Slide – Title - USF



Slide – TitleSlide - BlankIt was a partly sunny day – no not the day I was born, but it was February 5, 2014, when two of my colleagues, Dr. Kaplon and Dr. Mihelcic came to my office to talk about something. That something was to invite me to give the last lecture. I accepted without hesitation.? Soon after saying yes, my introverted-self started to get anxious and thought what kind of trouble I have gotten myself into - again.? My partly sunny day turned into a partly cloudy day. Hey, I already got 99 problems and this wasn’t supposed to be one of them. Then that night when I saw the list of people who had given the last lecture before me – Johny El Radi, Bill Baker, Christian Wells, and Barbara Cruz, my partly cloudy day transformed into a dark, stormy night.But I am here now and there is no going back for me - or you! I am a man with flaws, an ordinary man, and not a man of advice. I see many of my colleagues, students, family and friends nodding their head in synchronous agreement.? I want to thank Dr. Kaplon and Mr. Bowers for all the arrangements and the back and forth we went thru for this event to take place. Thank you to the Marshall Center staff for all the arrangements. Thank you to all the audience - family, friends, faculty, staff, and especially students, new and old, who are here. It means so much to me that you carved out all this time from your busy schedule to come to this event. I feel blessed.Slide – My NarrativeLet me spend a few moments on where I am from and how I ended up here at USF. I get asked that question quite a bit from strangers. They do not believe me when I tell them that I am from Tampa.Slide – My family - Father and motherThis is my father. This is my mother. And that is me, born in 1960 in the city of Srinagar Kashmir on a sunny day – not a cloud in the sky. With those two good looking parents, what else did you expect?My dad started his career as a high school teacher. He lived an honest life in a country where corruption and bribery is democratized as much as the democracy itself. His honesty fetched him getting transferred to all kinds of remote places for at least half of his tenure, but he kept the home base intact in Srinagar. Mom stayed home with the kids and we would spend our 3-months winter vacation with him - and due to the rural nature of places, it would be all camping style. We led a low middle class life, where we did not have many things we wanted, but we had almost everything we needed. The social structure was so well knit - majority of my relatives and friends lived within a mile of each other. Looking back, that was a great source of happiness and comfort for me. Slide – Place of birth (reductive)This is where I was born in Srinagar India. The mountains you see in the background belong to the Himalayan range. Slide – Place of birth (non-reductive)That previous photo was for the tourists but this is the kind of neighborhood I lived in right on the banks of river Jhelum. This may seem to be harsh, but everyone else I knew led the same life except for a privileged few. I do not have a picture of the homes we lived in, as twice, once in 1947, my family had to leave a prosperous life behind and move to the city of Srinagar as our neighboring country Pakistan sent proxy tribal army called Kabalis to overtake Kashmir. Luckily, India came to our rescue then and we became part of India. Then again, with arms coming from the end of Soviet war in Afghanistan in 1989, an internal conflict became deadly in Kashmir. In 1990, my family had to flee in a hurry to Delhi after my father was killed for the sole reason of being a Hindu.Slide – UndergraduateAt the age of 16 in 1976, I went for my undergraduate studies at BITS, Pilani. A reductive story would make you believe that I was a prodigy to go to college at the age of 16, but that was not so. Yes, I was a year younger than most, but we went to college after 11th grade in those days. This was also the first time I had ever been out of state and ridden a train. I had not even spent a week in college that I ran away to see my mom. My mom at that time was in Delhi, a 6-hour bus ride from my college, visiting her brother. I was home sick and overwhelmed with the high expectations. How did she expect me to compete against the prep school boys of Delhi and Bombay? She listened to my story and she asked me to give it another week. Next Saturday, rainy and gloomy as the previous Saturday, I am traveling back on the bus to New Delhi. I carried the same routine of crying that it was too hard for me to continue and I even brought evidence with me – a 800 page Calculus book by G.B. Thomas. I do not know if it had 800 pages as the book is now in its 12th edition and has 589 pages. Well it looked as if it had 800 pages. This book is as daunting to an engineering student as Gray’s anatomy book is to a medical student. My mom, the eldest child of 7, who had to drop out of middle school when her mom got tuberculosis, did not want to go through the contest of what she had to go through or even could attempt to tell me her story of “When I went to college”. After my crying spell was over, she calmly said to me, “This is your life! You decide”. Well, the decision was on my shoulders and to her relief, I decided to go back. What an adventure it was for the next five years!Slide: GraduateAfter working for a year in India, I had to take my patriotic hat off. I wanted to come to a country where social justice was at least in the dictionary of its people. I applied to US universities