Tag Archive for 'authoritarian parents'

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My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people

Published by davinci on May 27, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

As a consequence of being a graduate student in quantum computing, I met several people whose papers I had read in high school and whose writings had influenced my interests. It was very cool, for example, to sit next to Dr. Charles Bennett during a lecture at the Perimeter Institute and to watch him grill the speaker. My supervisor, Dr. Cleve, also introduced me personally to Dr. John Preskill, a meeting which I will describe in another post.

Another person I met through Dr. Cleve was Dr. Michael Nielsen, the co-author with Dr. Isaac Chuang of the standard textbook on quantum computing. Dr. Nielsen is writing a book on the future of science and is interested in the effects of modern communications technologies on scientific research and collaboration, a topic which I had been thinking and writing about since high school. But when I met him, I couldn’t bring myself to discuss it with him.

I have already written about this kind of self-sabotage, of holding myself back… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath
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My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”

Published by davinci on May 26, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

The main part of my strategy for overcoming my depression is to identify its triggers and confront each and every one of them by writing about them. Since switching my Ph.D. research topic to quantum computing, almost everything that I encountered every single day as a graduate student in this area has been a trigger of my depression.

The very situation itself was depressing to me, which is in some ways quite irrational. I had told my father when I was in high school that there would be a close collaboration between computer scientists and physicists to study the physics of computation, and now I was a part of this. But in many ways I felt very out of place… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 7: my mother’s selfishness, re-visited
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath
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My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science

Published by davinci on May 24, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

Beginning in my second term at the University of Waterloo, I started to work with Dr. Gord Cormack and Dr. Charles Clarke in the Programming Languages Group on some information retrieval problems. (They’re very easygoing and everyone just calls them “Gord and Charlie”, so it feels a little bit strange to refer to them so formally. But I will maintain this level of formality when referring to all of my professors for the sake of consistency.) I also took a course from Dr. Clarke on Automatic Question Answering.

It was quite fortuitous that Dr. Cormack and Dr. Clarke were members of the Programming Languages Group, to which I was thus assigned, along with other graduate students who were researching information retrieval. Programming languages was a topic to which my parents had no objection… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 12: the aftermath
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people
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My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice

Published by davinci on May 23, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

I had discovered, by the end of my first term in Waterloo, that while my father had maintained his negative opinion of quantum computing, it no longer seemed to enrage him consistently as it did before. This was a man who had screamed at me, beat me, locked me out of the house, and threatened to disown me for studying the components that make up quantum computing while I was in high school, but his reaction to the fact that I had resumed my studies — which he had expressly forbidden me to continue, under threat of being disowned — could only be described as mild irritation.

One of the main difficulties in coping with abusive authoritarian parents is the lack of consistency in their demands… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
2 Comments

My depression in Waterloo, part 1: the first term

Published by davinci on May 18, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

The previous series of posts, called “The causes of my depression”, established the triggers that set off my depression. Since coming to Waterloo, I have been encountering these almost every single day. I am therefore beginning a new series on (the effects of) my depression in Waterloo. As before, these posts were expanded from notes I took after my sessions with UW Counselling and a private psychiatrist.

The University of Waterloo is run on a system of three terms (or semesters) of four months each per academic year. The first term actually went very well for me, right up until near the end of the term, when I made the mistake of consenting to a visit from my parents… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 6: meeting people
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 9: exposed
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 13: dropping out
3 Comments

The causes of my depression, part 19: the demographics of my graduate school labmates

Published by davinci on May 13, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

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… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. The causes of my depression, part 2: my high school predictions about the future
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
  4. The causes of my depression, part 17: my “frivolous” web site and how I learned Persian
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
2 Comments

Being socially active is important to academic success

Published by davinci on May 11, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

I had originally written the material in this post as a part of the ongoing series on the causes of my depression. I had taken this material out because it had made the high school section of my chronology far too long, and also because I didn’t think the details were that relevant to the theme of the series. However, as I was writing the next post in the series, which was to be about my experiences in graduate school, I realised that a lot of it didn’t make sense except in comparison with my high school experiences. I have therefore cobbled some of the material back together into this post.

