Abod (Abdelrahman) Abbas

Introduction!

    Most kids inherit a similar eye color or a similar nose from their parents, however I've acquired much more than most, an energy for learning and a voracious curiosity which has ignited an entrepreneurial spirit within me at a young age. My dad, an engineer, taught me to investigate the world with curious eyes, always seeking new adventures to learn. I watched him for a considerable length of time as he chipped away at elevator schematics, thinking about what all the different images and lines meant. I was interested in technology and needed to know how and why things worked the way they did. "How does this toaster work?" "what's inside the VCR?"

    However, I was forever discontent with the streamlined answers that my parents provided me for these questions. So, I found responses for myself by investigating and testing, thus one test prompted another and, with every day my interest in math and science, in general, began to prosper. And question after question the fire within my young soul began to grew, and so I began to get involved in research programs and clubs at my high school. With these experiences, I was even more excited about what the world of math and science had to offer me, and so I took and finished the first three math courses of my engineering degree at the age of 16 in high school. Once I entered the University of Calgary, I began joining all the technical clubs that interested me and I continued to learn more and more about the science which initially fascinated me as a child.

I joined as a software member into technical clubs like:

• SOAR Satellite -- ensured all satellite functions are adapting as needed and that the on-board computer must be able to receive instructions as well as carry out pre-defined functions for assigned cases.
• Tech Start -- worked on a note summarizer app to assist students with time-management.
• Schulich Space Rover Team -- developed the website and the backend-system, such as mapping waypoints for the rover, displaying various camera and sensor inputs, as well as controlling the movement of the rover-arm and rover itself.
• Go Baby Go -- supports children living with limited mobility using ride-on adaptive toy cars.
• Schulich Racing -- Contribute to the successful design, manufacturing, assembly and testing of a two-third size Formula 1 racing car.

I also joined other causes that peeked my personal passion:

• Junior president for Schulich Ignite -- Offered free introductory Python workshops to high school students where they were able to explore the fundamentals of coding in a fun and interactive environment.
• Student and Alumni Commissioner for ESS -- responsible for inclusivity events and connecting students to the services of the Engineering Students’ Society.
• VP Academic for the Competitive Programing Club –- Organized a couple of western Canada wide competitive programming contests.
• Emergency Volunteer for Islamic Relief -- typically run huge fundraisers/gathering of all sorts every two-weeks, contributing a big population of the Muslim community in Calgary to help both raise money for countries in crises, like Kashmir or Palestine, and bring many of the Muslim community together in joy and learning.

    Correspondingly, through these experiences I have learned the importance of taking initiative, and the need for always going out of my way to get involved or learn something new in my free time. I learned to take advantage of the opportunities surrounding me. I was also encouraged to always present my best possible work at anything that I partook in.

What are My Career Goals?

Short Term

    I am currently trying to get as many diverse work experiences as I possibly can in the fields of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Furthermore, I hope to work in any company that encourages a great work-life balance, where I could work with individuals that will help me be a better engineer as well as an individual overall!

Long Term

    My career goal is to use technology to innovate, raise quality of life, and build a better tomorrow. I seek to leverage my growing skillset to inspire change. In correspondence with my double major in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, I am motivated to innovate and provide value by answering the question: "how can this be done?" across academia, entrepreneurship, and community service, I have routinely found myself asking this question. Curiosity, persistence, and a continual desire to learn are qualities that help me find answers, improve, and leverage my skills, and contribute meaningfully to those around me. That is mainly why I chose to pursue a career in the tech industry.

ENCM 369 (Computer Organization)

My Biggest Takeaway

    What intrigued me the most, was bridging the gap between how software and hardware communicate, and the architectural design that is required for a microcontroller to be a cohesive unit. Computer architecture acts as the interface between hardware and software. It deals with the components of a connection in a system. Computer Architecture helped me to understand the functionalities of a system. Computer Organization taught me how exactly all the stages in the controller are arranged and interconnected. This spoke to my previous experience in technical clubs at Schulich, where in a team there were multiple different subteams working on different aspects of the project, and how this division into subteams is required to make the full project come to life, as smoothly as possible.

What surprised me? What was the Relation to the inner workings of everyday objects?