and got admission and aid to Clemson. But there was no money to pay for the airfare and the initial expenses. My folks wanted to sell whatever little gold they had, but it was not enough. It was my uncle who took a loan against his retirement fund who came to my rescue. Many a times we hear stories of self-made people, mine is not one of them. I believe most of our stories are where people have helped us along the way. I finished my masters in December 1984 and wanted to go to a better institution for my PhD. I ended up at UIUC but hated it – the weather was depressing, I did not see the sun for months. I was to come back to Clemson only if I made all As in my courses. My Clemson advisor did not want to take back a loser. You have to take risks to grow – if it does not work, then you can fall back to Plan B.Nowadays, I see students take easy way out – not looking for jobs till they graduate, wanting to stay in Florida when better opportunities are available elsewhere. Do not take your 20s lightly – yes, we are living longer, but the energy you have in your 20s is of a different kind. Use your 20s wisely. Meg Jay in her TED speech mentions the following facts – 8 out 10 decisions you will make and experiences you will have will be before the age of 35. It is also in our 20s when our brain get its second growth spurt. Pushing finding a partner, having kids, getting settled in a career, choosing a city, is doable in the 30s but it becomes much harder.Slide: Family - WifeThis is Sherrie, my spouse. We got married while we were in college. We have faced many life challenges – may be more than others. But it has made us stronger. But I am here to tell you a reductive story – ain’t I.Slide: Family – KidsWe have two kids. Candace who is here in the audience graduated from USF with mass com degree and works in the College of Arts. If you have seen any trailers of USF dance or music on the USF website, most probably she has done them. Our other daughter Angelie graduated with an anthropology degree – shhh do not tell our governor that. She could not be here as she is away in the armed forces. Both our children took us far from what we know and were comfortable with. That has been scary and exciting at the same time. Choosing one’s own path can be the best gift we can give our children.Slide: Crazy Idea in 1991I started teaching at USF in 1987. When I started teaching a course in numerical methods in 1988 at USF, students would ask me questions that could not be answered on the spot as they involved lengthy calculations. Most times, I would write short computer programs in FORTAN and QuickBasic in DOS to find answers to their questions. This led me to thinking that I should write simulations for a course in numerical methods, and since my fellow instructors in other universities must be asked similar questions, why not send these programs to them on a bunch of 1.44MB disks? Crazy idea that was dismissed by some of my colleagues - I had simply gone bonkers.Between seeking tenure and raising a family, this project was turning out to be a joyous but time-consuming affair. I wrote a proposal to the National Science Foundation so that I could buy some time and assistance. The proposal received excellent reviews but was not funded two years in a row as the emphasis in those days was more on funding hardware-based educational laboratories. Fast-forward 10 years to 2000: the Internet had since revolutionized information-access and MIT had announced its open courseware initiative. We rewrote the proposal in this renewed context but again it was not funded. Not to be discouraged, we rewrote it in 2001, and we have not looked back since. You know what I am getting at – keep trying.The courseware we have developed in the last 13 years gets a million page views annually, and a million views for the YouTube videos. And this has not happened just by myself. I may have led the effort and done a lot of work toward its success, but there are many people who have been major partners – whether it is my dear friend and colleague Ali Yalcin who stepped in when a fellow colleague resigned and he has molded how we mine the results, or Glen Besterfield and Jim Eison who were willing to take the gamble with me, or Rajiv Dubey encouraging my crazy ideas along the way. What Students Think About MeYouTube FansMy YouTube fans make my head grow big with comments such as “Best Channel ever”, but I have my own students who keep me grounded. I will let you read their comments by yourself.Student’s Feedback at USFWhat have I learned from USF studentsMy USF students have taught me more than I have taught them. They have taught me humility by accepting their accolades like true gentlemen and ladies, maintaining grace while going through life’s challenges which I did not experience at their age, and an optimism that things will work out – especially that the project is going to get done even if I take the whole spring break off. But the biggest lesson my USF students have taught me is to keep my mouth shut when needed. That is a work in progress. AdviceThe last lecture is supposed to be about giving wise advice. I plan not to use my own opinions as they will be too simplistic and clinical. I want to tell you what the experts say. It just also protects me from having to spill the beans and not betray the trust of my family and friends. With giving adviceI have learned that with giving advice, comes great responsibility. But I am sure that your parent at some point in your childhood life told you - Do what the preacher