Preface

Discussing my personal life was not the goal of this blog; thus, I want to take some measures and preface by discussing the future of my academic blog. But basically, not much has changed other than the topic of the material. I will extend the span of this blog by incorporating things that may seem more personal than purely academic. You may know me as “Jay” or “Jasmin”. And you probably still don’t know how to pronounce it. How odd that we have grown into adulthood apart. This is something I do not regret but simply want to address. I have little in terms of a clue about who my audience is outside of those friends who have been close to me in recent years and, obviously, my family. It seems to me that we (or at least I) are simply no longer good judges of who our social media lives will attract from the vortex of mass communication and globalization and networking. I’ve invited some new and many familiar folks who might remember me from K – 12 to catch up and reconnect. And I point this out, so you know my intentions. The goal of this post is to reintroduce me after a long hiatus. Also, this was written as a requirement for a required class on engineering professionalism. Furthermore, there is some distinction to be made about my plans at the time of writing this essay and what came out the other end after this next semester began, that short-but-well-spent time. I’ve left the ending mostly unchanged although it doesn’t reflect my current goals. I intend to post about my current goals later. You see, I was very serious about finishing my education on time (although I’m a junior, I have 2 years). However, I got an idea for a novel and decided to drop most of my classes (except for Fiction Writing with Prof. David Zimmerman, who I now consider a friend.) The novel, Evolution Recall, will not be discussed in this post but there may very well soon be a dedicated post about it. But enough about the future. Here is “The Vistas of My Education.”

Jasmin Ivankovic
Leah Eilers
EE 166
12/12/18
Edited 3/25/19
Personal Essay

The Vistas of My Education

“I don’t know what I want to do,” was my standard answer to every question about my future up until my junior year of high school. “I need to find what I’m passionate about,” I continued, “then I can change the world in some small way.” I don’t exactly know why it means so much to change the world. What if the world already works? Why do I need to be passionate about my work? When did people suddenly start only choosing professions which were in line with their “passions”? These were the questions in the back of my mind. I was just a pizza boy who saved up enough money to buy a two-thousand-dollar electric Jazzmaster guitar, but the music was not the focus when I was imagining the bigger picture. The thoughts would fester and settle only after extraordinary effort to reframe my answer. “I want to be the exception,” or even better, I decided: “I want to be an engineer because the innovations made through the application of science and mathematics has made my existence today possible.” This one . . . this one stuck. It has a sense of catharsis. I’m expressing my gratitude for existence through my choice of profession.

According to psychologists, a good percentage of people make this decision (profession) from a subconscious sublimation, a defense mechanism that makes less socially acceptable emotions or habits more acceptable. Was this gratitude double edged? Was I really feeling bad for myself and humanity or in awe of our accomplishments? I choose to believe it was the latter. My habit for philosophizing and intellectualizing situations made me perfect for an academic arena such as ISU. Maybe that’s why I chose college over dropping out of high school. Moreover, maybe that’s why I chose to be social over anti-social when I could’ve gone either way.

I knew I couldn’t make it in prison. So, when my buddy, who’s now in prison, asked me to help him rob a bank, I said, “I can’t make it in prison, sorry.” And, I think that was a safe choice. I knew my future held more in store than a 6 by 8 ft. cell. What I wasn’t sure about at that point was what kind of engineering I wanted to do, plus there was always science or math. I had shown some aptitude for mathematics. I started buying books. Senior year, after acing the Algebra 2 final, I derived an advanced algebraic formula for the volume of a pyramid which ended up being very similar to something done by the integral operator.

When I got to this point, I realized how badly I had botched my education. I wanted a restart. I needed a new lease on life. The biggest turning point in my life and education came at 17 when I found out in art class that my ex-girlfriend had died from a drug-related incident. I cried for the whole class period, covering my face, and went home and picked up my guitar. I wrote what later inspired the final song that will be on my demo, the song is called “For Grace”. I cried again listening to it the other night.

