Author’s note: Drafted in 2022, lightly edited and finished on Sep 1, 2025 for clarity. Substance unchanged. I tried to not glamorize my undergraduate experience but I could be hallucinating.
“Hardware invention enabled the information revolution. The internet and all the fancy applications are nothing but some byproduct of the advancement in computer chips and fiber optic cables”, 18-year-old me thought wishfully, concluding that the next natural sequence in the major global transformation must be done with another dramatic hardware innovation. After giving this grandiose topic a little more thought, I decided that we are limited by the way we are interacting with computers. Look, it’s just screens and keyboards! There has been no fundamental change since the early days of computer history. Sure, you can have a fancy OLED 120 Hz touch screen in your pocket, but at the end of the day, you still have to thumb-type with the same keyboard! It seemed crazy to me that with all the amazing technological advancement we had, our efficiency in communicating via the computer wasn’t much higher than someone with a typewriter 150 years ago. “We need better ways to interact with the computer.”, I reminded myself while walking to school’s cafeteria during my first week in college. Then, I saw this TED talk.
SixthSense Tinkering Christmas
It immediately clicked with me. The hope to not just use the screens but augment all the physical objects around us to retrieve information and the promise to use natural gestures instead of mice and keyboards to interact are everything I had hoped for. So immediately after finishing all the finals in my first quarter, I bought a small projector, a webcam, a mirror and some colored paper to complete the setup. When friends went on trips to enjoy the winter break, I stayed at the dorm to tinker with colored paper the future of computing.
I had the projector and webcam plugged in, the colored paper worn on my finger, ready to go. But I don’t know how to program. I had some exposure with Python programming before but never heard about C#, the language with which SixSense was developed. So I taught myself C# and got familiar with the command line to get the program compiled. After a few days of head scratching with all kinds of red error messages, in a quiet evening, the program compiled. I got so excited and put on my colored finger cap. Viola! Little squares were showing up around my fingers. It was able to recognize my finger movement! I am touching the future!
However, my excitement quickly faded away by the underwhelming performance of the webcam and the buggy software. It would often crash. And when it worked, the latency between my finger movement and when the software registered the movement was simply too long. Frankly, I didn’t understand enough of the code to improve it at the time. However, I was determined to improve it. I wanted to make it more portable, easier and faster to use. I wanted to know more about hardware and software so that I can take SixthSense to the next level.
So when returning to school, I talked to my counselor at the Undergraduate/Undeclared advising office. After some discussion, I found my dream major, Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), a joint program offered by the Computer Science and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Departments at UC Irvine.
Life as a CSE Student
Apart from the basic Math courses, I enrolled in both CS and Engineering courses. I found myself listening to lectures on electrical network analysis and discrete-time signals in the engineering halls and learning algorithms and machine learning in CS buildings. Despite my best efforts trying to focus on the engineering classes, I couldn’t help but find the way that the knowledge was taught boring. “Astonishing facts are presented without astonishment.” I started to have a similar feeling about engineering as James Somers had for biology .
One of the most common patterns in the homework problems is to use the same exact technique taught in class to solve 50 variations of the same problems. Nobody cared about derivation. In lectures, equations and laws were presented without surprise. Memorization was the key to success in exams . I felt powerless and stuck. I couldn’t see through this endless practice of problem solving. I even had weird dreams about solving circuits. Not surprisingly, I failed two engineering courses that year. The basic SystemVerilog class felt so tedious that I quickly lost interest and just tried to brute force it.
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