Ankur – Page 17

I can’t believe this is happening.

My university released its results for this academic year and I’ve just found out that I’m not graduating this year. I need to resit two modules in August as part of the late summer resits the university offers, which means that the exam board will not be able to ratify my results in time for the graduation ceremony in July.

In June, I was called by the department to discuss “my case”. I was told in that meeting that I had the following options:

Take a leave of absence from university on medical grounds, take exams later, and defer my graduation until next year.
Sit for the June exams as normal, but in doing so acknowledge that I was going against the department’s advice.

I do accept my personal responsibility for why this is happening. I chose the latter option, and the gamble didn’t pay off.

***

It’s not hard to pinpoint where my academic career went off the rails. Earlier this year, I talked at length about the mental health issues that I have been facing for a considerable period. That was back in April, at the beginning of Easter break. I was still struggling to get back on my feet when I wrote that piece, as I was ramping up my dose of prescribed antidepressants at the time. By mid-May, I finally felt better, felt that the situation was under control.

The problem I faced was that I’d gone into a freefall for the period from February to May. I had a pile of work to chew through and not enough time.

I felt paralysed. I felt claustrophobic. My primary concern was my dissertation. I’d sunk a lot of effort into it at the start of the academic year, and it was a project that I was proud to be doing because it was innovative, it was an idea that I came up with myself, and something that I felt passionate about. I planned to use the Easter break to catch up on my project, and I emailed my dissertation supervisor for guidance at the time. I never heard back.

I looked up to my dissertation supervisor as role model in academic research, almost as a father-figure for how he guided me through the year. (And my counsellor was someone that I looked up to as a mother-figure too.) It wasn’t until that blog post I published on depression that I felt comfortable to talk to him about what I was going through. I was ashamed to admit it, and I was scared whether he’d consider me less capable for it. In fact, he was quite understanding and supportive. It reassured me the tiniest bit to know that he had my back.

So when I didn’t get an email response back during Easter break from him, paranoia kicked in. I thought my supervisor was mad or disappointed with me, for letting him down. I felt shame and guilt for not performing to what I thought was the best of my abilities. Faced with technical challenges, I just plain gave up on working on the project for weeks.

The truth was for more mundane: the email that I sent simply got buried in the flood of emails that academics usually get. I could have resolved the situation simply by pinging him again. When I finally felt stable, I tried to get on track with getting in touch with people in my department. I’d been regularly attending counselling sessions and having medical reviews of my case, and I went with this evidence to them.

The university does have procedures in place for considering extenuating circumstances. Unfortunately, the process of applying for one and the evidence being considered is a long-winded process, and decisions can take weeks – if not months – to be reached. By the time I applied I started getting decisions back on coursework and dissertation deadline extensions, it was already a week to go for my exams. It literally came down to the wire. I remember frantically panicking in the library because I’d supplied all the evidence, and yet only found out half an hour before the normal dissertation deadline whether my circumstances would be considered. I almost had a panic attack.

And then…I just got a week extra, when I was finally getting back on track but felt I needed more time to catch up during all those lost weeks. I didn’t realistically think I’d get an extra three months, but what I wanted was to have my dissertation deadline stretch into the summer before the exam board met so that I could focus on preparing for my exams. That, apparently, wasn’t possible because of logistical reasons.

I could have appealed the decision my department took directly with the university. However, due to the procedure laid down for this, it would have meant waiting for 3-4 months before I found out the outcome. And if I lost the appeal, well, I’d be up shit creek without a paddle for having failed my dissertation. So I decided not to, and rushed through with wrapping up my project.

I redirected all my efforts into getting the project, and did have a working demo in time. My project was to create a real-time gaze tracking system that worked with standard webcam video on mobile phones. (Kinda like what the Samsung Galaxy S4 has, but more advanced because they aren’t doing “true” gaze tracking.) Admittedly, partly due to the time schedule I was on I didn’t have time to sort out bugs in upstream open source projects that I was using, so I didn’t hit all of the targets that I set out to achieve…but it was at least the best of a worst case effort.

During the same time, I was asked to attend a review by the department. Based on the evidence that I had provided so far to them, all of the mental health concerns that were raised during my medical reviews, their recommendation was I take a leave of absence. It was quite a frank and friendly chat, actually. I remember sitting in that room and my overpowering urge was that I just wanted this whole episode of university to be done and over with. Taking deferred assessment would mean I would be paying tuition fees for another year where I would have jack to do except for kick tyres until (possibly) June 2014, as I would have to wait until then to take exams. And most of all, I just wanted to graduate with my friends. I decided to take the decision to plunge ahead with exams this year. Honestly, I didn’t even care what degree classification I would get. I just wanted to get this done with.

In retrospect, it’s easy to say that I should have taken the “out” when it was offered to me. It’s also easy to be bitter and start blaming external factors. Yes, I wish there was better communication between different arms of the university. Yes, I would have fucking loved it if they made an exception to the rules to suit my schedule. Yes, I wish some of the communication and the decision-making process was quicker, so that I could make informed decisions faster without needing to go through long spells of anxiety.

