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molecules or money? end of third year reflection
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Updated: 2022-05-06
After three years in university, I finally switched my major to a combined major in Computer Science and Chemistry. I also dropped all extracurricular activities that no longer aligned with my values and interests. But why has it taken three years? And why did I have so much difficulty in making these changes?
my values
I think my values about a lot of things have changed since I first entered university. For instance, my stance on computer science/technology, what I want to do with my life, and more.
my stance on computer science and technology
When I first started university with the intention of majoring in computer science, I had no idea what computer science was. My high school wasn’t a tech hotspot and none of my friends were doing computer science. They were all doing pre-med programs. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I did pre-med. I probably would have gone to UofC. But I didn’t want to do pre-med. I wanted to do chemistry.
Up until my last year of high school, I knew I was going to major in chemistry. I didn’t think about job prospects or money, mainly because my parents didn’t talk about jobs that much, and they didn’t let me know anything about money. My parents didn’t nag me to become a doctor or an engineer, and any money I earned I just gave to my parents to manage. I was largely disconnected from the real world until it was time to apply to universities.
When I was applying for universities, my parents started to bombard me with information on money, living alone, and jobs. My dad warned me that it would be hard to get a high-paying job as a chemistry undergraduate. And suddenly, I became really worried about how I was going to earn money as an adult. What would I do with a chemistry degree? Can you live off a chemistry degree? My dad was a real life example that served as the major reason why I couldn’t pursue chemistry. He studied chemistry for years, making it into a PhD program. At the same time, I was born. My father suddenly came to a fork in the road: continue his graduate studies in chemistry where he was getting a measly graduate student salary to support his new family or change programs to study computer science so he could get a job in software and support his family with a much higher wage. He chose software, and has provided a wonderful and amazing life for our family. So I also chose to pivot to computer science. I’m largely influenced by my father. We have similar interests and similar worldviews. So it was natural for me to also choose to computer science.
🫠
I chose UBC because of its computer science program, and I’m pretty happy with the choice three years later. But my first and second years of university were pretty messy and confusing. As someone who had no idea what computer science was, I tried to learn about it. I went to hackathons, learned about the hottest trends, and did side projects. I was the stereotypical computer science student. I listened to what other people had to say, about how AI was the solution to all our problems, which companies paid the most to interns, and what web technologies were the shiniest. I thought computer science was awesome. AI was amazing, hackathons gave so much free food and swag and you could build awesome side projects on your own. Computer science had an easiness to it. It was easy to love AI because everyone was talking about it. It was easy to activate your reward centers with the free food and swag at hackathons. It was easy to think you did something useful with all those shitty side projects you built.
So that’s how I justified that I liked computer science. The easiness of it. As a way to justify my choice further, I told myself that "chemistry didn’t have it this easy". No one would let a bunch of chemistry students into a lab to concoct up an experiment on a drug that cures everything. No one gave the chemistry majors free food and no one told chemistry majors that they were the future.
Of course, I could only fool myself for so long. Firstly, I started to dislike hackathons. I used to organize hackathons and stopped this year because of how hackathons clashed with my values. What made me stop going to and attending hackathons was the techno-solutionism and techno-utopian hype. As a participant and organizer, I’d witness an improper use of technology on a large societal problem. A simple quiz with stock photos of food made with HTML and CSS that tried to diagnose you with an eating disorder still haunts me today. I remember going through the quiz and becoming angrier and angrier at how reductive the questions were. And these were the projects that were awarded thousands of dollars; trying to replace therapists with AI-powered mental health apps, trying to replace doctors with AI-powered web apps and more. Fun games with breathtaking graphics and immersive storylines never won any awards, no matter how well they were designed and programmed. I’d rather play a game than have AI decide if I have an eating disorder. A project that was duct-tapped together with copy-pasted code from the internet, which claimed more than any application could ever do, were the projects that were winners at hackathons. I was so disgusted over how people could just claim their project solved a problem in the world. How "easy" it seemed to be to find a technical solution to any problem.
It’s funny how a microbiology class fundamentally changed the way I went about thinking about solving problems. In MICB 202, I learned about cholera, an acute diarrhoeal infection caused by ingesting water or food contaminated with the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. How would one go about reducing the number of cases of cholera? Well, by cleaning up the water. But how? Using chemicals? Using energy to kill off bacteria? While these are solutions, there’s one thing we are forgetting about: the context of the problem, and those who are actually affected. The context is that the location (Bangladeshi villages) where cholera is still an issue is in places where water is used for everything, usually not being filtered or cleaned before the water is used. The water that people use to drink is also used for washing. So you can’t just dump chemicals into the rivers and hope for the best. Additionally, there’s a lack of resources. Who’s going to synthesize chemicals and where would you even purify the water? Even boiling water would be a strain on resources (it would be better to use firewood for heating or cooking). To someone that is unfamiliar with the context of the issue, it’s easy to slap a solution together and actually cause more harm than good.