    While it seems necessary and obvious for the recent major shifts in technological advancements, the idea of pipelining and caching was the most intriguing to me. Delving deeper into the inner workings of the clever, and efficient, operation on multiple assembly instructions concurrently, while minimizing the elapsing of clock cycles by storing urgent data closer to the CPU fascinated me as an individual who has always found fast algorithms appealing. Furthermore, the analogy to cookies and library books made these concepts of pipelining and caching even more real and accessible.

Application to personal Project/Experience

    In my previous involvement with SOAR Satellite, I attempted to work on an stm32 to develop different functionalities for an on-board-computer for a nanosatellite, such us working with interrupts to monitor radioactive decay. While working on this project, I had to write the most efficient code to save on the time and power that was used by the computer, and this was heavily talked about in ENCM 369. In this project I utilized the clock frequency instead of hard-coding in delays, which we covered in lab 3 of ENCM 369. This was an important lesson to learn as a hard-code delay is a "blocking" task that takes up 100% of the processor's time. Utilizing the clock frequency is a "non-blocking" task and takes less power for the processor to operate. This difference is not evident in our small programs that we used in class, but was essential in appropritely delegating many different tasks to be done in a short amount of time on the nanosatellite.
    Additionally, looking at how organized and efficient the AVR was impacted my personal views towards time-management. Seeing the optimization of the stages-of-execution put into perspective how much more I could potentially improve my time-management skills. However, there is a reason why humans are not robots, it is because humans are not perfectly optimized to work as a computer does, and with that comes some of the time that we waste to aid with our mental-health, social-life, hobbies, etc.

ENEL 361 (Electronic Devices and Materials)

My Biggest Takeaway

    Over the past 2 years it seemed like my engineering degree was more abstract than I had thought, without any in-person or hands on experiences it seemed purely theoretical and not an “applied” science degree. However, with the implementation of the ILS kits and as well as the videos provided by Dr. Kartik on the usage of bench equipment, I am finally feeling like I am truly part of an engineering degree. During the past 2 years when times got tough academically I questioned my enrollment in the engineering degree, but with all of the hands-on experiences we are beginning to receive in ENEL 361 it is nothing but motivating and enriching the spark inside of me that initially interested me to pursue engineering.

What surprised me? What was the Relation to the inner workings of everyday objects?

    I was quite shocked when I saw the harmony between how a diode, a bipolar junction transistor (BJT) and a metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) were very much similar when represented in a physical and material perspective. Two sides of the same coin really. This catalyzed my critical thinking ability, as it showed me that there realistically are multiple ways to attack the same problems. And, while I thought science was a subject of pure axioms, where there is only one right answer, ENEL 361 proved this otherwise by convincing me that an engineer should sometimes get creative and visualize the solution in multiple forms instead of just one, as this helps with fully comprehending the applications, as well as fully understanding the limitations of a specific device.

How I Would Explain This Course To A First Year Student

    This course delves into the finer details of how electrons navigate their way through different forms of semiconductors. You will learn about what diodes are, and how they could be used in different applications such as LEDs and solar cells. And, if you’re one for derivations and why equations are the way they are, then you will get a lot of that in this course. Be assured, you will walk in the path of electrons and completely see and understand why they operate in the way they do in semiconductors, through mathematical derivations and physical phenomenons. Also, have you been hearing a lot of buzz about transistors and why they are the source of modern technology? Well, you also get a solid introduction to what and how transistors work under the hood on top of everthying else, in ENEL 361.

Relation to Real-Life

    Completing the ADC and DAC lab provided me with the theoratical and practical experience of how ADC's work under the hood. This was useful, especially to my team, becuase our tuner device used an analog comparator to analyze the input signal's frequency. In our hands-on lab we built a slope(integrating) ADC, where it was my first time using a transistor in a crcuit!! We experimented with the different parameters of the circuit, like the counter period, and observed the effect on the output of the ADC using Matlab.
    The is the basic idea behind the so-called single-slope, or integrating ADC. Instead of using a DAC with a ramped output, we use an op-amp circuit called an integrator to generate a sawtooth waveform which is then compared against the analog input by a comparator. The time it takes for the sawtooth waveform to exceed the input signal voltage level is measured by means of a digital counter clocked with a precise-frequency square wave (usually from a crystal oscillator).
    Testing this design with different input frequencies showed how vulnerable, and unapplicable this ADC archeticture was, as it didn't perform consistently with varying frequencies. With the digital ramp ADC, the clock frequency had no effect on conversion accuracy, only on update time. In this circuit, since the rate of integration and the rate of count are independent of each other, variation between the two is inevitable as it ages, and will result in a loss of accuracy. The only good thing to say about this circuit is that it avoids the use of a DAC, which reduces circuit complexity. This showed me that some devices should only be utilitized for a very niche application, like a small range of input frequencies.

