Stun Locks

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image_path: /assets/images/Zagreb.jpg title: “Myself” excerpt: “Self-Introduction” url: “https://henry-yip.github.io/Welcome/” btn_label: “Read More” btn_class: “btn–success”

I’ve realized that most people (all) put their CVs in their personal website.

Realistically I don’t see how potential future employers will stumple upon my website and even if they do, I doubt if this will affect my application procesess. Just like no one ever puts their CVs in their instagram/facebook accounts, right?

The main reason I don’t put any personal pictures, however, is because I am terrible at taking pictures. I don’t even bother with that.

Stun Locks

I just read Toby Lam’s post on Stun-Locks

Those who know me personally in Edinburgh know I’m not a very imaginative problem solver, and my strength mainly lies in solving very arduous algebra/ differential equations with very high accuracy. So if the questions are moderately-difficult, chances are I will struggle for a while and get stun locks. Therefore, I usually get full marks in easy parts while messing up hard parts.

I have personally met imaginative problem solvers who can solve difficult problems with relative ease, but struggle to complete easy questions due to carelessness. I usually end up more or less the same marks with those people, albeit knowing they are better physicists than I am: Usually if the exam is hard, they will have much higher marks than me; if the exam difficulty is moderate, it depends on whether I can solve the hard part or not, but usually I can’t. If they exam is easy, we’ll all get high marks

Sometimes while doing hand-ins I keep on forgetting that the difficulty should be rather quantised, or I should say, limited, i.e. there shouldn’t be really complicated and difficult calculations. However, because I like to solve complex systems, I usually end up having \(\cot x\) and \(\arctan x\) everywhere in my equations, which is just ridiculous!

Therefore, I have adapted my mindset such that, whenever I encounter problems I can’t solve, I will first look at the initial conditions, or check if something is negligible but I have forgotten - Maybe I will take the taylor series and check if the kinetic energy in a particular direction can be ignored, or just see if something is 0 under really special conditions, hence quadratic term can be ignored and the equation is linearized. Think from the markers’ persepective… Usually problems aren’t that hard and extremely heavy algebra isn’t what they usually want.

Something that is also really important (and most people forget) is to check the mark allocation. For example, questions that allocate 2 marks will most definitely not ask you to solve non-linearesed second order ODE, while those that allocate 10 marks may.

Despite saying these, there are exceptions and I have seen really difficult algebra/integrals in 20 marks handins, and everyone basically spend 8 hours doing it p/w, but we’ve all learnt a lot, that’s most important.

However, for me, I rarely encounter Toby’s problem of:

Lack of some sort of pre-requisite knowledge / experience

simply because the handins are due way after the materials are covered (maybe 2 weeks/3 weeks), so while desparately trying to catch up with the class I automatically equip myself with the necessary skills. So it all becomes a matter of angle of attack.

He also mentioned that:

Completing easy parts also assures my ability is of a certain standard at least.

While this is secretly true, I just don’t think it’s that good to brush our ego. Reminding ourselves that we are good physicists/mathematicians doesn’t really solve the problem. Even though most people, including me, have a bit of imposter syndrome and forget how good there are already. I am always afraid that my friends will leave me because of my stupidity, but it turns out I’m always imagining it and I am held in higher regard than I believe (i.e. People don’t find me inferior to them). Despite this, I feel like we shouldn’t brush our ego intentionally. Admitting we are worse does help us, to some extent, as long as we don’t overdo it.

However, people still think I am good at computers because of this stupid website, this is still wrong. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in this website that requires computer knowledge, the most complicated part is downloading Jekyll.

I don't know CS