So what was the solution the researchers came up with? The solution is quite simple and is a solution that can be easily adopted and pushed out into the public. It was to use a sari, a piece of cloth worn by Hindu women, but also now frequently worn by women of other religious groups. This solution is one I didn’t even think of when my professor presented the case study in class. Why? Well because I didn’t have a good or even basic understanding of the context of the problem, such as the cultural practices.
My thoughts on hackathons
Hackathons had a similarity with the fast-paced nature of Silicon Valley, grabbing at every trend possible, and awarding money to people who promised elaborate solutions that eventually fell flat. Hackathons were easy. Easy to feel like you understood technology and easy to feel like technology is all good and powerful. Easy to become entranced with the values and goals of Silicon Valley, jumping on new trends like no tomorrow with the mentality of "move fast and break things".
In my first year of university, I remember thinking "how am I supped to keep up with all the trends?". I took some online courses on AI because that’s what I thought I should do. I also tried to build a "full-stack project" with MERN or whatever the hottest tech stack was because that’s what I thought I should do.
At the end of my first year of university, I decided that I was done with computer science. I started to feel something like this:
"If someone stays in the major, it’s usually because they have strong peer connections," she says. "When they leave, it’s not because they’re not capable, but it’s typically because they have this idea that CS does not contribute to the social good, and they want to help people."
I didn’t have many friends, and I didn’t like constantly being confused about what was hot and what I was supposed to learn. AI? Web Dev? I kept wondering why I was spending my time learning about things I wasn’t interested in like web development. Everyone was telling me to learn vocational skills because school was "too theory based". (I don’t think the main responsibility of universities is to teach vocational skills, but complaints of universities "failing" computer science students by not teaching them technologies like React is one I hear a lot.). I guess I wasn’t interested in learning vocational skills. But that was what everyone else in computer science was doing, and I was doing what everyone else was doing ever since my first year of university.
The root of the problem was that I didn’t know anything about what computer science was. I knew chemistry had many subareas like organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, theoretical chemistry, etc. and I had a basic understanding of what each of these subareas was about. However, I didn’t know about any subareas of computer science. I thought computer science was only AI and web development. I’d complain to my boyfriend "I don’t wanna do AI or web development" and he’d say "then don’t". But I didn’t know what else there was in computer science. I had no idea what you learned in the algorithms and data structures course, the computer systems course, and basically, every computer science course offered. I had spent my first two years of university doing what other computer science majors were doing, which was preparing to getting a job in big tech. And that’s what I thought was useful for my future: to get a job in big tech. If lots of people were doing that then it must be useful? Right?
On the other hand, my boyfriend just learned and studied whatever he wanted to. He dove into the world of ML languages (and no not machine learning) like Haskell. He learned about things everyone told him "wasn’t useful for getting a job at Google/Amazon/BigTech". And he didn’t care at all. He’s one of my largest motivators and inspirations and why I said fuck it and registered into organic chemistry one day before the course drop deadline this year.
the tech industry
Hackathons (which I dislike) were my first exposure to the tech industry, and my internship at Microsoft solidified how much I detested the tech industry. I was shocked at how much interns got paid for doing pretty useless work. Yes, the work I did during my internship at Microsoft was useless too. It didn’t help that I didn’t even like what I was working on at Microsoft. At my first research job, I used NLP to quickly extract information from highly structured health documents. My salary was 3500 CAD a month, with 75% of that subsidized through a biotechnology grant. My work was intellectually stimulating and I worked with amazing and passionate people. At Microsoft, my salary was 5000 CAD a month, my work bored me to my wits, and I had to work with colleagues who I despised because they didn’t seem to put any effort into the team project, which would bring the progress of the project to a halt, blocking the entire team’s ability to work. Interns I worked with at Microsoft exhibited macho heroics and other tech bro behavior, leaving me so frustrated on the last day of my internship I decided that no matter how much I was going to be paid I would not accept my return offer. My return offer to Microsoft was 7000 (or 7500, can’t remember) USD a month to their Bellevue campus in Seattle.
There’s a lot money floating around in the tech industry. Tech billionaires throwing money at technology to solve problems they have no understanding of. Venture capitalists throwing money at AGI, for reasons beyond by understanding (maybe it’s because of the idea of long-termism). In the path to develop AGI and other tech hype things like Web3, people have been, and are being exploited (AI exploiting people and Web3 disasters).