says, do not do what the preacher does. So here goes my sermon.Work EthicWork Hard and SmartThere is no substitute for hard work. This is from the movie Karate Kid and we may be giving you wax on, wax off assignments at USF, they are there for a purpose. Of course, we have to work smart as well. Learning is tough and there are no easy pathways to achieving your goals. If you do find an easy pathway with no long term bad consequences, do take that path. Work Hard and SmartNow you may be too young to know about wax on wax off, here is the modern day version of it. On top of that there are 4 steps now, instead of two. And they say that the millennial generation has it easy. Far from it, people have been complaining about new generations since the Middle ages!Do not be a pimp all your lifeQuestion: HindranceMultitaskingOne main thing at a timeIf there is one challenge to the current generation, it is to be able to focus. You can even get Lady Gaga upset if you start blowing up her phone with text messages and not let her focus. Listen to what she has to say.The two circuitsWe have two circuits in our brain – one for reactive attention and another for when we have to concentrate on something. They are two different circuits. And when we multitask, while doing our school work, we are simply using the reactive attention circuit when we should be using the circuit which is needed to do concentrating stuff. So what, you may ask?Negative ConsequencesResearchers such as David Meyer of University of Michigan have documented 4 negative outcomes when students multitask while doing schoolwork. 1.First, the assignment takes longer to complete. You are spending time on another activity and then you have to familiarize yourself again with the task at hand.2.Second, there is mental fatigue caused by dropping and picking your thought process. Imagine that you are texting your friend as well as writing a lab report. The two require you to write but the level of writing is informal in one and technically formal in another.3.Third, students’ may have memory failure because if one was multitasking during the memory process, it may not get encoded the way it should be. So then, the recall of the information can fail not because one was multitasking at the time of recall but when the information was being coded in one’s brain. 4.Fourth, one develops inept learning. Higher order thinking skills suffer. In a study published by the US National Academy of Sciences, one group of students were asked to learn something and another was asked to do the same but while counting number of sound tones that would come on intermittently. They found that both groups did equally well in a task that was given to them. But when asked to use the information in another context, the multitasking group had more issues doing so than the nonmultitasking one.You still need to memorize tons of knowledge. A society requires shared bodies of knowledge – not some cloud. On an individual level, study slowly for deep retention. Those creative thoughts you have are not coming from googling, but from deep and unconscious reflection. Your brain likes to mull over what you have on board.Finance 101Slide – Money is importantSome people will tell you that money is not important.? Poverty is glamorized only in Bollywood movies and as the author of the Harry Potter series JK Rowling said, “Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.”? Now, you do not have to go as far as singer Ke$ha by putting a dollar sign in your name (she took the dollar sign out last month after rehab), I do not forgive Kesha as she has singlehandedly created a shortage of glitter and my favorite drink Jack.? The only people who will tell you that money is not important are the ones who have the money.? It is not because they do not want you to have the money, but it is because their basic needs are met and they are figuring how to get their higher needs met.? Another group of people who will tell you that money is not important are the ones who confuse “money is not important” with “money is not the only thing”.? Of course, there are more important things than money like your health, family and friends. Remember the Bible does not say that money is the root of all evils – Timothy Chapter 6 says – for the love of money is root of all kinds of evil. Money is importantWhen in doubt about money, remember this acronym – PMS – it is the financial guru Suze Orman’s mantra – people first, money next, stuff last. I say that men suffer from lack of PMS – power, money and sex.Marriage 101Should I Marry at allBy all means marry: If you get a good spouse, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher - Socrates. Marry wellWhat if I marry a trophy spouse? Be sure that the trophy is for first place – Steven Wright Lessons in MarriageThere is a Marriage 101 course that is taught at Northwestern University. In an article written in the Atlantic not too long ago, the first myth that needs to be busted about marriage is that there are no soul mates. If you are cringing at this statement and swear that you have found your soul mate – it is either that you have just fallen in love when everything is hazy and hormone driven, or that you have been married long enough to realize that the soul mate is an earned title. The first lesson in this course is that you have to understand yourself. Professor Solomon who teaches this course mentions that your marriage is not as much dependent on finding the right person but knowing that you are the right person. If you are attracting