Delightful December at Minerva University (2023)

California Academy of Sciences, tech panel with Minerva alumni, four cornerstone courses and 200 lifelong friends

California Academy Of Sciences

Without a doubt, my favourite museum in the city, not least because of its prime location in Golden Gate Park. A stunning science museum, designed to invoke curiosity and awe, answer old questions and pose new ones, and ‘to regenerate the natural world through science, learning and collaboration’. Exhibits include:

·       Osher rainforest – a journey through a three-story rainforest, containing billboards full of information, plants and trees of the forest, and even animals and birds like spiders, macaws, butterflies, and snakes.

·        Steinhart aquarium – A lovely aquarium exhibit, featuring underwater creatures and vegetation from coral reefs, California’s coast, and the deep sea

·       Morrison planetarium – Experience two shows about the cosmos on the all-digital, 75-foot planetarium dome.  

·       World’s largest dinosaurs – live fossils and models of the Sauropods – the world’s largest land animals ever. 

A holiday special exhibit featured award-winning photographs from local photographers, with the theme of ‘Man and nature’. Powerful, surreal photos which were able to freeze time if only for a moment and capture glorious acts mid-motion: A flying fish, a stalking snow leopard, the northern lights. With the ability to freeze space and time, we are able to hold our most cherished memories in our hands and smile nostalgically at days long gone. A fulfilling feeling. However, it sometimes makes me wonder whether we have lost our ability to experience the world through our simple five senses, and have deliberately chosen to experience reality with a layer of technology – this is the VR/AR revolution and it is coming.

Reminded me of a powerful scene from the 2013 film, ‘Walter Mitty’. Walter Mitty hikes deep into the mountains to find a photographer who has waited months in the freezing cold to take just one photograph of the elusive snow leopard. Yet when the snow leopard finally emerges, the photographer is so awe-struck he puts his camera aside, and just stares at it until it disappears, as if in a trance. Later, when Walter asks why the photographer didn’t take the photo he had waited months for, the photographer replied, ‘If I like a moment, personally, I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it. Right there’.        

Tech panel of Minerva alumni

Two of my wonderful classmates hosted a tech panel in Palo Alto, which comprised 5 Minerva alumni who now work in Uber, LinkedIn, Tesla, Apple and Google. The speakers spoke about their journeys leading up to these highly coveted jobs, busted common myths about working in Silicon Valley, and shared how the very term ‘work-life balance’ suggests the wrong priority, and should forever be re-phrased to ‘life–work balance’. Importantly, these were people we could relate to, who not so long ago were students just like us, and it inspired all of us to dream big because ‘If they can do it, why can’t we?’. None of these people were born more intelligent than me and you – the key is direction. Having a long-term goal for at least a decade from today is the most powerful and consistent source of daily motivation. 

   

My biggest takeaway was simple but true: just working in a comfortable tech job in Silicon Valley does not automatically solve all your life problems. It takes care of only one tiny slice of life: career and financial stability. On the other hand, you are still a normal individual with the same challenges and goals as everybody else, in every other domain of your life. The speakers opened up truthfully about how their entire week was often spent just working, how they were unable to focus attentively for long periods of time on anything else because they had to respond almost immediately to a message or e-mail, and how even after coming home from work, their minds began immediately to worry about and plan the tasks of the next day. Many industries and jobs which look glamorous on the outside, have their own struggles and challenges on the inside, which are rarely spoken about. ‘The graceful swan on the lake’s surface is actually paddling frantically underneath just to stay afloat’.    

Academics – Cornerstone Courses

HC highlights

1)    Formal Analyses – #estimation

Fermi estimation is a technique which allows you to make logical predictions about extremely large values, through a series of logical assumptions. The goal is not to land on the precise answer, but rather to be within one order of magnitude to the exact value. How many pianos are there in the entire United States? How many times can you say the alphabet in 24 hours? How many tennis balls would it take to fill an Airbus A320?

Real-world examples:

·      Media and news – This is an excellent fact-checking tool. When you come across a surprising statistic in an article, this is the ability to do a rough, quick, back–of–the–napkin calculation to evaluate the plausibility of this statistic being accurate, instead of blindly accepting the plethora of numbers and data points thrown at us every single day.

·      Business – Estimating future demand and revenue for your product. You cannot just google the expected sales of a product you hope to launch next year. Being able to generate a plausible range of potential sales revenue or items sold can help a product manager evaluate whether launching the product will bring profits or loss to the company

·      Understanding the power of large numbers – If a movie like Avatar is watched by 300 million fans worldwide, then increasing the ticket price from $20 to $22 results in an increase of 600 million dollars in revenue for James Cameron. When working with large numbers, changing a product’s price by even $1 can result in losses or gains in the millions, so precision is key, down to the last decimal place.

2)    Complex systems – #powerdynamics   

We are surrounded by power. Power is an essential aspect of our work, relationships, social networks, and civic engagement. Understanding different sources and structures of power, and capitalizing on a few specific sources of power rather than trying to embody all sources of power can help us as individuals, organizations and citizens of the world to bring about the social change we desire.

Real-world examples:

·      Civic engagement – As dutiful citizens of our states, countries and the world, we can rely on key sources of power like ideas and numbers, especially when trying to topple intimidating individuals or institutions who rely on physical force or wealth as their sources of power. Sometimes, the most intangible sources of power like a mere idea/symbol can spark a revolution.

·      Relationships – A constant ebb and flow of power. It is important to take power to ensure you stand up for yourself and have your say in every relationship. But it is equally crucial to give power when the other party requires that they be heard and respected, as an equal. Failed relationships are all too often simply an imbalanced allocation of power between two parties.  