ENEL 343 (Circuits ||)

My Biggest Takeaway

    Learning and understanding why circuits and some electronics are delayed was quite enlightening, this was because most circuits acquire a parasitic resistor, capacitor, or inductor which could form some sort of RLC circuit. And, based on the transient and steady state responses of RLC circuits this all clicks in my mind very clearly now. This outreaches to the idea of inherent limitations that a design might face, and how to overcome these limitations by anticipating their occurrence in the planning phase of a project.
    Furthermore, unfortunately we can never be able to completely eliminate parasitics. However, there are some simple layout choices one can make that will help reduce problems from parasitics. Selecting the right components can also prevent signal problems that arise from parasitic capacitance and inductance. Correspondingly, when it comes to the inherent design limitations for any project, one can always try to maximize performance by reducing limitations, however, there will most-likely always be restrictions to the capabilities of a design to a certain degree of precision.
    As the incoming president for Schulich Ignite, project planning is on my mind consistently. What Schulich Ignite does is that it offers free introductory Python workshops to high school students, where they are able to explore the fundamentals of coding in a fun and interactive environment. Furthermore, through my position for next year I am supposed to reintegrate the transition back to in-person sessions, as COVID begins to fade. And with this deliverable, I have to compensate between different limitation to optimize for the best possible experience for our mentees, to provide them with the best possible learning experience.

What surprised me? What was the Relation to the inner workings of everyday objects?

    What was mind boggling to me is how useful the Laplace transform is, while it seemed very abstract and obsolete as to why we were learning about it in MATH 375(Differential Equations), everything made sense as soon as we reached module 7(Laplace Analysis of Circuits) of ENEL 343. The pure ingenuity to transform all circuit elements into the s domain then inverse the resultant to get a proper transfer function in the time domain was a surprise, to say the least. Furthermore, with the help of the derivation of these transfer functions, we later learned about how they could be manipulated to create all types of different filters with different use-cases. And, filters are basically utilized everywhere in the world of signals, like in networks and communications.

Application to personal Project/Experience

    Most recently, we have tried to implement a bandpass filter and an amplifier onto our ENEL 300 final project, using a combination of a passive RC low-pass filter, a passive RC high-pass filter, and an inverting amplifier. We hope to use the high-pass filter to remove any DC voltage offset from our input signal that will be received from our guitar. Then, the low-pass filter will cut-out the audio frequency that is played by our speaker, which is played at 1000Hz. Next, the non-inverting amplifier will attempt to provide a gain of about 100 to our input signal, which will be passed on to our AVR for further ADC-sampling and anlysis. Lastly, after the computation is finished on the microcontroller we will output visual and verbal feedback to the user to assist with their tuning process. Therefore, without the presence of the amplifier and filter on our device none of the later steps would be possible, hence our project would have been a disaster.

Scrum Design Process

What is Scrum?

    Throughtout the course of the semester, my peers often thought scrum and agile were the same thing because scrum is centered around continuous improvement, which is a core principle of agile. However, scrum is a framework for getting work done, whereas agile is a mindset. A team can’t really implement "agileness”, as it takes dedication from the whole team to change the way they think about delivering value to the customers’ needs. But a team can certainly use a framework like scrum to help them start thinking that way and to practice building agile principles into their everyday communication and work.
    The scrum framework is heuristic; it’s based on continuous learning and adjustment to fluctuating factors. It acknowledges that the team doesn’t know everything at the start of a project and will evolve through experience. Scrum is structured to help teams naturally adapt to changing conditions and user requirements, with re-prioritization built into the process and short sprint cycles so that the team can constantly learn and improve. Lastly, after every sprint a reflection session is held to cover the goods and bads that need to be encouraged and fixed for later iterations, through the form of a retrospective.

