Jash Mota

Advice I wish someone gave me before I joined college

When you enter college or undergraduate university, you tend to be confused about how to make the best use of it. You are filled with a lot of enthusiasm, motivation and a will to do your best, but have little clue where to utilize it. Many aim to score well and ace all exams, but I must warn you this is a suboptimal plan. Below is the guidance I wish someone had told me or I’d discovered before I started my B. Tech course in Mechatronics, and I hope it can be of value to you.

But should you go to college?

There are some people with extreme views on why college education is waste of time, most of which is centered around why other sources are better for educating yourself. It would be true if college was all about studying, but it isn’t. College is barely about studying. It is about meeting people, being with 5000 like-minded people for 8 hours for 4 years.  A good college provides access to labs and its expensive tools, which is quite beneficial if you want to dig deeper into something (as I write this, I’m having a hard time accessing an oscilloscope, they are incredibly expensive!). These are some good enough reasons to go to a good college.


1. The only filter to choose your stream should be what you love to do.

Of all the engineering students I’ve met, while studying, working or interviewing, I’ve seen a majority of the population is into it for all the wrong reasons. People are highly misled into choosing their domain: by the glorified depiction in pop culture, misinformation from media and people (including parents) and wrong assumptions. 

These are all the wrong filters to select your course, university, and domain of work you would (probably) do for the rest of your life. The only accurate filter and the only thing you should care about is what you love the most, for what work do you have the most obsessive interest that even if no one was looking, applauding, paying you will still do it. If you have tried learning different skills, and have a wide experience with various work and interests, this should be easier to identify. Others would have to think and take a more abstract decision, perhaps bet upon what they love.

Filtering based on what you love is the path of minimum future regret. Ramanujan would have probably died without recognition and money, solving infinite series on temple floors and couldn’t have cared less. What was most important to him was to work (or rather, play) with sequences and series. 

2. Meet lots of people

Being an introvert, this was the most challenging task for me. Before starting my undergrad, I’d asked my best friend to be brutally honest with me on what I should improve, to which his answer was “meet more people, make more friends”. This was, and continues to be great advice. Meeting people, sharing ideas, can not only break your misconceptions but also give you new ideas. Being able to meet like-minded people is the highest value a university adds to someone’s life. 

Use the internet to your advantage too. Unless you are at the heart of where tech happens, the best way to connect with people not locally reachable is via the internetIf you would like to meet more people in the robotics domain and join a group I run, feel free to contact me.. If used well, Twitter, LinkedIn and emails can turn your life around. (Please stay away from politics on social media.)

3. Do projects together

It is impossible not to think of ideas on a topic that interests you. It is also impossible that you alone have a particular idea, and probably someone else from your university is thinking about it too. So, work with them! Doing projects tests your assumptions about someone, thereby improving your judgements and instincts about people. Teaming up with people who share the same obsessive interest in something augments the individual abilities of all the members, even if it is a team of 2. It not only helps you see where you lie within your network but also gives you possible paths and inspiration to achieve further greatness. It helps you create a lookup table of sorts to seek out help on various topics. Talking to someone who has already done what you plan to work on gives you a head start by knowing the resources you should look into, the caveats you should avoid. All of this multiplies your output by a huge factor, if not by magnitudes. The best advantage is being able to brainstorm ideas and solutions to solve a problem. It usually starts with trivial ones, but you might end up impacting some of the basic processes one day.

4. Learn in the process

At least in engineering, real learning and experience are gained when you literally build something, and I don’t think it is much different for any other form of work. Textbook learning is abstract, has a clear-cut path, has a set pattern for solving problems and is passive – all of which is untrue for applying the skills to produce something. All of what I know about engineering is from building something. 

When I was a kid, I loved creating electric circuits on wire-wrap boards using wires, AA batteries and simple DC motors and light bulbs. I started with the goal of lighting up the bulb, not knowing anything about electricity or the physics and math which goes into making it work. I was 8 years old and it took me a few days just to understand that I need to complete a loop of wires (in the right way) to light it up. Using my hands to build a real circuit allowed me to comprehend electricity at a deeper levelAs I made these circuits, there was an intangible and raw intuition built in my head about the concept. For example, I always compared electric current flow with people in floating tubes swimming through a river. Years later, when learning physics in grade 12, I realized the equations of fluid dynamics and electricity are similar. Vindication! There were also many painful electric shocks which gives you enough experience to not blow-up circuits, at least not the same way again., much before it was taught by the school in grade 7. Even when it was taught, none of my friends comprehended it the way I did. 

Building is much more different and critical compared to consuming to learn anything.I am not saying textbooks are worthless. It helps in knowing the terminology, among many other things, which facilitates the transferability of knowledge with others-an important skill.

The goal of doing projects isn’t to successfully complete the project, but to learn as much as you can. Failed projects can add just as much value to your growth as successful ones do. I very much prefer ambitious projects which are quite likely to fail. Failures add a higher level of comprehension in your brain because most failures would physically hurt you.This is not true for startups, where the goal is to succeed, and failures are much more hurtful.

I have received numerous burns and electric shocks while having fun with electricity. It’s all part of the learning process.

If you can successfully finish each project you plan to do, you are either aiming too low, copying something off the shelf, or don’t have a high-quality assessment. Each of them is a terrible obstacle to growth. The good news is you can easily tell which one is which.