·      Technology – Most ethical debates around emerging technologies like AI, CRISPR, IOT and blockchain are centred around power. Who is in control of these technologies? Who stands to benefit the most, at the expense of others? What power will the technology itself hold, which human beings currently lack (computational speed, predictive power, etc.) and is this worrisome?   

Student spotlight

Ashley Cheng (Hong Kong) 

You had quite a busy and fulfilling summer break, prior to joining Minerva. What did you do?     

I got a summer job at Disneyland Hong Kong, and it was a blast! As a child, I had grown up around Disney and had visited the park nearly every week, given it was less than an hour’s drive from my home. Soon, I began working with Disney through brand partnerships and ambassadorships for small shops in the theme park, and I even gave some tours of Disneyland to visitors and tourists. I knew I had a long summer break ahead of me after graduating high school and decided to apply for a position at Disney. I got a position as a chef in their kitchen. I worked on bulk meal preparation each day for hundreds of visitors in the theme park, and got a unique insight into the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of how Disney runs operations, how much HR values and caters to employee needs, by randomly walking into important manager meetings during work as they discussed new food items to introduce in the park. An industrial kitchen is nothing like a household kitchen – everything is bigger, faster, and very organized and sanitized to ensure health and safety protocols. It is comparable to an assembly line where we divide the work of making a single hamburger into a series of small tasks which we each specialize in, to improve efficiency.  

Fascinating. I hear that in high school, you interned with an emerging AI start-up. How was the experience for you?

The start-up is called ‘Edgi learning’, and its motto is ‘Learn sh*t that matters’. It uses Open AI’s API to create engaging, Tik-tok style educational videos for middle and high school students to learn important sh*t that school won’t teach them, for example how taxes work in the US, crucial current events, advances in AI, how elections work and much more. Once GPT – 3 came out, the company experimented with creating an educational chatbot for users, which was a huge success.

I started as a user, just creating a handful of videos for the company, which eventually culminated into being offered an internship position. As an intern in a company of less than 10 employees, I literally did everything: finance and accounting, legal assistance, creative ideation, product design, and prompt engineering for the chatbot. The variety of skills and knowledge I gained is incomparable to interning at a larger company, where your position and tasks are very defined and structured. The start-up world is crazy, fast-paced, and a true emotional rollercoaster, populated with highs and lows. I made extremely good friends with every member and got very close to the co-founders, who are now my personal mentors.      

You surely are a ‘Start-up girl’! Tell us about ‘Postura’, your own Start-up from high school.

‘Postura’ started off as a project we built for a program with Cyberport, which is Hong Kong’s flagship digital technology flagship and incubator for entrepreneurship. It is a national innovation hub sponsored by the government, to encourage innovation and cultivate entrepreneurial talent among the youth. I built Postura with strangers, who are now all my best friends. Postura is an athleisure wear company, with the main product being clothes to exercise in, which use motion sensing and connect to an application on your phone, which advises you to correct your posture and thus, reduce your risk of injury while working out. Not everybody can afford a personal trainer, hence our clothes are a more long-term and affordable option for the public. Kind of life a Nintendo switch which uses motion sensing for games like ‘Just dance’, and follows your body’s exact movements. We are currently building the MVP for this unique idea, which we believe has a lot of potential and limited competition in the market. 

You’ve travelled to 20 countries thus far. What is the most interesting trip you’ve ever taken?

My friend and I went to LA in 2018. We were coincidentally right on time for ‘Vidcon’ – a convention for youtubers to network and exchange ideas, started by Hank and John Green, the VlogBrothers. We interacted with so many YouTubers who we had never expected to ever see face to face – it was like fulfilling an unexpected and long – awaited childhood dream. We then witnessed the ‘Radio Disney Music Awards’, where we saw multiple singers and Disney channel stars, and then even hung around for the after – party where we spoke to celebrities like Meghan Trainor, Meg Donnelly, and Jenna Ortega.

Book of the month

Movie recommendations

Top watches for the month   

·      Spirited away (2001) – Hayao Miyazaki

·      Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) – Benh Zeitlin

·      Beasts of no nation (2015) – Cary Joji Fukunaga

·      Just Mercy (2019) – Destin Daniel Cretton

·      The Hate U Give (2018) – George Tillman Jr.

·      Room (2015) – Lenny Abrahamson

·      Fences (2016) – Denzel Washington

·      Hacksaw Ridge (2016) – Mel Gibson

·      Darkest hour (2017) – Joe Wright

·      Sully (2016) – Clint Eastwood 

Poem of the month 

How far we’ve come

Be grateful, child

Your great grandfather

Toiled hard on the fields

Morning till night

Eating the same food

For breakfast, lunch, dinner

365 days a year

Your grandfather

Stayed up till midnight

Sweeping floors and serving tea

Living in a small house

With two rooms

One toilet

And twelve people

Your father

Stared at a tiny computer screen

Doing repetitive, mundane work

For the last 30 years 

Enduring fatigue, frustration and contempt

Just to put you in school

And you

Blessed with a quality education

Studying in the glorious United States

Sleeping on a comfortable bed

Going out to eat once a month

Playing with the latest gadgets and toys 

You

With your expensive laptop

Designer shoes

And luxury all around you

Still you complain

Still you sulk

Still your cry

You have no idea

Of how far we’ve come

Over just 4 generations

You have no idea

Of how far we’ve come

As a family

Be proud

That was long. Thank you for being patient with me and reading (or skimming) to the end.

Please subscribe to my monthly newsletter if you would like to stay updated with my monthly updates as I travel to 6 countries over the next 4 years with Minerva University. Until then, Au revoir!