Hardest Part About Scrum

    When it comes to the agile process the most difficult aspect for me was not what I needed to learn, but what I needed to unlearn. I needed to unlearn previous beliefs and the behaviors that were rooted in me from my previous experience with the waterfall design process. For example:

• Unlearn the belief that work can be specified up front. Instead learn that needs emerge, evolve and change.
• Unlearn the idea that work can be planned in advance. Learn that work is planned, reviewed, and replanned with blinkers on so we only look at the near future.
• Unlearn that estimates should be praised and schedules are the source of truth and light. Learn that estimates are just estimated, not commitments, and plan for slack-time and the unexpected when creating a schedule.
• Unlearn that “that's the way we do it around here, you can’t change the system”. Learn that if things are going to get better, then things have to change at some point.
• Unlearn that you should work on a deliverable until it’s finished, and then report back. Learn that daily standups are essential to the cohesive progress of a project, and retr are the backbones of agility.

Most Rewarding Part of Scrum

    As second year students, at the beginning of the semester my team were completely and utterly clueless regarding how to go on about creating a useful and achievable project within the span of 3 months. However, the central theme of Agile is flexibility. So, when we learned new materials from other concurrent courses, and realized how unrealistic some of our initial functionalities were(like tunning every instrument) we were responsive to change, even at the last minute, and adapted to it without much disruption. Also, because project deliverables were not set in stone, we were easily capable of reassessing our plans and adjusting our priorities to align with updated goals. Being adaptable meant that we could deliver consistently and manage clients’ changing requirements(user-stories) effectively. Because of agile’s methodology to continuously iterate and improve, our team was more and more motivated throughout the period of the semester as we got closer and closer to achieving a minimal viable product. This consistent focus on improvement and quality control is one of the core principles of agile, and it helped us to recenter ourselves continously to achieve our deadlines.

My Biggest Takeaway

    I learned what isn't a retrospective. An agile retrospective is mainly run for the team to discuss what went well and what didn't during the past sprint. Project retrospectives are an important component of healthily functioning teams. In order to fully benefit from retrospectives, I learned to keep in mind the following limitations and guidelines:

• Retrospectives do not replace communication or actions taken to fix team or project issues at the time of occurrence.
• Retrospectives are not an excuse to spend an hour complaining (although it is important to let some venting happen during the session).
• Don’t turn the retrospective into a witch hunt. Retrospectives are not an opportunity to lecture your team on what they could have done better. Ideally, you would be proactively coaching your team throughout the project.
• Retrospectives should not be a huge burden on your time and resources. Throughout the 4 sprints, I found 10 to 15 minutes for reflection was sufficient. This gives everyone enough time to update about each of the broad themes. This also forces people to be wise, and effecient with the time they have during the retrospective.
• If some team members feel depressed or unsatisfied because of some practices, give them space to let these feelings out. Discuss them rationally instead of denying them. Don't let the negative attitude control the meeting either: Try to find what causes those emotions and work on it.

ENEL 300 Takeaways

But, Why Scrum?

• The scrum framework itself is simple. The rules, artifacts, events, and roles are easy to understand.
• Its semi-prescriptive approach actually helps remove the ambiguities in the development process, while giving sufficient space for teams to introduce their individual flavor to it.
• The organization of complex tasks into manageable user stories makes it ideal for extensive projects.
• The clear identification of roles and planned events ensure that there is transparency and collective ownership throughout the development and design cycles.
• Quick releases keep the team motivated and the users happy as they can see progress in a short amount of time.

    However, scrum could take time to fully understand, especially if the development team is acclimatized to a typical waterfall model. The concepts of smaller iterations, daily scrum meetings, sprint reviews, and identifying a scrum master could be a challenging cultural shift for an unexperienced teaeam. Nonetheless, the long-term benefits far outweigh the initial learning curve. That's is why scrum’s success in developing outstanding products makes it a compelling framework to adopt in any project.

Prototyping is the First Step to Success

• Resolves conflicts. when our team was in a disagreement about the product’s design, prototyping allowed us to see which features worked best and why. The resulted in optimizing the design, hence allowing us to produce the best possible product.
• Adjust the design. On paper or a computer screen, a design’s problems aren’t always noticeable. However, by creating a prototype, we actually held a version of our proposed product and determined what aspects are adequete and which ones needed refining.
• Gather Requirements. Prototyping allowed us to experiment and spot bugs early on in the process. This quantified how our product would be used, and how each change would impact the end-result. Due to this we were easily capable of changing directions, if we found that we had too many features or if the design was not user-friendly. This gave us a chance to gather more accurate requirements and obtain market/professional feedback.

