How I went from a 2:2 in First Year to The Dean’s List in my Final Year
Reflecting on a Journey
The UK University Grading System
For those of you unaware of how the UK university grading system works, here’s a quick crash course:
First (1st): >70%
Upper Second Class (2:1): 60%–69%
Lower Second Class (2:2): 50%-59%
Third: 40%-49%
Fail: <40%
The social narrative dictates that in general you should try to aim for a 2:1 or above for postgraduate job prospects; although the validity of this isn’t for me to comment on.
Back to Bragging
Anyway now we’re all up to speed, let’s return to everyone’s favourite topic; me 🙃
I studied Electrical and Electronic Engineering with Management at Imperial College London; a 4-year marathon.
In my first year, I got a 2:2 (58%). Admittedly, this is pretty close to a 2:1 but nonetheless I remember being pretty stressed when the results came through considering my first year counts for a bit over 10% of my final degree grade.
Years 2 and 3 went a bit better, I got a 2:1 in both years which pulled me up to a 2:1 overall, so by fourth year I was in a bit of a limbo. I needed 78% to graduate with a 1st and around 50% to graduate with a 2:1.
SPOILERS: I ended up with 82.69% in my final year which pulled me up to a 1st overall and got me on the Dean’s List of students who scored in the top 10% of the cohort in that year!!
What Happened?
This is probably where things get a bit unexpected. I didn’t buy any text books. I didn’t go to more lectures. I didn’t even make any notes. Don’t get me wrong, these things are all probably great, but in my opinion they’re more like icing on the cake. The cake is passion; a bit cliché I know.
Despite what it might say on my cover letter, before going to uni I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I basically went with the idea of getting a decent job at the other end. Admittedly, in first year I was also pretty complacent. I had done well fairly effortlessly in sixth form before uni and assumed that I could continue to waltz my way through life (I was very wrong). The shock of the 2:2 certainly gave me a kick to work harder, but I can’t give credit wholly to work because I think I did significantly more in second and third year but could still never get higher than a 2:1. Instead, I think the problem is the idea of ‘work’ altogether. The trick is to play harder! Things really turned around in the summer of third year when I was first introduced to AI and ML (machine learning) during an internship. It was here where I realized I genuinely enjoy thinking about AI and statistics; and when I went on to choose my final year modules around the subject, the work stopped feeling like work and I started to understand the topics rather than just memorizing formulae. In other words, I actually started to learn the subject at an intuitive level.
That’s all well and good, but I appreciate it’s a bit useless. I know I personally didn’t think I could ever like something that resembles work when I was younger. The first question is, how do I even know if I really enjoy something? I can only speak for myself here, but I realized when I was thinking about ‘work’ when I was supposed to be relaxing or taking a break (in a positive way, not in a stressful someone end my suffering way 😅). In other words, what do you think about in the shower? Whatever that is, you’re probably pretty passionate about it. So the next, arguably more important question is, how do I figure out what I like doing?
Proactive Serendipity
TL;DR, you need to get lucky, but you can make your own luck 😉
Those are two big words. Let’s start with the bigger one, serendipity. This is basically the idea of getting lucky! Fundamentally, you need to get lucky to find yourself in a productive area that you really genuinely enjoy. Taking this scenario as an example, there were many events out of my control that lead me to the work on AI/ML during my internship. Firstly, my interviewer had to be assigned to me, another interviewer may not have liked me and rejected my application. Next, I actually wasn’t initially assigned to the ML Engineering team; instead, a friend on my course happened to get in there. Also, my manager had to agree to let me join my friend in the ML Engineering team so that I could start looking into AI. These are just a few examples, there were so many events that had to go my way just to get to this point in the first place! The opportunities presented to us are often lucky breaks.
But…I also don’t think luck is the entire picture. This is where being proactive comes into play. Yes, you need to get lucky, but you can also increase the odds of getting lucky with a bit of effort. Work done now often pays dividends way into the future, and effort applied over a long period of time tends to compound. I mentioned earlier that I applied myself more in my second and third years at uni. If I hadn’t done this, it’s possible I still would have got lucky to find myself in that internship, but I’d argue it would’ve been much less likely. Also, at the time, the goal of that work was to pull myself up to a 2:1, but the greater, unintended reward only manifested itself in the last year when I realized I could build on that foundation to amplify my understanding of the topics I really enjoyed. I wasn’t particularly bothered about vector calculus or linear algebra in second year, but those topics proved to be vital to optimization theory which I really enjoyed in my last year. The paths ahead are clouded, but looking back it becomes clear to see what actions were vital to your development, even if they seemed trivial at the time. So explore widely! You never know what you’ll be thankful for later on.
If you enjoyed this article, let me know! It’s a bit of a different format, I actually intend to post more about my projects on statistics and AI on the Towards Data Science publication, but I may do a few more of these more verbose articles as well 🤔