the wrong partners, do not keep looking, but spend time working on yourself.The second lesson is that you cannot avoid marital conflict but you can learn to handle it better. Conflicts are not a win-lose proposition but it is two people looking at the problem together.The third lesson is that a good marriage takes skill. In the course, students are asked to interview couples with a set of 80 suggested questions. It gives a chance for the students to see how couples interact. The fourth lesson is that you and your partner need similar worldview. As much as we like to say that opposites attract, you and your partner need a similar – not same, worldview. Maybe that is why is one of the most successful online dating sites as their worldview is defined by the religion they each follow. As much as we also think that communication is important, we can only talk it out so much. Having a similar worldview makes communication possible, and do not underestimate the skills you and your partner bring to the marriage.Work-life BalanceThis is an eternal question we keep asking ourselves – how do we achieve work life balance. It is hard, and you may have it some of the times, and then even if you have it, you may not have it in the proportion you want it. The nature of the balance will change as you go from single to dating to married to having kids to kids out of the nest. But if as per Nigel Marsh, you will feel better if you elongate the time frame by which you judge your work-life balance. Some people may insist the time frame of a single day. They insist on having dinner together every day as a family, but life does not work that way for most of us. Sometimes you may have to spend a little more time at the office to meet that pesky deadline, and your boss will not mind you leaving early to watch an afternoon recital of your son or daughter. Others make the time frame to be too long – like a year – let me work 60 hour weeks and I will top it off with a 2-week vacation. It is best to elongate the time frame by which you judge your work-life balance to a week. You will maintain your sanity that way. Nigel Marsh should know that as he wrote two books – Fat, forty and fired; and overworked and underlaid. CommunicationThe Tale of 3 C’sUndergraduate engineering alumni consistently rate communication in the top cluster of skills in addition to teamwork, data analysis, and problem solving.? This advice about communication is coming from me who made all A’s and B’s in his undergraduate degree except for 3 C’s. These 3 C’s were in English 101, English 102 and Technical Writing.? And I paid a heavy penalty for not taking my written communication seriously.? But it can be overcome, as otherwise I would not have been invited here today to speak to you.? Just do not wait as long as I did!Do not believe what this guy saysI had to throw this in!Happiness 101Come and dance with me. Where are my volunteers?Let’s talk about the recipe for happiness.Correlation RecipeThere is no secret to happiness but there are correlations to what makes people happy.You need to have a social network – I am not talking about just Facebook here. It has been shown that when you have a social conversation, after a little bit of complaining and little bit of gossip, the conversation has to be on something substantial. I talk to my mother and sister who are in India twice a week, and these conversations have been lifesaving in moments of despair and uplifting in moments of joy. I also have my tea-buddies, Ali and Rajiv and we have solved the world’s problems over our drinks.Happy people have love, but it does not have to be from all the people in your life. Just some love is enough and seeking it where there is little love to receive will just add to your sadness.Happy people have good health. Some of us have chronic conditions but it is how we deal with such conditions positively that can make us happy.Happy people have empathy. And this is what I have found is the most important part of life. EmpathyDaniel Goldman talks about empathy in his two books, one on emotional intelligence and another on focus. Empathy has three levels. Cognitive is where you understand what the other person is going though. The next level is emotional where you feel what the other person is going through. A doctor may break down if he or she feels the pain of delivering bad news to a patient. That hardly does any one good. It is the third level of being compassionate that we need to have. This where you do something to reduce another person’s distress – it may be giving a ride to a friend whose car has broken down, taking care of a child while their parent is sick, tutoring a neighbor’s son who is struggling with math.As much as I have gone dangerously inward during my troubling times and there have been a fair share of such times and there will be more, I have found that reaching out to other people at work, at home and in the community is what has taken me out of my doldrums.? Even Pitbull in his album called Global Warming says, “It ain’t greedy when you are sharing”.? I will not tell you what follows that line of lyrics as that will defeat the point I am trying to make.Is College Worth It?People ask me this question all the time. 93% of the Fortune 500 CEOs have a college degree and 70% of the Fortune 500 CEOs have an advanced degree such as an MBA. Four years is too much time to graduateBut this guy here says 4 years is too much time to graduate.Stay in touchThank you ................
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