Posted on: 01 June 2018What advice would I have given to my 16 year old self.

This article is inspired by Josh Farr’s post about ‘Given it’s 2018 and knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to your 16-year old self?’

You can find the original post here.

So you can find my answer to this question below.

‘Don’t only just study, go out explore and make the world a better place’ I’ve also taken the position that University is not only about studying, it’s also about how you learn and make a contribution to society. So why not start early? I’ve previously written an article about this, check it out here

But this is not always about tech. Yes it is true, we currently live in a digital world, there’s always ways to make a difference to the world.

  • Kai Kloepfer wanted to reduce gun violence in the US , he developed a fingerprint-sensor gun for the US
  • Amber Yang wanted to help reduce collisions with Space Junk, so she built a ML model that predicted impacts

These examples may seem too ambitious, I know a lot of problems exist in the world, but there aren’t any solutions. Some other examples include:

  • Monash University’s Timetable Allocation Swaps was done manually through in-person swaps then contacting Student Enrolments, etc…..(this was a very tedious approach). So a bunch of guys (Ishan Joshi, Surayez Rahman and Arni Mittal) got together during a Hackathon, built a demo. Over the later half of 2017 they worked with parts of the university (and Ben Clare joined the team) and this was launched as a pilot product during Semester 1 2018 — SwapMe
  • Even the two/three projects that I’ve built was around solving problems (they weren’t necessarily and still not part of my course): MonPlan was built to solve the problem where a student wants to figure out how their course should look like without have to go in to see a course adviser MARIE.js digitalise a old Java based application geckoDM was built to solve harder to download lectures over the echo360 platform, we have expanded from one university to users across 4 countries.

So, studying at university helps you to learn how you should study. Because you should never stop learning (I sort of tied that into Monash University’s motto — Ancora Imparo (or “I’m still learning”)

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