These days, I am experiencing the downsides of interdisciplinary studies. My project requires me to meet different people, see different things, and work out the interactions that could be imagined between all of them. So, might you ask, what better candidate for this job than a student who kind of knows everything? Well, the problem is in the “kind of”. Let’s take an example. Yesterday, I met a developer working for Wolfram, who will probably be helping us with providing the students with a way to analyse their data at the end of their projects, and to make the comparison easier between all the different projects. So here we were, talking data analysis and he ended up showing me the structure for a code used in machine learning. We have studied machine learning right? So I should have been able to know what he was talking about. Unfortunately, we only brushed the surface of how machine learning works, and so, when confronted with a professionally built code from an actual developer, I knew what I was watching was interesting, no doubt, I just couldn’t grasp all of what I was seeing. And this is deeply frustrating! This situation has somehow been repeated over and over these last few days. I have visited a PCB factory, several maker-spaces and electronic markets, talked to engineers, artists, teachers and designers, and every time, I felt like there was more to it than what I was able to see from my perspective. Of course, being an interdisciplinary student allowed me to have those conversations in the first place, but how frustrating to never be able to look at things like an expert would, and never ask the questions that actually matter!
2 Comments
Flo
7/9/2016 08:35:03 am
Dear Piou,
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Maryam
16/9/2016 03:27:22 am
I am confronted with the same situation here, especially for the part "never ask the questions that actually matter". I feel like I'm missing out on very interesting things and it's sooo frustrating !
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