How can we let it be known far & wide that there's a religion in Silicon Valley (longtermism/effective altruism & similar) that has convinced itself that the best thing to do for "all of humanity" is to throw as much money as possible to the problem of "AGI"...
— Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) April 30, 2022
I became, and still am, largely inspired by folks like Timnit Gebru, Ali Alkhatib, Amy J. Ko, Emily M. Bender and Stephen Diehl, who are doing work to hold the tech industry accountable.
I really like what Amy J. Ko says in Critically Conscious Computing.
Society has not yet broadly decided to make programmers responsible for their code and its impact, and until it does, making room for algorithmic justice will require personal and organizational will.
Critically Conscious Computing
Currently, not much personal or organizational will exists, and that troubles me.
learning about what i like
I eventually came to enjoy learning about computer science. Specifically, the areas of programming languages and systems like compilers and operating systems. My fascination started when I took CPSC 213 and read Critically Conscious Computing, which enabled me to view programming languages and operating systems in a different light; both technically and from a critically conscious point of view. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be interested in something like an operating system. Why? Well, many upper-year computer science students said they dreaded every second of the third year computer hardware and operating systems course so I believed that I’d have the same experience. But it was quite the opposite for me, as hardware and operating systems finally clicked with me, whereas algorithm design and analysis was a course that tested my limits and made me doubt my abilities.
At the end of my third year, I think the dust has finally settled down. I no longer try to learn what’s "trending" and I do not touch web development (I’m not even good at web development). That full-stack app I mentioned I was going to make never happened, and never will.
degree dilemmas
Lots of students change their majors. But chemistry wasn’t just "chemistry" for me. It was the subject area that I, and my dad, are both still passionate about. The difference is that my dad didn’t get to pursue his dreams and passions. He had to pivot to the software industry, which was booming at the time I was about to be born. His dreams and passions could not support his family. So in a way, it felt wrong, for me, his daughter, to pursue her dreams and passions, which were so similar to his. I struggled with these thoughts a lot. I was also scared that doing a degree in chemistry would lead me to a bleak future (I felt like I needed to make my parent’s hard work and sacrifices worth it). I saw how undergraduate chemistry and biology majors struggled to find a job while computer science majors could easily get an internship paying five times more than a lab assistant. So I became a computer science major, but I still wanted to do something that had chemistry. I still wanted to learn about chemistry.
So what did I do? I tried out everything but chemistry. I did courses in biology, microbiology, and biochemistry. But none of them clicked. Every time my biology, microbiology, or biochemistry professor mentioned something about chemistry in relation to a lecture topic, I got so excited! But it would only be for a few minutes. I soon realized that the parts of courses I liked the most were the parts in which the professor made some connection to chemistry.
After encouragement from my boyfriend, I did it. I registered for the organic chemistry course one day before the drop deadline. Whoever was managing the chemistry undergraduate advising requests and added me enrolled me into CHEM 213 changed my life that day. Even though I failed quizzes, CHEM 213 was like a fresh of breath air for me. I was finally letting my 18-year-old out: she could learn about chemistry!
Did I get that A+ in organic chemistry? Hell no. After a year of not doing any chemistry and taking the "biological sciences" route to the "chemistry" version of organic chemistry. (Essentially, UBC offers organic chemistry for chemistry majors, biological sciences majors, and biomedical engineering majors. I took the organic chemistry course for biological science majors and after getting a good grade, I was permitted to take the chemistry version of organic chemistry). But my subpar grade doesn’t bother me that much, since I learned so much. I was able to read through a paper that a chemistry professor at UBC wrote. Every time I came across a concept I understood like "Friedel Crafts Alkylation" or "iminium" I’d excitedly let my boyfriend know that I know what that means!. Last year I would have not been able to do that.
Changing majors isn’t all rainbows and sunshine. Due to my advanced credit from IB, I could have finished my computer science degree in three years. Because I did co-op (and then dropped out from co-op), didn’t plan my courses well, and switched my major, now I have to take five years. Right now, I think the extra year is worth it.
what’s next
Currently, I’m listening to a bunch of Dreamcatcher and reading papers on operating systems, compilers, programming languages, computer science education, and chemistry. I’m finally becoming okay with the things I like and worrying less about doing what others are doing. I take courses that I want to and finally accepted that I want to learn about chemistry.
Something from my chemistry professor that I think a lot about:
[…] I opted to make molecules because if I ever gave that up, I could always make money whereas if I chose the money option, I would never have a chance to make a molecule.
About Dr. Perrin – Personal Profile
I’ll end this post with the same question my chemistry professor asked himself as an undergrad, which perhaps is the same question I’m going to have to answer soon: money or molecules?