Category: sharing

Just a quick glance at some vivid memories from my undergraduate studies. There was a time when I did all the wrong things—yup! I was that student before.

The student who begins studying the day before Test 2 is busy with assignments from week 10 until week 14.

The student who is too “shy” to ask lecturer questions because she feels too scared to look dumb.

The one that sits in the library studying but spends most of the time on their phone… Let the time fly and regret later.

The one who passes the course but forgets everything they learned a week later.

The one that says, “This semester will be different,”  but nothing changes.

It took me a while to figure out how to be a good student. But once I did, my grades and life improved. One of the main reasons for my improvement was a change in my study habits. Instead of simply passing tests, I studied to learn and understand.

Because if you understand something, you’ll remember it.

Here I share the strategies that will help you understand and remember what you study:

1.Ask What, Why, and How? Question everything: question your lecturer in class, question the material you read, and question yourself. By asking questions, your curiosity will force you to think deeply about a concept and analyse it. Then, it will lead and stimulate your brain to search for the answer. Currently, all information is just at the tips of your fingers. You can dig deeper and not only rely on the given material in your lecture. Be proactive!

2.Recall, recall, recall—there is no shortcut to digesting the information well. Constantly test yourself by doing practice questions and recalling answers. Repetition of this technique will help embed concepts and information in your mind. In this case, a night before the exam  might not be enough for you to digest all the information. You need to strategize, chunk up your materials well, and be disciplined.

3.Take notes in your own words. Chat-GPT is currently the most popular application for students. However, did you realise that when you try to answer an exam question, you are stuck building your own words? You are blank? This is because you did not practice writing your own notes. Writing from your own understanding will force you to think about what you study in more depth. To write something complex in your own words requires a higher level of understanding.

4.Use mind-mapping– Using the bird-eye POV, draw a big picture of what you have learned. This technique helps you visually connect the main concepts of each topic and the entire subject as a whole.
Learn from the first principles and build from there; each subject will have its own fundamental principles. Once you understand those core principles, you can relate new material to them, making it much easier to understand.

If you realign your purpose of studies, then you will feel how hungry your brain will be seeking more information and knowledge. All of the above strategies require a full swing of discipline and willpower. Study to understand, and you won’t forget what you study. It’s not too late to restart and recharge, even though this is your final year.

Try the best and do the best. Always remember to keep on practicing, practicing, and practicing. Practice NOT makes perfect. Nothing will be perfect. Yet, Practice makes improvement.

Sincerely from your cute lecturer ~Adios!

Time management is a crucial as a student to master it. The time goes by as a blink of eyes, the assignment, project and exercises keep in coming in the to do list- where none of it being strike off yet. The due date make you more pressure. Besides, you also have to jingling the studies with the curricular activities where also will affect the portion of your time. Things become worst when you intend to procrastinate or distract with social media or games while handling a lot of things in your plate. In the end, you became less focus.

A strory to share, when I was pursuing my doctorate studies a few years ago, I struggled with time management issues. It’s difficult to balance work and study. It’s different from my life on campus as a student; even though I’m involved in many programs as a top committee member, I can still manage my time well. When I reflect, it is because during my studies on campus, we did not get too distracted by gadgets and social media. During my bachelor when it is early year 2000, the social media not yet hype as now. The most distract is a computer game and Movie marathon CD’s.

I confess, the social media did effect my productivity and focus. They unintentionally stole my time. Trying to help myself, I start to searching for the solution in how to become more productive and manage my 24 hours a day effectively and keep the motivation and focus. Surprisingly, the solution to my procrastination problem and completing my work on time and happily involves a tomato and taking more.

Start your task, and then set the timer for 25 minutes. I use my phone instead of a tomato timer. breaks. In an effort to control my distractions and prevent both procrastination with a goldfish attention span and all-night study burnout, I discovered The Pomodoro Technique. This time management method, created in the 1980s by Francesco Cirillo, takes its name from the typical tomato-shaped kitchen timer.

The theory behind the system is that by breaking up your work and breaks into regular, brief intervals, you can prevent feeling overburdened by an impending task and also prevent burnout. Basics are as follows:

1. Start your task, and then set the timer for 25 minutes. I use my phone instead of a tomato timer.
2. If a diversion occurs, note it down on paper before getting back to your task.
3. Put a check mark on your paper when the buzzer goes off. You have finished one increment (also known as a pomodoro).
4. Allow yourself a five-minute break. You can check your thoughts for distractions, stretch, grab a cup of tea, and so on.
5. Take a thirty-minute break after four pomodoros.
6. Repeat!

Try it if you want to learn more about time management and how long a task will take to complete, as well as breaking down your workday into manageable tomato-sized bites. All the best!

Speaker: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Khairul Azami Bin SidekAssociate Professor, Kulliyyah of Engineering, International Islamic University Malaysia

Date: 23 July 2022 (Saturday)

Time : 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM (Malaysia time)

Platform: Zoom

Webinar by Prof. Philippe Rigollet

The goal of data science is to turn data into information, and information into insight. Through the various data in our new era of BIG DATA the data science helps you to increase revenue, provide insight, improve operations, open markets, process information, optimize cost, and many more. Through the amount of data, the user’s behavior can be defined as well.

Methods deep learning, clustering all the data science ecosystem. Many of the methods achieve the same pipeline. The following are some of the categories that we can make:

1. Making sense of unstructured data | Clustering – PCA
   Principal Component Analysis (PCA)

• Tool for dimension reduction
• Useful to visualize data (in dimension at most 3)
• Gain insight and select important variables
• very efficient algorithmically
• implemented in all statistical software
  Example of dimension reduction technique
• ISOmap, Sammon mapping, Locally linear embedding, and t-SNE
  -CLUSTERING-
  Example Netflix Data
  infinite collection in data set, rated by million users. When we use the dimension reduction, we can see the cluster for each movie.

1. Prediction to decisions | Classification | Deep Learning – Lasso
   Using the prediction formula. Where get those data? predict from the data using Regression -Linear regression or nonlinear regression.

Cookies collect the metadata. can be used also to predict
Use the Automatic variable selection using the lesson algorithm
However, sometimes the reality of the data does not give us a clean cut to predict. Then, here where we use Deep Learning to find representation where things are nicer.

So deep learning will learn the data and it needs much more data. Delicate to fit and good for images/speech.

3. From data to decisions | Causal inference – Graphical models, A/B Testing

How to make a precise decision?
turn into a graphical model, where each node is a movie and relates
to each other. Connection of each node learned by the data.

“Imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance” – Cargo Cult

Action to be taken:

Set out personal GOALS as an academic clearly and align them with organization goals/vision.

Find a MENTOR or have a model for reference and emulation

MANAGE and execute our tasks based on importance and piority Example to-do-list

Be an ALL-ROUNDER academics-fill in all the bins/baskets

Have clear STRATEGIES and processes to meet goals

MIX with right peers and crowd

Keep progressing, move FOWARD, no matter how small

Make DECISIONS and follow-through