “nothing to do with” a future career in academia. As always, their actions had the opposite effect, and actually shifted my attention away from the physics of computation and towards religion and the Muslim world. This did not damage my computer science career as much as it might have only because I “rolled with the punches”, so to speak: when I entered graduate school in computer science, it was to do research into information retrieval — using skills which I had learned by working on searching through Arabic texts while an undergraduate.
The primary reason I could not concentrate on my computer science and physics classes in university was that almost every single topic they covered was something my parents had attacked me for studying in elementary or high school. I had already learned most of the topics in the applied areas of computer science through having played a lot of computer games and reverse-engineering them as well as writing my own, all the while being attacked by my parents for “wasting time” playing games. And when it came to theoretical computer science and physics, the topics were exactly the ones which my parents had derided as having “nothing to do with computer science”, “frivolous”, “nonsense”, and so on. In other words, they were exactly the topics I had learned through reading books which my parents had forbid me from and beat me for reading. So I was in a position where I had to satisfy my parents’ mutually contradictory demands: on the one hand, I shouldn’t be studying these topics because they were “worthless”; and on the other hand, I had to study them because it was necessary to do so “for school”. I felt very sick when I encountered these topics and couldn’t study, but I did pretty well anyway because I already knew the material. But my marks in my undergraduate classes did not reflect my strengths at all; I did relatively poorly on some of the subjects that I actually knew very well.
Another reason why I couldn’t focus on my studies was that the environment was simply not socially conducive to it. There were two aspects to this: the expectations of my professors, and the attitudes of my classmates. Both aspects stemmed from the fact that the university treated engineering as a vocational program, and the curriculum was designed around this philosophy. Again, this is not a criticism of Engineering Science, which as the “elite” engineering program at the University of Toronto did exactly what it was designed to do: select people who were able to manage an insanely enormous workload while maintaining enough sanity to continue to solve difficult problems. Obviously, the program provided excellent training for certain kinds of careers; but it was not ideal for anyone who wished to acquire a very deep theoretical understanding of any one subject in particular. There was just not enough time for that — each professor treated his or her own class as if it was the only one we had, and scheduled the topics covered accordingly. We jumped rapidly from topic to topic, and learning not to dwell on any topic past its due date was a matter of survival.
– davinci
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