Detailed User Personas are the Foundations…

    A deep understanding of a target audience is fundamental to creating exceptional products. User personas helped our team find the answer to one of our most important questions, “Who are we designing for?” By understanding the expectations, concerns, and motivations of target users, it made it possible to design a product that satisfies the users’ needs and therefore is successful. The first step to identifying the user’s needs is empathizing with them. Empathy is a core value if a team wants to make something that is good for the people who are going to use it. Personas enabled us to create an understanding and empathize with the end-users, guitar owners:

• Gaining a perspective similar to the user. Creating user personas allowed us to step out of ourselves and recognize that different people have different needs and expectations. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, we were better able to infer what a real person might need.
• Identify with the user that the product is designed for. The more we engaged with the user personas and saw them as real people, the more closely we considered them during the design process and wanted to create the best product for them.

Consumers Want to Save the Earth…

    According to research conducted by Accenture, Over the past five years, there has been a 71% rise in online searches for sustainable goods globally, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit. Consumers are engaging with sustainable businesses in ways that they previously ignored. This trend isn't just in first-world countries. Consumer satisfaction in developing and emerging economies is also tied to concerns around climate change, and many want businesses to commit to protecting nature and natural systems. Correspondingly, in ENEL 300 we discussed the utilization of cards and categories of sustainability to better optimize our guitar tuner device for sustainability:

• Maintenance: By reducing the amount of visits for maintenance of a product, then we can reduce the energy consumption that is carried out during each maintenance session.
• Modularity/Design for Disassembly: designing a modular product, such that the product doesn't completely rely on the lifespan of one specific component. Modular products contain separable parts (modules) that can be replaced or upgraded individually by the user. By implementing this, we could support the functional lifespan and overall product longevity through the replacement of faulty components, instead of a completely new purchase. Also, This will further enhance the users’ emotional attachment thanks to modules that adapt to the users’ specific needs.
• Rental Service/E-Shop: Implementing a website dedicated for the renting of a product can minimize the production of excessive products, and correspondingly, the use of those extra resources. They can also make certain products accessible to a wider public. This could be more realistically implemented through the Re-use of products through rental services such as subscription services and leasing.

ENEL 300 Project

What changed about your product, what iterations did you make and why?

Our Initial Idea: The microphone captures noise from an instrument and this noise is converted to an electrical impulse and then compared to ideal frequencies of musical notes and then using the blue, red, yellow, and green LED lights, the device displays visual and verbal feedback of how close the note played on the instrument is to the ideal frequency. The speaker plays a chime when a frequency matching that of a musical note is played and volume can be adjusted with the potentiometer. The default setting with none of the buttons pressed is that the device compares what is being played to the closest ideal note and then lights that corresponding light, but with one of the buttons pressed the device only compares what is being played to the note corresponding to the button pressed as seen from the top view.
Cut Downs: I think the biggest cut-down that we had to implement to our tuner device was removing the idea of implementing a musical-note selection, with this deletion we also had to narrow down our feedback notes to only be the 6 open-notes on a guitar. This was because we thought it would be much more elegant if we just used a 7-segment-display to show which musical note was currently played, instead of having LEDs lighting up to correspond to the played musical-note. Additionally, each musical note alphabet ranged in overlapping frequency ranges, so we would have needed to use a lot of storage to exactly store the values of all the frequencies that are possible for a single musical note, like the note A, which the AVR couldn’t handle. Furthermore, we also had to remove the verbal feedback, mainly because the AVR didn't have enough SRAM on board for us to store our desired audio file. Additionally, attaching an SSD card would have taken a very long time to learn how to do, as it would have required us to learn about serial communication protocols from scratch.
    Lastly, we also adjusted our algorithm for measuring the input frequency, as we initially began by thinking of implementing a sampling algorithm where we would gather a sufficient amount of conversions of data samples in a specific amount of time using the ADC, and then we would run through the samples to check how many times we crossed over a specific threshold, and that is how we counted for the amount of cycles in our signal. However, we better adjusted this to make our algorithm analyze in real-time by using the Analog Comparator to count the number of cycles immediately after each conversion sample data was available. This adjustment improved our algorithm's response-time and was more accurate, as we could run through more data samples per second to determine the frequency of our input signal. Even Though, when we tested the later comparator algorithm with a signal generator it worked 100% of the time, it failed to follow-through when applied to real-life signals where noise and harmonics were a pain to get rid of. That's why our only feasible option turned out to be an FFT(Fast Fourier Transform) algorithm, as this method picked out the most prominent frequencies with no effort, when compared to our previous two algorithms. So, in the end, we had to use our initial ADC sampling with our adjusted FFT algorithm to analyze the input signal.

