What you want to major in might not be exactly what you imagine it to be

I’m not sure if it exactly look as I imagine it

Zeinab

The first time I encountered this idea was when talking to Zeinab Sami 016 FMSI, while I insisted that she must study how stochastic processes are involved in machine learning, she responded with something that falls into the idea: “Your perception of this major might be different from the reality.”

Indirectly, she helped me to adapt this as a new way of thinking when picking majors throughout my life, whenever we plan to study something new we might have initial assumptions about it, its almost always the case, that our minds are not null when we study new materials, we do not only take assumptions with us, but also attach information we hear along the road with it. with extra imagination.

Most of us have heard the term quantum mechanics, and you probably have imagined the nature of how these types of studies are, no matter how far your assumptions are from true, say you have been hesitating to enter an engineering degree due to your imagination of previous engineering classes or things that you have learned that helped you to generalize to the engineering concept. I’m not the best at making analogies, but I will tell the story of stochastic processes and my conversation with Zainab.

She’s a Computer Science major who devoted more time and effort to mathematics while also maintaining good grades in CS related subjects. she shared me the work of a mathematician in stochastic processes after winning a Nobel prize on his work, or Fields Medal I really can’t recall it. we were arguing about how he managed to imagine these things, let alone architecting a framework to explain it, although we tried to “wonder” but we come from completely different backgrounds, as I see stochastic processes from practical Machine Learning point of view, mainly thinking of “if I never set a random seed I might never reproduce my same results again, my weights will always initialize randomly, the gradient will always give different results/trough when minimizing the cost function”, Zainab is coming from a completely different background thinking about the mathematics how differential equations are implemented…etc.

This idea of things being as you imagine them, or as the image you are able to craft by generalizing from previous experiences, is something I often think about.

How to benefit from this lesson.

Assuming you want to study a material in a new subject that you have never studied before, you will have generalization ability to predict how it’s going to be, but the reality might be different. and sure it is different, from the things that you can think of, it is always better to do the process to know how things are. quantum mechanics seems like you will be imagining where the cat is, what will happen if I observe it, but in reality, you will be doing differential equations, which will shape the framework of how you think about these problems. so this might let you think twice that THINGS ARE NOT AS YOU IMAGINE them, don’t let your assumptions fool you.

Instead, it should be a part of your learning process, when you hit the realization of what actually this topic is talking about, for a very long time, I thought calculus is about calculation, after reading it I knew that it was talking about the rates of changing, and now I view as the art of dealing with tight spaces, and I will keep changing my assumption about it as I go, and sometimes adding to the previous once. just as every assuptions I had about calculus wasn’t wrong, but they differ based on what parts, experience I’m currently concerned with, so having this flexibility will always help.