As I have described in several previous posts, my academic and social lives basically did not intersect while I was an undergraduate. In graduate school, these aspects of my life became somewhat re-integrated once again, because there were so many Iranians in engineering, and especially in my area of control systems.
I should perhaps go back a little and explain why the demographics of my graduate school labmates was noteworthy. Throughout my undergraduate years in Engineering Science, my father had been harassing me about my supposed inability to compete with students from mainland China. This was, of course, complete nonsense. I don’t recall many students from a mainland Chinese background who didn’t drop out by second year. The majority of them had formed a clique, and worked and socialised only with each other. As soon as a few of them started dropping out, most of them dropped out because they no longer had their support group. The only ones who made it past second year were those who did not restrict their coalitions to classmates from a similar background — in other words, those who adapted to become more like their Canadian and Westernised classmates. I had only one classmate of Chinese descent who had comparably high marks, and he was fairly Westernised (and I think he might have been born in Canada or the United States).
In any case, my father held what he imagined to be the typical student from mainland China to be the epitome of the university student: someone who had no goals aside from maximising his grade point average and spent all his time on only that and nothing else. Never mind the fact that I could clearly see for myself that those of my classmates who actually had his kind of mentality were all struggling to even pass, and failing — he insisted that I should behave more like them. Furthermore, he declared that, while I did not believe him now, I would soon find out in graduate school how right he was.
I had actually thought a lot about the demographics of my future colleagues while I was in high school, but at that time I had wanted to study what would now be called quantum computing, and had no intention of entering into engineering. I believed that my future colleagues would be mostly white, largely secular, and with a somewhat disproportionately high number coming from Jewish backgrounds — these were the typical demographics in many cutting-edge fields of science. On the other hand, those of Chinese descent would be underrepresented, especially in comparison with their general overrepresentation in more established areas of science and engineering. The reason for this is the Chinese cultural preference for staying away from anything deemed novel or risky, and sticking with things which are seen to be traditional or safe. My father was the perfect exemplar of this attitude. He refused to accept the rationale I offered for my interest in theoretical physics, namely that there is a deep connection between quantum mechanics and computer science which was largely unexplored, on the grounds that he “had never heard anyone say that”. (The implication that I was not anyone did not go unnoticed, either.) Clearly, if I wanted to do cutting-edge scientific research in certain areas, very few of my colleagues would be from a Chinese background, except for those who were highly Westernised. And yet my parents kept pressuring me to restrict my social circle to those of Chinese background only.
I could see for myself, both in high school and as an undergraduate in university, that every single one of my classmates who behaved according to my parents’ ideal did very poorly in school. I had no reason to believe that it would be any different in graduate school, whether it was in computer science or in engineering.
The top students in Engineering Science in my year came from a variety of backgrounds, but those of Chinese descent were underrepresented, while Iranians and Jews were overrepresented. In fact, the two students with the highest averages were a pair of Iranian guys who were cousins. The highest average in the class that was two years ahead of mine also belonged to an Iranian. This overrepresentation of Iranians among the best students in one of the top engineering programs in the West did not surprise me; it reminded me of the preponderance of German-American physicists during World War II, or of Russian-American scientists and mathematicians during the Cold War.
As I have written about previously, I chose to focus on control systems because this allowed me to study several subjects that I wanted to learn more about in a context that was acceptable to my parents. The demographics of my graduate school labmates was a bonus, because it meant that I could also learn Persian within the same environment. My Master’s thesis was based on previous work carried out by an Iranian former member of the lab, and I received a lot of help on my research from my Iranian labmates. Incidentally, my supervisor, Dr. Raymond Kwong, has a similar background to my parents. I had thought that, because of this, they would not criticise him — but they did anyway.
I had been studying information retrieval in languages written using variants of the Arabic script on my own, but my focus had moved away from Urdu because I was no longer in touch with Mrs. Mallo. Because of my labmates, I redirected my focus towards Persian. As I have mentioned previously, I added a section on the Persian language to my web site, but took it down just before the 9/11 terrorist attacks at my father’s insistence.
Despite the fact that my web site was unavailable, I continued to receive e-mails about some of the projects on it. Apparently, it continued to show up as one of the top results on text processing in the Perso-Arabic script in several search engines, and naturally there was now a lot of interest in this topic. After I restored the site (but without the non-English sections), I put up a page on processing various languages in LaTeX because it was one of my most popular requests.
