CAE Research Challenge, Staying on Your Path, and Maintaining Your Baselines - Feb & Mar 2023
PIE Challenge
During the whole month of February, I worked on a research challenge called the “PIE (product incentivized economically) Challenge” with CAE. CAE is a company that creates high-fidelity simulators for pilots and they’re by far the best in the field, as 90% of pilots use CAE’s products. I got the chance to participate in a research/consulting challenge where CAE asked us to research and create a proposal for the following prompt:
How can CAE increase its revenue by either introducing a new product or expanding to a new market?
After spending a month working on this, our proposal was to create training simulators for robotic surgery. You can find more details in our deck:
Key Takeaway: Deadlines MUST Be Enforced
Although we submitted our deck on time, the workload during the last four days of the challenge was brutal. I was drained for the entire week. I reflected on what went wrong and why I had to hustle so much at the end and I came to the conclusion that it was because of our deadlines.
There were 4 separate phases to the challenge: brainstorming, idea validation, research, and deliverable. Setting deadlines for these phases, as a team, is crucial to not fall behind.
Although we did set deadlines, we weren’t strict with them, so we ended up starting our work on the challenge deck 3-4 days after the deadline we set and as a result, I had to cram before the deadline.
This is an important learning that applies to any group project - enforce deadlines no matter what. In a university or job, I won’t be able to put 12 hours a day into my project for 3 days straight - I’ll have other priorities. I always inherently knew this, but didn’t take it seriously. I’m glad I learned this now so that I won’t make this mistake on projects with bigger stakes.
It’s Easy to Lose Your Way In a High-Performance Environment
If you didn’t know, I’m in a program called TKS, which is an accelerator program for teens. Most of the students are building interesting projects and making solid progress on them. Around January, we discussed summer internships and most people said they wanted one. I also wanted one for several reasons, but I didn’t think about which one of those reasons I valued the most, since most of my peers had the same opinion.
Therefore, in the last two months, I tried working on small projects to add more volume to my portfolio and it completely backfired. I wanted to complete at least 3 projects within a month and that didn’t work out because my experience and knowledge in AI weren’t enough to allow me to quickly build new projects while implementing new concepts. I tried to re-use the code from my projects, but I still needed to restructure it for the new projects and I wasn’t able to do that quickly. This led to me jumping between projects and quickly ditching anything I couldn’t understand instantly.
Looking back, this was a stupid approach since I just got started in the AI field a few months ago, but going through this helped me realize something. I reflected on WHY exactly I wanted an internship and I realized that I don’t REALLY want an internship.
I wanted it last year because it would improve my technical knowledge and experience and allow me to pursue more complicated projects this year. But this year, that isn’t the case. Since I’m heading off to university, I won’t have much time to work on personal projects.
Before I started chasing internships, I didn’t think about whether that was the best way to spend my summer. I went along with it because most of my peers did and because I wanted an internship last year, which didn’t really make sense. In addition, a lot of my peers were quickly building projects, which influenced me to do the same instead of working on something that interests me and is beneficial for me.
This doesn’t mean I won’t try to find an internship. I’m still thinking about it and it probably will be the best way to spend my summer. But the point of this reflection was to understand WHY I want an internship instead of blindly chasing one.
I think this is applicable to any high-performance environment, since most people are hard-working and make quick progress. However, it’s important to constantly think and reflect on your path to make sure you’re heading where you want to.
Comparing with others is helpful to judge the rate of your progress relative to your peers, but results won’t be uniform for everyone. Compare your results to the goals you set yourself and NOT what others around you are achieving. This is a helpful heuristic to have in anything that you pursue in life.
You Adjust To Your Baselines
Near the end of February and the beginning of March, I didn’t workout for a whole week due to the heavy workload from the PIE challenge. After that week, I had 2 tests in school, and the week after that, I went to Vancouver for the March Break. I went 3 weeks without exercise. When I returned from Vancouver, it was difficult for me to start working out again. This was odd for me because I’ve gone 3-4 days without working out in the past and was able to resume easily.
I realized that since I didn’t work out for such a long time, my brain got adjusted to the lazy lifestyle and it became much harder for me to work out. My brain returned to the state it was in before I first started working out.
I spent more time thinking about this and came to the conclusion that this applies to any habit. If you don’t practice a habit for a prolonged period of time, that state becomes your baseline. Your baseline for happiness adjusts so that you don’t feel bad if you don’t practice that habit.
This is a dangerous trap to fall into because it creates a high amount of friction for important habits that you used to practice consistently. It’s like relapsing when you’re on a path to cure an addiction. It also only gets worse the longer the gap is. Your baseline changes exponentially.
I loved working out, but after the break, it was mentally challenging for me to put my shoes on and start moving. It took me another week of procrastinating until I finally worked out again, which made me feel great.
This is an important lesson to always keep some sort of momentum on important habits. I used to think that a 20-min condensed workout would be useless, but now, I realize that:
Something is better than nothing.
It keeps your habit intact and makes it easy for you to continue practicing the habit; as long as your system’s intact, you will continue seeing results.
I’m glad I learned this lesson now, as I now know how important it is to keep practicing habits that are important to me even in university. I’ve decided that I’ll try to never skip a day in any habit - I’ll simply put whatever amount of time I have into practicing the habit.
Outlook of Next Month
Earthshot Challenge - I’ll be exploring and developing a solution to an important problem in the world over the next month - excited to see the results.
World Summit AI - I’ll be at the World Summit AI conference in Montreal on April 19 & 20. Hit me up if you’ll be there.
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