But the truth is that, at the end of the day, it was my decision to ignore the advice and go ahead. I may not have been in the best state of mind when I made the decision, but it is something that I need to live with. Similarly, I was the one who let go and effectively went AWOL from my course. I can’t “take responsibility” for my depression because I didn’t choose to be this way, but ultimately that’s what happened and affected my performance.

I’m actually quite impressed and glad with all the support that I have received from my university. Throughout the process, the people whom I have spoken to have been understanding; constrained by what they could do according to the rules, but understanding nonetheless – and to me, while I was going through a hard time, that meant a lot. I also have to thank the Students’ Union for excellent advice and support throughout the process. Every step of the way when I faltered, it was reassuring to know that it just wasn’t my friends but the university too which had my back.

As things stand now, I’m taking resits in August. Resits are capped at pass-mark cutoff under our university’s regulations, which means my overall degree classification will probably suffer in the process since it’s weighted heavily towards performance in the final year. I will have a transcript by September, when the final exam board meets to ratify results, but I won’t be awarded a degree scroll until next year’s graduation ceremony in June.

***

What next? Honestly, I have no idea. I guess I need to focus on the resits for now. I probably need to do a second degree to make up for what I know will be shit result on this one, whenever I find that out three months later. Which will be made harder by the fact that I have a shit result, so my options may be limited, unless my extenuating circumstances are taken into consideration. And the PhD offer that I could have had is definitely off the cards now.

A big confidence boost in the recent weeks has been that I have been making good progress with job applications. I have made it to the final round for every single application I have made, with only two of them giving a final decision so far; rejecting my application, but with valuable feedback nonetheless. And I’m currently awaiting outcomes from multiple companies, with more confirmed interviews lined up in the future. The first thing that I did after I finally felt I was in control of things was to get on with the job hunt, and finding approval from such external agencies feels good. I have my fingers crossed that through the interview process and/or in case I get offer, my extenuating circumstances would be something they are willing to consider – and that I can move on from higher education.

Failing which…I have no idea what degree to study next or where to study it. It kinda excites and scares me.

***

Academic stress has not been my only concern over the past few months. I’ve had my own problems to deal with, with getting better and more often than not it has felt like gasping for breath. Times when I feel better, times when I feel worse. Besides that, I’ve had friends going through personal problems too during the period which I was helping them deal with. I won’t go into details because it concerns the private lives of other people, but it was something that added to the stress and anxiety nevertheless. I absolutely don’t regret it though; I would be there for them if I had to do it again. What I have realised this year is that I’ve finally learnt not be a selfish little piece of shit and sometimes put others’ concerns before my own, because that’s just what friends do. And in return, I’ve had friends who’ve stuck with me through some pretty dark times. I’m glad for that.

Throughout the months when I battled worsening depression, I never wanted my friends to know the true extent of how shit I was feeling on a day-to-day basis. I’d tell them what was bothering me, but almost in a flippant, nonchalant way. I like to present an image of “yes, I’ve got my shit together” because the alternative of actually showing how bad I was a rabbit hole that I didn’t want to go down. Despite their best intentions and what people say, the truth is that nobody likes being around a depressive at their worst – especially if they have never been through anything like it. Like I said in my earlier blog post on depression, healing is a long-term process and if you don’t make efforts to achieve that goal, you’re well and truly fucked. I like to think “I’m not bothered by what’s happening, I’ll just focus on the moment” because if I do think it should bother me, then it does actually bother me and I feel worse. It’s a vicious feedback loop.

Looking back at the past few months, I’d say that the support that I’ve had from friends has massively helped me recover. Because I’ve seen other people dealing with similar issues, I’m glad I was able to push myself to remain socially active and not give up on daily life. It’s given me something to wake up to every day.

***

I recently acted as an extra in a film shot by the university’s alumni department about the university’s graduation ceremony. I got to wear a robe and a hat, and I made a mental note to amend my robe hire order because I found out through that shoot that I got my hat measurements wrong. I’d only just made my graduation ceremony bookings earlier this week. And now, I won’t have to bother with that at least until next year.

This is a video that is intended to be played at every graduation ceremony for the next two years.

Irony, thou art a cruel bitch.

***

“Life was so much simpler ten years ago when I knew everything.” – Paul Carr

I love discovering new music to listen to, but what I don’t like is reading reviews on music blogs or magazines to find them. Reading through reviews rather than listening to discover new stuff feels so 20th century to me. Music is emotional for me – as it is with many people – and I’d rather get a feel for something new myself to find whether I like it, rather than just reading words on a page.

(After I find an artist I like, though, I do read up about their history and creative process on music blogs. That’s what they are good for: no matter how obscure an artist, you’re likely to find someone who has interviewed them.)