My Biggest Takeaway

    I really began to improve my prioritization skills in this project. With all the deliverables from one sprint to another, I had to manage my time and my plans in the most efficient way possible. I did this by allocating and delegating the tasks to the best-fitted group-members for the tasks. For example, when allocating the 3D-CAD design of our casing we choose the person with the most experience in solid-works to accomplish this job so as to not increase our tasks and assign it to a member who still has to brush-up or even learn CAD from scratch. Of course, prioritization is a necessary and fundamental skill to have as an engineer, especially when the workload gets heavier than usual at times. I am sure that I will need this skill in making sure that deadlines are still met while also submitting my best work. For example, next year, I will be taking at least 5 courses per semester, doing extracurriculars, while also having to handle the pressures of finding, applying and preparing for job applications. With all of these tasks, prioritization will be my best friend and asset.

ENEL 300 Teamwork!

Toughest and Most Rewarding Part of Teamwork

    Consistently looking at our product and not seeing how innovative or “world-changing” it was, always dampened our spirits and our motivation to make it exceptional. However, realistically, how innovative, yet achievable, could a group of second year students really make their product, on top of 4 other extensive courses, extracurriculars, and even personal manners outside of school. So, whenever we felt discouraged by how much of an impact we were really making in the world, we tried to ground our vision and began to think of the long-term effects rather than the daily impacts. We realized that eventhough our product for this semester was not the most impactful, we tried to understand that we only had a limited set of skills in our tooolkit, and that over the upcoming years of our undegraduate degree we would be better equiped to develop our more exotic and impactful ideas.
    Thankfully, my entire group was always able to attend in-person meetings after the shift back to in-person of course, which not a lot of the other teams were fortunate to manage. This provided us with a communal support system, where we were continuously attempting to provide critical and creative ideas to enhance and grow our product. Seeing our product move from the brainstorming phase to the multiple prototypes ignited our spirits to follow-through day after day.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work…

• Speak your Mind: Suppose there are five members in a team and all of them just follow their leader, this restricts the flow of more robust, and developed ideas. Therefore, in a team, there should also be the freedom to express evry memebers' thoughts and views, a team does not mean just following orders, instead it should also be about being able to freely express one's thoughts and ideas. This makes for a more versatile team where all members would feel more essential to the daily operation of the project, hence outperforming as they would feel closely binded to the project, when compared to otherwise. Through our project our scrum master did not have authority over team members, however, they did have authority over the process. This allowed for the blending and filtering of ideas, and for a better overall product.
• Reducing Conflict: A team should not be filled with opposite thoughts and full of conflicts, as this will never allow for the completion of tasks. So, to avoid this, after our brainstorming sessions, our scrum master enforced that all of the team members would strictly obey his decisions regarding the design-process. It was the duty of the scrum master to make smart decisions, based on our collective thoughts, to avoid any kind of conflict among the team members, while not directly having authority over team members. Through this, our team was guided to think in the right direction, and everybody was clear about their assigned user-stories to be accomplished.


Delegation is How We Managed to Accomplish All of Our Tasks

• Keep Your Ego Aside: When working in a team you should always take care that your ego should not clash with others because everyone has some ego but they should keep it apart when they are working in a team. This is one of the basic rules of a team. Otherwise, a team cannot generate profitable ideas, since some team members will not recognize or respect others' proposed ideas.
• Work Should be Assigned as per Interest and Ability: All of us have different abilities and should be given work as per interest for good results. We should keep on learning but when there is a time boundation, we should work smartly for good results.

What I learned from Working On This Team Project...

Remember to assume positive intent. I wouldn’t necessarily say it was new information, but it’s always helpful to me to remember to assume the people I’m working with are operating from a place of positive intent. This is especially true when things get busy and everyone is stressed out because it’s so easy to lose your cool and assume a more adversarial relationship with your team when there are differences of opinion or approach. But after my experience with working on the ENEL 300 project I now always try to keep in mind that most people are just coming into work and trying to do the best they can. They probably aren’t trying to work against me and it’s important to take a moment to try to see things from their point of view.