5. Filter your friends, meet more people

Working in a group is quite different from working solo. There has to be harmony in the team to do great work. Team dynamics is such a multivariate function that it is hard to define succinctly in words even after doing multiple projects. I’d just say, you’d learn it with experience (some experiences can turn out to be quite bad, but that’s the point). I’ve realized you can filter all your team members into broad categories based on skillfulness, determination, focus, kindness+integrity, in the context of some project you’d want to work on. These dictate team harmony. Out of the four characteristics, kindness and determination are non-negotiable. The other two are more malleable and can be worked with. When you measure each person using the above dimensions, you’d find it easier to outright reject few people and correct your biases about the rest. It also helps you to reflect on yourself and get better.

There doesn’t have to be a complete overlap between your project members and friends. Friends can very well be from a completely different area of work, interests, ambitions, and therefore might not be the best choice for a project, but still be excellent friends. Having a diverse combined domain of expertise can in fact be catalyzing. However, I can’t imagine having friends who lack kindness and integrity, and who are not skilled at something. The characteristics of a person are easy to tell with more conversation you have. Sometimes you’ll be amazed that a person you thought to be extremely intelligent just has superficial knowledge which makes them good ice-breaker conversationalists but not very valuable as friends or team members, by how flaky they get as you converse more with them, probing them further. It’s good to have friends much better than you. It’s easier to aim higher when your friends are ambitious too, think non-linearly and value building over critiquing. 

6. Tests are ultra-hackable, spend the least resources to achieve your academic goal

It might be clear now that the above process is quite heavy on your resources, especially time. But it’s worth it. It turns out to have a quite higher rate of learning than relying on your university syllabus and professors. If you plan to study engineering in India, it is a safe bet to say the professors teaching you won't be the best resource for learning. I’ve had detailed conversations with many professors and it was apparent that most of them had themselves never applied concepts they were teaching. Their knowledge is restricted to the textbook and questions they have been asking for years in their exams. Applied Mathematics teachers don't know why you are learning about eigenvalues, and how it is useful in computer vision. While CS teachers are surprisingly good at catching common beginner program errors having read so much code, they mostly follow bad coding practice. Electronics teachers won’t let you go out of the coursework to try different things because they don’t want you to blow up an IC (it is impossible to learn electronics without blowing some components up and shocking yourself). I have still not got a response from my mechanical professors inquiring if there’s a documented process to design mechanisms, given we know input/output dynamics and kinematics.

For this reason, learning something and scoring well on a test aren’t the same things. Paul Graham’s essay ‘The Lesson to Unlearn’ does a great job of explaining this. I’ll paraphrase it.

Let’s say you had a medieval history exam. If you plan to just read good books on medieval history, it would help you learn, but won’t be apt to score better, as most of what you read won’t appear on the test. To score more, you want to read lecture notes and everything the professor hinted was important. You will be looking for keywords within that text, evaluating what seems like an important event, sidelining the rest. You’ll further narrow down the material by looking at past year papers, to know the questions highest likely to appear. This makes tests ultra-hackable and not a true measure of learning. The disappointing fact is teachers aim to make you score better, and not necessarily to help you really learn.

My point is, if your plan to become an engineer in its true sense is to rely on your university and your professors, it’s a terrible plan. It is akin to a 14-day trial for a software at best. And since it isn’t worth the time, you should give it as little time as you can afford to. 

Therefore, the way to do real engineering, yet to have a good academic record, is to simply pay attention to the details in lectures, they easily give away what questions would appear on exams. Check previous papers, and if you don’t know something, literally write any garbage with relevant keywords. You’d be surprised by the result you get with much less effort. That's also how I was able to get 3.5CGPA, by only studying two nights before exams and focusing the rest of my time on projects, like LyfLime. 

7. Get as uncomfortable as you can

College is about expanding your horizon.  It is meant to be a virtual machine equivalent, and thus allows you to try and experience new things which benefit you, without any irreversible damage. The safety net college provides is unmatched. If you think of focusing on scoring a good GPA and do projects later, you need to reconsider. This is a form of procrastination or that your decision lacks research (even most people who pursue a Master’s degree are merely procrastinating). Nobody holds you accountable for trying and failing on a project while you are a student. Stakes are low, and what you would give time to will be purely based on your interest. So, get up and get uncomfortable. Start that project, reach out to that person you want to date, start a community to meet people like you, whatever. Do it now, no matter how challenging it feels. Moreover, people are more helpful to students seeking help.

8. Be kind

If I had just one thing to say, it would be to always be kind and helpful to people (offline and online).  Some stupid people think that to help others would mean their loss. I once had such a colleague who had a pessimistic outlook at everything he set his eyes upon. If their friend got a better GPA, they would feel sad because for them it meant worsening of theirs. Playing zero-sum games is going to rob you of all the benefits a university provides, because everyone around you will understand your self-centered intentions, and are going to reciprocate similarly. 

What you need to understand, which also becomes useful when you start a startup, is that you should be playing a positive-sum game. This means aiming to increase the size of the pie instead of increasing your share in a small pie. Play the long game, where infinitely many events will occur. Don’t just focus on gaining in the short term at the expense of relationships and friendships.