Third: Term 6

Into my final 1/3 of University life and I’ve always wondered where my time went. So I started to track it seriously including the progress over the term.

Had to make a really hacky table to display it all, with help from this guide

16 Sept — Dec 20th 2019 is 96 days

My timetracker successfully tracked just 71% of the time, I didn’t track that 29% of the hours especially the last 1 week where it was an onslaught of exams. Nonetheless, it’s a fairly accurate gauge of how I spent my time.

Timetracking Process

So the raw hours add up to only 69 days. This is because there are some moments where I’m not actually doing anything as part of the ‘categories’ I’ve put up. I try to track my sleep as accurately as I can, and this results in just 6h23m a day.

Hours supposedly owed

SUTD’s curriculum is supposed to be 12h per module per week. Considering this is a 14 week term, I should be spending 672 hours (28 days). I spend just 54.8% of that in actuality. Instead the other hours go to other work, meetings, and learning other things. This was because each module had a project and this term turned out to be quite intense.

SMA — do a simulation. I used a state machine and SUMO which I had to pick up from scratch

Investment Science — was a stock pitch on Netflix and we recommended a massive sell (not sure if it would really drop to$100)

Analytics Edge — where 38% of your grade was a competition. Personally I was quite disappointed with how the competition was run but I trusted my Teaching Assistant would deliver justice (feel free to reach out if you’d like to know more)

Milestones

I started this term knowing that I wanted to finish a few things… and I did!

1. Have our first Unfiltered event
2. Set up opensutd’s page!
3. Submit our Coinwatch paper (sadly it got rejected from ACM)
4. Finish up the Security Reference Architecture for Blockchains paper
5. Plan and execute a blockchain workshop
6. Try Capture-The-Flags
7. Contribute to Maurelian’s newsletter
8. Travel when the term ends (went to India from 28th Dec to 14th Jan)

Unexpected opportunities

Along the way, several things came up

1. Conferences: BSide, Fintech Festival, Devfest
2. Meetups: Hosted Hyperledger at SUTD, a VC developer meetup, Beth Noveck’s open source talk, marketwatch’s seniors’ sharing
3. CFA Challenge — this took up a tremendous amount of time but we managed to get through the University round
4. Learning Celebration Carnival — we got asked to work on this, we’re probably rebranding it to something better

Reflections

I tried to spend this term consciously thinking about what I was doing and how they would provide some synergy. If I had to do anything it would have to fulfill more than one goal otherwise I would prefer very much not to do it.

When I tracked previous terms, I found that I would spend almost 10% of my time on meetings. Now it’s just 1/10th of that. All those hours spent on something else that actually moves the needle (I hope).

For example, the blockchain workshop. Rather than simply doing one by myself at the Independent Activity Period (IAP). We collaborated with 3DC to launch a conference which seemed to really help student have a better experience.

If somehow you read this entire thing and would like to reach out, you can find me on telegram @fishbiscuit.