molecules or money? end of third year reflection

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.

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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.

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:

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.

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).

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.

Currently, not much personal or organizational will exists, and that troubles me.

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.