Lunch conversation after the tutorial yesterday, nothing formal. joined my classmates for lunch, and prof jiang joined us, during the lunch he said something that landed harder than the tutorial content itself.
Life is all about hitting failure, just like mid-term, mock tests and assignments, you make mistakes and you learn from them. The key here is to be open minded to hit failure, to make mistakes; and learn from the mistakes and grow from that.
― Prof Jiang Kan
Paraphrased but close to his words.
my thoughts
i wasnt surprised that i got a good score for this practical exam (PE). but that full mark didn’t come from getting answers right on the first try. It did not come from my experience as a 5+ years software engineer, but also the time i spent working on tutorials, mock tests and assignments, where every wrong submission taught a specific thing. off-by-one errors in slicing. forgetting that .append() mutates in place. the score came from a pile of small failures i eventually stopped hiding from.
prof pointed this out on a specific piece of code of mine. in PE Q4 i used a stack-based iterative solution. he said it should have been recursive: decompose into subproblems, reach for recursion, stop leaning on manual state (comfort zone).
it sudden hits me with that i have always been thinking of the laziest route, that’s good in software engineering and i trust that my secret to do things efficiently, but for school, i am here to learn, i shouldn’t be setting rules, instead of i should be trying to solve the puzzle in a unusual setting.
for finals
May 4 - same module, but this time on Examplify, not Coursemology. fill in the blanks of provided code. no compiler. 💀
2 things to carry in:
- recursive thinking as the default mental move when a problem has “do X, then do it again on a smaller piece” structure. Stop reaching for the stack reflex.
- mistakes during prep aren’t “falling behind.” They’re the actual medium. The drills are not supposed to be clean. If every mock test goes perfectly, something is wrong with the difficulty.
conclusion
a growth-mindset line in a lunch talk can fade into a feel-good quote if i don’t tie it to something concrete.
for now i’m tying it to 2 things:
- re-drilling PE Q4 recursively before the final, as a way of taking the note seriously.
- keeping the first attempt on any fill-blank practice rough on purpose, and reading the mistakes as data, not judgment.
will come back to this post after the final, and after any failures that show up between now and then.