My go-to source for music recommendations used to be Last.fm. I still scrobble to my profile – partly for keeping track of my music tastes over time, mostly in the vain hope that some day I will be able to unlock this data in a usable form.

Last.fm remains a one-of-a-kind service for archiving music tastes; there simply hasn’t been any replacement over the years for a service like this. Ever since they stopped on-demand playback of tracks though (due to licensing issues; it was simply financially unviable for them to offer it) the platform has been less than worthless for new music discovery. Using Last.fm radio – while good at making automated recommendations based on listening history – is quite cumbersome to use as a standalone application. As it stands now, Last.fm’s discovery mechanism is primarily focussed around surfacing recommendations based on similar tracks / albums…which makes the process of going through all of them a chore.

***

I have been a Spotify customer for four years now (first, Spotify Unlimited, and now Spotify Premium). It’s every music fanatic’s wet dream – an almost-limitless library of songs, available on desktop, web, mobile, offline that syncs everywhere, and for the artists holding out from adding their works to their library, it’s easy to add local MP3s to your collection.

We Are Hunted's automated playlists — We Are Hunted’s automated playlists

For over a year now, I was using the We Are Hunted Spotify app to source my music recommendations from. The neat idea behind We Are Hunted was that it scoured the web for signals of what music people were listening to – rather than relying merely on charts such as Billboard – and automatically created digests of what the hottest tracks in each genre were. I loved it, because for people like me who are into indie / alternative emerging music, it surfaced finds that may not even yet be climbing on any official charts yet…but thanks to Spotify’s vast tie-ups with independent labels could still be found in its library. There were times when I discovered music so underground that they weren’t available anywhere other than Spotify, or perhaps, Soundcloud (not even YouTube!). Many of my “What I Have Been Listening To” recommendations came about this way. Every month, We Are Hunted would publish an automatically-generated playlist of the hottest music and make it available through Spotify. I looked forward to this day every month with the same kind of excitement one would for a magazine issue.

Then, it all ended when We Are Hunted was acquired by Twitter. Functionally, it does the same thing that it used to – in a far more cumbersome interface. Now, I need to login to Twitter Music using my Twitter and Spotify accounts, and play the tracks through that interface. There’s no easy way to export the list as a playlist any more, as the obvious intention here is to lock people in to playing music through Twitter’s own interface and / or music apps.

Herein lies the problem with every other music discovery service I have ever seen: they expect the user to play part of the curation process either by selecting ‘channels’ or ‘users’ to follow (such as Hype Machine, 8tracks, and others), or by basing recommendations on individual albums / tracks / artists / playlists (such as Last.fm and countless Spotify apps). The downside, as I see it, is that either way it requires effort on part of the user to constantly prune lists of whom to follow, or in the second scenario to refresh the recommendations manually. This is a cumbersome process! We Are Hunted was doing something extremely unique with the service they were offering. It’s a service useful enough for me that I’d pay for something like it on top of my Spotify subscription fees. (The closest replacement that I have (recently) stumbled upon is Tunigo. It’s still not a perfect replacement though for We Are Hunted as its top-of-genre lists count absolutes rather than ‘rising’ tracks like WAH used to.)

***

Spotify's new Discover feature in its web player — Spotify’s new Discover feature in its web player

The need for such a service or an app would be obviated if Spotify itself offered an equivalent. It has moved somewhat in this direction with the launch of its new Discover feature.

Apps such as We Are Hunted and Tunigo are good, but what I really want is a leanback, interaction-free music recommendation engine – much like Last.fm’s radio feature – that simply melts into the background and throws up one new track after another. Spotify does something similar with its Radio feature, on the surface, but in my experience it isn’t truly a radio service. Instead of having a native recommendation engine, Spotify integrates with The Echo Nest’s music discovery APIs to power its radio functionality – and the way this seems to work is that it generates a static playlist based on a genre, artist, track, or playlist that is queued for playback. The reason why I say this is that whenever I play Spotify radio, it seems to continue repeating the same tracks over and over again. Supposedly, using the thumbs up / down buttons is meant to help its recommendation engine ‘get better’ but all a thumbs down seems to do is to skip to next track, and the thumbs up button to add the track to a ‘Liked from radio’ playlist.

Spotify’s API primarily seems to revolve around playlists – and I can see how for people whose music experience revolves around playlists, e.g., many friends I have on Spotify, this is the perfect model of curation for them. However, for anyone – like me – who wants more robust and automated tools for an interaction-free music experience, it falls short of expectations.

My point is that without a good recommendation engine backing up its radio feature, Spotify is leaving money on the table in terms of user experience. It has such a deep library of music, and yet, discovering it is still primarily driven by last-decade methods such as collecting albums and playlists. I expected much better from a service that is supposedly the future of music.

***

UPDATE: Twitter launched a Spotify app that allows playlists to be exported. Solves many of the problems I listed here! I’m glad Twitter realised its #music feature was crippled without supporting an external ecosystem.

UPDATE 2: Twitter Music is dead.