Looking Back Reflection: PostCard To Self

My Biggest Takeaways

    It seemed like I was very worried about working too hard and missing out on the social aspect of the college experience. One thing that I did to fix this was to become the student and alumni engagement commissioner for the ESS, which has helped me participate in more student life activities like pie week, pain night, and more! Not losing focus though, I have, thankfully, maintained a satisfactory GPA and other personal projects to show when applying for an internship next year! However, more importantly, with an increased work-load I continued to grow and understand about the concept of time-management, procrastination, and motivation throughout this semester:

• Juggling Torches: It is an obvious fact that those who can complete multiple tasks simultaneously have better time management skills. However, different people have different abilities and some are blessed with the ability to work on multiple tasks simultaneously, which saves time. As it turns out, I was not the best at multitasking, when push came to shove at the beginning of this semester. I was doing multiple interviews to try to secure my undergraduate research position at the Technical University of Berlin, and with multiple club initiatives to organize, and 3 upcoming ILS(integrated learning system) Exams within 10 days. To say the least, I was drinking a lot of coffee, and not enough sleep. I realized that my brain just wasn't very proficient at multitasking and that it was better not to indulge in it. Multitasking can be baffling sometimes and can lead to time delays in some cases. So, I learned to work on one task at a time. This was better fitted for me because I realized when I do one task at a time, I can give that task my complete concentration and alertness rather than splitting my focus into multiple tasks, and falling apart due to this.
• Remember to Breathe: Through the many reflection sessions that we did this semester in ENEL 300, I began to consistently sneak out some time in my schedule to pause and reflect on my decisions and learnings. Through this simple practice, I significantly improved my decision-making, analytical skills, and time management abilities. This was because whenever I reflected on why I was pushing myself so hard, I spiraled back to the main reason as to why I was pursuing the degree and career that I am, and that was because I love learning and impacting others. This readjusted my compass, and motivated me towards my tasks at hand, and helped me perform exceptionally well and in a time-efficient manner, as opposed to when I didn't reflect on a daily basis.
  

  Reflection Technique Taught In ENEL300

• Short + Short = Long: Besides bigger goals in the longer run, I realized that I must also have smaller goals for each study session. I used to take each long term goal of mine and tackle it as a whole, however, I learned that this only discourages me, as I barely get anything done compared to the wider scope of things after each session. Now, I use a to-do list to manage my deliverables for each day, hence I have seen a considerable increase of productivity regarding my deliverables.

Looking Back Reflection: Learning Strategies

Self Regulate (agile studying)

    First, I must set a goal to be undertaken. Second, I must exercise the completion of the task at hand, and monitor the progress in which I am making. Lastly, through the information that was gathered while monitoring my progress, I must reflect and respond to better achieve my goal the next time I attempt this aforementioned task at hand. For example, This semester I wanted to self-study about the topic of competitive programming questions. I bought a course on udemy that was 50 hours long, and basically covered all the fundamentals that I needed to start with. I began my journey over the course of reading-break and I was very energetic and got a lot of videos watched and understood. However, as school restarted I began to lose the ignition to continue learning, as my work-load exponentially accumulated. Nonetheless, I still managed to finish the course, but it took me way longer than I had anticipated. Therefore, the next time I decide to self-study, I will remember to pace myself and take into consideration my other commitments. So, when I start to learn about game development this summer, I will make sure to plan for the unexpected, and fit that into my expectations.

Pick Yourself Up, and Try and Try Again

    Understanding the role that resiliency plays in developing proficient and stable study habits was quite insightful and practical to learn about in ENEL 300. For example, in university, there are a million things that can happen in ways we hadn’t planned on. It could be that I slept through my morning classes by accident. Or, perhaps I forgot to study for a test I had today and end up flunking it. Messing up or thinking I have things figured out and realizing that I don’t can be embarrassing, but if I look carefully, there are lessons to be learned. Missed a class? It’s not reason to feel stupid or ashamed and decide not to go; that’s going to backfire. Failing my exam will teach me that I need to find a method of studying that works better for me.
    I realized that, when I let myself feel defeated by the challenges I face in university, it’s really easy for me to dig myself into a hole that it’s extremely difficult to pull myself out of. But, even if I was looking up at the world from the bottom of the pit that I dug, I understand now that this doesn't mean that my fate is sealed, and I am not doomed to failure. There may be some negative consequences involved, like taking a bad grade or falling behind a little. The experience isn’t a purely positive one, which is why I, previously, got stuck in the “failure” mindset. However, now, when I use my resilience to triumph over the obstacles instead of surrendering, I most definitely learn from that adversity. Resilience allowed me to see the positive aspects of my mistakes and to learn from them.