Many people remarked to me at the time how marketable my skills had become, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I was told that I would be the perfect candidate for many career paths and job openings which had suddenly become available. It reminded me of what people said to me in high school about my suitability for studying the physics of computation. But I had no formal qualifications in information retrieval or Islamic studies, though I did have some attributes which people with only book learning did not have: I had first-hand experience of fasting through Ramadan, and I had spent the past four years counselling students from Muslim backgrounds who were trying to reconcile their inherited beliefs with what they learned in university. Furthermore, my background was neither European nor Middle Eastern, and I was not Jewish, Christian, or Muslim. The fact that the historical conflict between Christianity and Islam and the current turmoil in the Muslim world were “none of [my] business” was seen by everyone as something that worked in my favour.
I knew that there would only be a small window of time to take advantage of the opportunities which had become available to me. Others would soon act to fill the niches which had been opened, but I had a head start. Furthermore, I was studying Persian, rather than the too-obvious Arabic, which would buy me some time. After 9/11, I predicted that Iraq would fall and that Iran’s regional status, which had been kept in check by its archnemesis, would be elevated as a result, and that therefore knowledge of the Persian language would be in demand in a few years — a prediction that turned out to be correct. However, my actions were also constrained by the crippling restriction that whatever I did, it would have to be a part of “school”. Furthermore, I was in the middle of my degree, and I wanted to finish it first. But I planned my switch into computer science — which I had wanted to study in university in the first place — around my skills in information retrieval in Persian.
In graduate school, I started becoming a social hub again. Besides hanging out with Iranians while they spoke Persian to each other, I also went to see Bollywood movies in Little India with labmates and friends from South Asia. I had actually started watching Bollywood movies in high school to learn Urdu, and since I had studied Sanskrit (and hence Devanagiri) in university, it meant that I could also read Hindi. (If the previous sentence was confusing to you, see here.) My interest in Sanskrit was shared by Dr. W. Murray Wonham, Professor Emeritus, who remained quite active in the lab in spite of his official retirement.
I socialised with everyone without regard for cultural or linguistic barriers. Many graduate students seemed to socialise mostly with those from their own cultural backgrounds, not necessarily out of any prejudice towards anyone else, but mainly out of convenience and laziness. But because I wasn’t inhibited by either of these factors, I knew a lot of people and a lot of people knew me. I had an international reputation: whenever there was a visitor from Iran or India, I was someone they “had to meet”.
Now, one might argue that being able to recite Persian poetry and knowing a bit of Bollywood trivia are the wrong reasons for being famous in graduate school — but this didn’t matter. (For all I know, maybe Richard Feynman became such a famous physicist because he played the bongo drums.) The point is that I had opportunities to meet and potentially work with people which I never would have had if I had obeyed my parents and acted like a student from mainland China. The only reason that I didn’t take advantage of those opportunities was because I knew that my parents would simultaneously criticise me for associating with my colleagues while taking credit for any work I did with them. I suppose that this was a form of self-sabotage, and this kind of thing would become increasingly common throughout my career. (Having a harsh inner critic and acting in a self-injurious manner are traits common to people with abusive parents.) Meanwhile, my labmates who actually came from mainland China would express to me that they wished they were more social and had more connections, but lacked the proficiency in English and the confidence to make themselves noticed.
My busy social life in graduate school did not escape the notice of my parents, who once again began to attack me for being too popular. Considering that they had been attacking me throughout my undergraduate years for socialising primarily not with my classmates but rather with people who had nothing to do with my schooling, one would think that they would be happy that my social and academic lives had become re-integrated in graduate school.
I have been extraordinarily lucky in my life in that I kept encountering people who, for whatever reason, decided that I was extremely talented and volunteered to do whatever they could to help me make the most of my abilities. In the long term, I think that my parents’ continual efforts to separate me from these people have been far more damaging to my scientific career than their depriving me of any specific career opportunity. In elementary and high school, they always criticised my teachers, my friends, and my friends’ parents who supported and praised my interests, while demanding that I behaved like my Chinese classmates who had submissively allowed their imaginations to be suppressed and destroyed by their own parents. They accused Dr. Percy of diverting my attention to astrophysics which had “nothing to do with” computer science, when in fact he gave me an enormous head start with my scientific research. They continually blamed Mrs. Mallo for distracting me, when she was the one who enabled me to continue my studies after they had made it impossible to do any work around them. When I entered university, it was my affiliation with people who shared my interest in religion that allowed me to acquire the skills I would later need in graduate school, but my parents insisted that they were wasting my time. And in graduate school in engineering, it would be my Iranian friends who prepared me for my return to computer science by teaching me Persian. Ironically, it was my parents who had put me into an environment with so many Iranians to begin with when they forced me into an engineering program, but this didn’t stop them from criticising me for making the best use of this fact.
