All Things Creative
Going to the Women in STEM Conference, rehearsing for the Talent Show, solving a successful Challenge, and having a High Agency and Disciplined Mindset
Okay, so for this month’s newsletter, I want to start off with a mindset. Often, we get caught up in our routines and activities, and forget to take a breather and reflect. For me, this comes in the form of mindsets. At The Knowledge Society, I’m in a sub program called Velocity, which is a high intensity program for growth. As a member of Velocity, I’m required to follow the mindsets and reflect on the Person of the Week, which is an important figure that is taken to highlight each week. However, more than a requirement, it’s now become a scope for me to become better and achieve greater success. Each time, the mindset brings a new type of thinking into my life. And, each time, I get to reflect on all of the things I need to change, or even work on.
One such mindset I’d like to especially emphasize is of agency and self discipline. Self discipline is quite important because when you’re in a space where you’re given the freedom to think, everyone has radical ideas, but not everyone’s able to implement them. Why? Because of a lack of self discipline, and low agency. Self discipline is easy to understand, you have a goal, you need to stay on the bath to achieve it. Most of the time, people underestimate the time and effort it’ll take to get to the final destination, which when people actually start working on the problem, holds them back because they realize that what they’re trying to do is actually a lot harder than what they initially thought it out to be. In the business world, this is even known as the Planning Fallacy, and is something people actually take into account to make sure that they’re able to reach that final destination.
Agency is the other key thing, which is basically proactiveness in the way that I think of it. People that have high agency create opportunities for themselves and actively work on making a difference or doing whatever it is that they wish to do. People that have low agency, on the other hand, wait for opportunities to come their way or to be told what to do. This is a major setback because you create and define your own success, and if you want that high result, you’re going to create it. If you want to live that great life, make it for yourself. Sure, it might take some work, but even a little bit of growth every single day compounds into exponential growth form where you began. At that point, you then attract all the opportunities towards you and manifest success.
Women in STEM
STEM sounds for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Arts. Is there anything in there that suggests what gender this might have been made for? Absolutely not. So when I grew up and matured and realized that women in STEM was such a big deal and is given so much prominence to, I was shocked. Mind you, I had never seen this as a problem before. I just did what I loved. Maybe I was naïve as a kid for this, but when I reflected back on it, I realized I was only one of the few girls on the robotics team, and then in my computer science class, and then when I had more sense and actually realized, I was one of the few in my physics class. Either way, I was doing this because I loved it, and as a result of that came me being in a class full of boys. I didn’t realize physics was a subject for boys, because it’s not. It’s after I had taken that course that I realized I was one of the other 4 girls in my class. There were over 20 boys. It was kind of a moment for me that I wanted to laugh at. Like, something I’d taken for fun was apparently me doing something big without even realizing it.
If girls are told early on or know that these subjects are statistically pursued more by men, and on top that, statistically by men of certain races, they’d back out, no doubt. Most of them, at least. So why are we even making this a problem? STEM aren’t subjects for men, so you can pursue them if you want, when you want.
As such, I was invited to attend the Women in STEM conference at the Perimeter Institute on behalf of my school. Perimeter Institute is a really big lab and infrastructure that’s mostly focused on Physics-related problems and experiments, but it’s one of Canada’s largest institutes. The sole chance that I got to go here was crazy. I heard from some amazing people as well, including Poh Tan, who owns a STEM startup and even works with stem cells in her job, Miss Canada, who is also a city inspector during the year, and Shohini Ghose, who is a quantum physicist and professor, and also the former president of the Canadian Association of Physicists (which I realized after I had met her - I would’ve been so much more awestruck had I known this before).
It was an AMAZING experience, because from the panelists and from the three presenters I just mentioned, I learned to just pursue what I want. All of these women have accomplished such amazing success, and they got there by just following their passions and not caring about the rest of the world. As Ghose said, go to the party, enjoy it, eat all the food, and just act like you belong. You are not an intruder, so do whatever you want to do. Things are only a problem if you make them a problem, so just party your way through it. If you’re passionate, go follow that subject. Don’t back off because someone told you not to do it or because there isn’t representation, but do it because you love that thing. Or do it to prove a point. Just. Because. 💅
Afterwords, I had the time to learn about women working in some amazing fields like architecture, combining geography with construction, water purification, and just so many fields that I didn’t even know existed. So to know that women are making a mark in so many different areas was such a proud Barbie moment for me. I got every single role, as a Barbie, standing right in front of me. Then, it wasn’t a movie, but a reality. And I loved it!
(why do I look like that? idk 😭 Don’t come at me guys)
Talent Show
Soooo, we got in! There really isn’t much to say because we’ve just been rehearsing, and figuring out our props and costumes. We’ve combined three different dance styles, so hopefully we can get a consensus in the audience, but once we have our performance, I’ll make sure to post it! In the meantime, if you have any questions or suggestions for how we can win our audience’s hearts, I’m open to that!
Spring Challenge
In my last newsletter, I recapped the Fall Challenge, but our Spring Challenge was bigger and better. I was working with my teammates Ovee, Kelly, and Vivi. I feel like I have to give a special shoutout to Vivi just because she really held the team together and managed us so well.
Our problem statement was looking at how Microsoft can sustainably scale their AI operations and systems. Especially since Microsoft’s been looking into and launching lots of new AI driven chips, it requires a lot of infrastructure to cool and operate, so how they might be able to sustainably scale this was a big issue that was given to us. Since Microsoft’s a big company, that makes it a little bit hard to actually get data and help them to improve because they’re NOT going to disclose their spending, or their emissions, or any statistics that give away the model of their company, so we really had to work smartly and find loopholes, which was a super interesting thing to do because it gave us a perspective on how things work in the real world, especially in business.
We realized that the main issue came with cooling their data centres. Currently, chips are stored in these big storage racks inside of their data centres. Since they run a large number of operations in a day and have a very heavy load, liquid cooling using water, or even air cooling is utilized to keep these at ‘average’ needed temperatures. This is a big spend and is not efficient. My group thought to use PCMs, or Phase Changing Materials, and specifically, paraffin wax, instead, because these offer a green, sustainable, no energy using, and non-corrosive solution. So this means that they are safe, for the environment, for people, and for profitability. Plus, you can get a return on your investment in these in just a few months.
Using this, we were able to design an intricate solution to a huge problem, and make a precise roll out plan for the implementation of our idea. Hearing feedback from our directors, our solution might actually have a chance to be the solution that Microsoft uses!
You can take a look at our deck below:
Well, that’s a wrap on March. Stay tuned for more mindsets, Moonshot progress, a trip to Waterloo, and more to come in the next newsletter.
See ya! 👋🏼
PS. make sure to keep in touch and stay updated by subscribing, or even emailing me. Now, in the comments, let me know: what would be the best thing that could happen to you?
And I’m going to say, stay disciplined and get on the road to achieve that thing!