Islamic Relief Canada

Community Service

    Islamic Relief is an international aid agency that provides humanitarian relief and development programs in over 40 countries. I have been thoroughly involved with Islamic Relief Calgary for the past couple of years. I am part of their emergency Volunteer Team in Calgary. That means I organize, manage, and construct the fundraisers which are based in Calgary. We focus on providing emergency relief and protecting vulnerable people from conflicts and natural disasters, mainly directed at Muslim communities. We achieve this through fundraising/charity campaigns such as religious-conferences and other-forms of community-gatherings. Additionally, not only do I help-around with fundraisers but also with many other Muslim-community-based activities, such as Eid Gatherings and Ramadan preparations. We typically run huge fundraisers/gathering of all sorts every two-weeks, contributing a big population of the Muslim community in Calgary to help both raise money for countries in crises, like Kashmir or Palestine, and bring many of the Muslim community together in joy and learning. For example, in 2019 we organized a big concert-gathering in the Saddledome with many Muslim-influencers to help with Kashmir’s and Syria’s crises.

    From this volunteering experience I have learned that most people could be compassionate or sympathetic towards people in major crises and who need major help, but not everyone acts upon their sense of sympathy. Therefore, to create change one must not just exchange emotions, but exchange actions. Additionally, working with communities to strengthen their resilience to disasters helped me understand how leaders must unite in cases like these to make a noticeable change. Without the many independent donations from Muslims in Calgary, Islamic Relief would have never had the impact it had previously, and currently has, on other Muslims in need all across the world.

Junior Achievment(BONUS)

    In grade 11 & 12, I was the president of my junior achievement business group, called Sock Shoppe. In both years, my group sold an average of $2000 worth of product per year. We broke well over even during both years and achieved more than an average of $1350 in revenue profits per year. Throughout my two years, my friends and I created a unique business plan and executed it by making 450 dyed socks in an eight-month period. And, from my group's combined effort, we devoted 35% of our profits to the Canadian Mental Health Association. However, during the execution of this business plan, I was constantly faced with the operational difficulties and the incoordination that came along with initiating a business, but I was contrarily motivated by the vision of helping those in dire circumstances. So, I kept at it. As the president, I had to focus not only on one specific branch of the business but on all of them. However, out of all the different branches, I was mostly involved in the marketing, IT, and production sides of the operation.

    In conclusion, Sock Shoppe was established with one goal in mind, which is best expressed by our company mission statement of "Reconnect Calgary with Color". The goal of our company was to spice up an often-bland clothing item and provide our customers with happiness. And so, with our initial individual investment of $30.00 each, Sock Shoppe was able to reconnect Calgary with color and provide customers with an outlet for creativity, in the form of beautiful tie-dye socks. Over the course of this program, my dedicated team of entrepreneurs were able to break even and secure a final Return on Investment of 193% after donating 35% of Profits to the Canadian Mental Health Association, and 25% to the Junior-Achievement Association which had Helped mentor our vision. I learned many leadership lessons during this program, but the most important one was how to deal with adversity when it appears unexpectedly. Throughout our journey, we faced many setbacks in marketing, production, and IT, with limited resources to resolve any of them. However, through our creative and optimistic perspective, we managed to exceed any expectations and managed to surpass all our adversities. The company program has been a truly transformative experience, every single member of my team grew immensely, and it was truly amazing to witness the personal development of each and every member of the board of shareholders, my friends.

Schulich Racing(BONUS)

I Contributed to the successful design, manufacturing, assembly and testing of a two-third size Formula 1 Racing Car through the software sub-team:

• Spearheaded the design and implementation of a web-based dashboard that displays historic and real-time telemetry data from a formula-style vehicle
• Developed custom API layer to handle all CRUD transactions and JWT using Express.js
• Worked with engineers to gather user requirements and convert them into user stories
• Improved the efficiency and readability of previously poorly-maintained code modules through code refactoring, optimization, and documentation.
• Implemented a in-memory data caching store using Redis to ingest, process, and analyze real-time data with sub-millisecond latency.