When I completed my Master’s degree, both Dr. Kwong and Dr. Wonham asked me to stay for the Ph.D. program. I felt very guilty about turning down the offer, but I had never intended to be an engineer in the first place, and I wanted to return to computer science as soon as possible. My parents had insisted that I obtained a postgraduate degree in engineering, and I had hoped that they would leave me alone to pursue my own interests once I had earned one — but I guess I knew that this would not be the case. My decision to leave was made easier by the fact that my father had started to really dislike my supervisor for no discernible reason (but my guess would be jealousy), and began to insult him and criticise my association with him. I knew that even if I had wanted to pursue a Ph.D. degree in engineering, there was no way I could do so while sustaining a continuous barrage of insults against my supervisor by my father. But I disappointed a lot of people by leaving engineering.
I searched for a way to switch into computer science and to do research into both information retrieval and quantum information theory. My parents had always accused me of being distracted and of dividing my attention, but this was my defense mechanism against being prevented by them from studying what I wanted to study. I knew that, at any moment and for no reason whatsoever, they could put an end to my research by forbidding me from continuing, and if I refused, then by continually criticising and threatening me until I was no longer able to continue. They had done this to me in high school, and I had compensated for my inability to continue studying theoretical computer science and physics by turning my attention to informational retrieval and religious studies. Every time my parents prevented me from being able to focus my attention on one subject, I would turn to another. This was how I survived their continual attempts to destroy my scientific career.
Incredibly, one university was a leader in both information retrieval and quantum information theory, and it was in Canada to boot: the University of Waterloo. Even more incredibly, the city of Waterloo was also home to two research institutes devoted to the topics that I cared most about. The first, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), was established by Mike Lazaridis, the founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIM), to be a world class research facility devoted to theoretical physics. It fit the description of “a building full of astrophysicists” that I had predicted to my father I would one day be studying computer science in. The second, the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), was founded by Jim Balsillie, the other co-CEO of RIM, to be a think tank on issues of international relations. (In fact, after the Perimeter Institute moved to its new location in late 2004, the two institutes were located just across the street from one another.)
I felt that it was an incredible stroke of good fortune that everything I wanted to study happened to converge in one place. Therefore, I came to Waterloo.
– davinci
Isn’t it interesting how one’s visions of the future can come true? While I was still living on campus, I used to walk around Waterloo Park a lot. On one of my walks, I envisioned myself living in the neighborhood south of Erb, on a leafy street, on the second floor of a house with narrow rooms and sloping ceilings. A few years later, that’s exactly where I ended up.
I am not proposing any supernatural explanation, nor do I discount the effects of self-selection and mere chance. Still, I find it pleasant to observe how precisely the reality can materialize around the ambition. It’s too bad that my more fanciful visions, such as the one where I’m the quarterback of the Steelers or the one where I’m a billionaire, have not turned true. I also regret that my dream apartment didn’t last long because the house got sold and the new owner kicked out all the tenants.
Does CIGI do anything useful? I note the following description on its website: “Led by a group of experienced practitioners and distinguished academics, CIGI supports research, forms networks, advances policy debate, builds capacity, and generates ideas for multilateral governance improvements.” Oh, boy. Distinguished academics forming networks and building capacity and gratuitously using the word “multilateral”? Sounds like a bullshit factory.
I think self-selection and chance probably suffice as an explanation in my case. There are certainly thousands of people who are interested in theoretical physics and international politics, and it’s just a convenient coincidence for me that two of them happen to be Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, who are located in the same city and have the money to found research institutes dedicated to their interests.
I’m not sure that “pleasant” is the word I would use to describe the phenomenon. I get very depressed thinking that if only my parents hadn’t stopped me in high school, today I might have an appointment in both institutes. I think I would have been the only one, too. Think about how intellectually influential I would have been then. (Or is that too nightmarish for you?)
That description of CIGI sounds like it was written by a PR person. I suppose the answer to your question depends on how you define “useful”. They do many of the same things as a university: publish reports, present talks, support research, etc. Thomas Homer-Dixon is there, and he gives pretty good talks.
– davinci