Last night I had dinner with an old friend and the conversation drifted to the topic of FYPs. She commented that she had the chance to read through a lot of FYP reports when they were being graded and she felt that they were of little substance. I shared with her about my own FYP experience and shared my perspective on the state of FYP in NUS. I’ll probably blog about what I shared another time.
Anyway, I came home and saw this post on Techmeme about video annotations. Kevin discusses the developments here.
When I first chose my FYP topic 3 years ago, I wanted to do something related to interactive television. More specifically, I wanted to work on a more accurate way in determining who was watching the television based on past viewing and channel surfing history. The idea was that if you could determine who was watching the television, the set-top box could fit in ads based on the viewer and not which channel the viewer was watching.
The project got sidetracked because even before I could do that, I ‘had to contribute’ to an almost abandoned open source project for an interactive television platform. There was a reason we were ‘advised’ to work on that platform but I won’t go into that here.
Somewhere after the first semester, I realized that online video sharing was going to be big. This was the beginning of 2006 and I decided to work on a web based video sharing platform. More specifically, I wanted to focus on a system of adding, viewing and distributing metadata linked to the video frames.
The support I got from my two professors were mixed. The main adviser, bless his soul, tried to be as encouraging as possible but I could tell this wasn’t his interest and there was mild disappointment in the change of direction for my FYP. While he tried to give good advice, one could always feel a small invisible hand nudging me back to his interest.
The other professor was someone I had really murderous thoughts about. He gave no constructive criticisms and made disparaging condescending remarks about the project. To say he was dismissive about the potential of online video sharing and the metadata it can have would be understating the palpable contempt he had for the project.
This post isn’t about airing my grievances and trust me when I say I have a lot more. What I actually want to focus is on myself. In recent years, online video has grown in ways I could never have imagined but when I track the developments, I see a lot of what I wanted to do in my FYP in these developments. And I wonder what could have been.
And I start analyzing why it didn’t be.
I shared with my friend that I had lacked the fighting spirit backed by deep conviction in my own ideas. I placed too much on my professors’ validation of my ideas. When I didn’t get the validation and support I wanted, I implemented those ideas half-heartedly just to get the FYP done. The FYP became less about fulfilling my own vision and more about just completing another project to graduate.
When I graduated, I still wanted to pursue my ideas. I told myself one day I will find the time to do it. The cliches are right - there are no new ideas under the sun and time waits for no man. As I allowed myself to get sucked into the daily grind of work, the vision slowly slipped away from me and others came to realize them.
I think my FYP experience and the aftermath is a very typical Singaporean experience. We fight and fight but never continue to fight. We allow ourselves to let authority in whatever form to put us in our place, we get drained and we chuck our ideas, visions, hopes and dreams into a drawer, always promising ourselves that one day we will return to them, dust off the cobwebs and make things happen.
It rarely does.
To talk about what went wrong is easy. It is harder to figure out what needs to be done to make it better. It is even harder to make the changes necessary.
This is why I believe in the importance of a team, and if you can’t find a team with a common vision, friends and a loved one who will always be there for you to recharge your batteries when you have been drained fighting the battle outside. Thinking your idea is good is different from having a conviction about your idea. How do you develop such convictions? It is a process that has to be self-sustaining. Sometimes your conviction can waver and you need to have a system in place to return your conviction to the proper state.
I don’t have the answers.
What I do know is this, at 27, I’m too young to let myself die inside.