I am not including this post in the ongoing series numbering primarily because it is out of chronological order, but also because I think its theme is important enough that the post should stand on its own. There is a widespread belief that intelligence and sociability are inversely correlated; gifted children are commonly stereotyped as being socially awkward and unpopular, especially in high school. I not only think that this stereotype is untrue, I think it is perniciously harmful. It is especially harmful in the case of gifted adolescents of Asian descent, who are basically hit with the double whammy of being stereotyped as socially awkward for two different reasons… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. How I managed to be so successful in high school
  2. The causes of my depression, part 6: how Mrs. Mallo saved my academic career
  3. The causes of my depression, part 15: the most important thing I did in undergrad
  4. My academic and personal background
  5. Why children should be allowed to study whatever they want to study
2 Comments

The causes of my depression, part 18: my parents blamed me for 9/11

Published by davinci on May 8, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

My parents had been attacking me for years for observing that religion would once again become important in global affairs, that the post-Cold War division of the world would be into blocs defined by religion and culture, and that in particular the resurgence of Islam would have a large part to play in this. Their reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the way they began to treat me thereafter, perfectly illustrate the enormous gulf between traditional Chinese culture and the culture of science.

In science, progress is made through the elimination of faulty hypotheses which are discarded whenever they are shown not to agree with observations of reality. Science therefore demands certain traits of its practitioners: the readiness to alter one’s opinions, no matter how deeply held, when they are contradicted by incoming evidence; and the willingness to admit one’s errors. An individual scientist may be unwilling to abandon a pet theory, but for the most part, science celebrates the desertion of wrong ideas; when one studies the history of science, the really major discoveries have been hailed as such precisely because they overturned previously cherished beliefs. These traits are not only lacking in traditional Chinese culture — which values obedience, harmony, reverence for authority, and the concept of “face” — but are actually antithetical to it… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 2: role reversal and sacrifice
  2. My depression in Waterloo, part 3: my Master’s degree in computer science
  3. My depression in Waterloo, part 5: feeling “unworthy”
  4. My depression in Waterloo, part 10: disowned
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 11: the biggest regret of my life
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The causes of my depression, part 10: “the Machine”

Published by davinci on May 1, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Besides my brother, I didn’t spend very much time with anyone else in the Engineering Science program, except for one other guy. He had actually joined the program late, and wasn’t very social. I had noticed him sitting by himself and invited him to join us, and the three of us ended up spending a lot of time studying together after that. Many of the other students in the program studied in large groups and socialised together in the evenings and on weekends, but we didn’t join them. I actually kept a very active social life outside of Engineering Science, which I will write about in later posts.

Our friend was the most efficient person my brother and I had ever seen. We nicknamed him “the Machine”… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. My depression in Waterloo, part 9: exposed
  2. The causes of my depression, part 9: rolling with the punches
  3. The causes of my depression, part 11: nothing in common with classmates
  4. The causes of my depression, part 19: the demographics of my graduate school labmates
  5. My depression in Waterloo, part 8: disguising my research
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Overcoming my writer’s block, part 4: high school and being editor-in-chief

Published by davinci on April 10, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

In the previous post, I wrote about the main cause of my writer’s block, as far as scientific writing was concerned. But that was not the end of it — my parents continued to punish me for writing even as I switched to other topics.

Now, being beaten, locked out of the house, and threatened with disownment would probably have deterred most people from continuing to do the things that provoked those reactions in the first place. But the maltreatment I received at home was more than balanced by the acclaim I received outside. Everyone called me a genius and told me that this or that one of my essays was the most insightful thing they had ever read on whatever subject it was on, that I was the most talented writer they had ever met, that I should be published, and so on. People kept telling me that I should submit my writings to this magazine or that journal, but I couldn’t heed their suggestions. I had conflicting goals: on the one hand, like any author, I wanted to disseminate my writings, but on the other, I had to limit the probability that my parents would chance upon them. And this latter constraint took priority, because being caught would have meant being prevented from writing at all… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 3: science writing in high school
  2. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 5: writing about open notebook science in high school
  3. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 2: elementary school, ESL, and fiction
  4. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 1: overview
  5. How I managed to be so successful in high school
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