At that point, at age 17, I was driven to learn about chemistry and physics and mathematics. I needed a distraction from all of what I had come to know as my indifference to social organizations and formal traditions. I had to stop being a punk. I mean, I idolized the hardcore scene; Minor Threat and Bad Brains. I liked the book Catch-22 a lot. This was just after I had just transferred schools from Roosevelt to Urbandale, basically starting over. And it showed, I did better my Junior year in this new environment. I somehow managed to get a 3.5 GPA by my senior year. What I was confused and upset about at the time was that I thought that physics might be more interesting than engineering, and I was interested in learning from more than the books I had bought off Amazon, but the school didn’t let me enroll in a physics class my final semester because I didn’t have the prerequisites in math. So, after I graduated, I spent a large part of that summer teaching myself pre-calculus and calculus. I went on a trip to Germany with my German II class for three weeks, starting June 22nd, 2014. On the plane ride, I read a pop science book on Quantum Mechanics. After I was settled in with my host family, I picked up their classical guitar and started writing music in my room for most of my days on the trip until they literally broke a string to get me to stop. (I’m not sure how bad I was.) Also, late at night, since I had brought the book The Theoretical Minimum by Leonard Susskind, I was writing equations of motions and studying physics. I also wrote a half a journal’s worth of fiction and drew some not-so-great drawings.

When I came back home to Urbandale, I found out that my parents and I were forced to move. We moved to Johnston. And, I remembered it was exactly one year after her death. This brought up a lot of emotions. I was angry and driven, I studied calculus as an escape. When it came time to enroll for classes at DMACC (the best I could hope for with my poor transcript, lack of academic knowledge, and one scholarship), I tested out of pre-calculus. Later, at ISU, I tested out of chemistry for engineers and a first-year Electrical Engineering course EE 185, as well as a programming course on problem-solving in C, EE 285. I did well in every class except one after that summer. And more importantly, I discovered for myself the value of self-teaching, as most of my idols figured out well before me.

Unfortunately, I did have to retake classical physics I after my first semester, because I figured a C- was not satisfactory. But, honestly, even that felt like an accomplishment! I retook the class, did well, and took a tutoring position at the community college for classical physics I, chemistry, and, later, differential equations. I helped get my friend Billy Noy an A in physics. During my time at DMACC, I took calculus II, in which I invented a shortcut method for doing partial fraction decomposition and presented it to the class. I did a final project in differential equations class that ended up being a presentation; it was on a set of error correction equations of varying orders of derivatives that mapped the trajectory of rockets or missiles going through the atmosphere. I used a mathematical modeling software called Maple for the numerical approximations to compare with the given information. My teacher, Prof. Chris Macclure, oddly enough took off to aid the military in mathematical training or some kind of undisclosable Quant stuff. I’ve always had this funny feeling that my formulas were used for real rocket projections. By 19, my reading schedules were so strict that I finished my reading list for the summer. I finished Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s giant masterpiece.  I also found outlets for my wild imagination by writing fiction. My teacher for composition I, Prof. Rose (sorry, I’m spacing on her full name; she’s a very nice older lady,) lauded me as her best student on the second day of class, after handing back an in-class writing assignment in which I wrote a short story in 45 min using a set of specific words rolled from picture dice. I felt alive during that writing session. I still look back at this moment in my education where I realized that writing was a passion; it felt like I was back in Germany.

By the time I had transferred to ISU, I was settled on engineering. Not only was I not good enough to be a physicist, but, I figured, engineering was more hands-on and, therefore, more fun. I did spend the whole day after declaring my Mechanical Engineering major regretting that choice, hastily writing my advisor emails, and ultimately switching to EE. My first introduction to the world of Electrical Engineering was at ISU and more specifically in EE 185 with one of the greatest professors at ISU, Mani Mina. In his class, I began learning how to program and use an Arduino microcontroller; it was my first introduction to an embedded system. Unfortunately, I had some health issues come up and had to miss most of my first semester at Iowa State. But I quickly bought a starter kit off eBay and read a whole book on it on my own. Although it seemed like there were unlimited possibilities, I soon found out that there were great limitations to what you can do with this board. I had convinced myself through logos (logic) that EE was the most interesting major I could find, but there wasn’t much bonding going on with me and the electrical components and the circuits. Furthermore, everything looked unexplainable. I couldn’t explain how simple components made such complex systems possible. But just as I began to resign myself to the permanently unknowable was when my first major breakthroughs and hints of passion came through, Fall 2018.

The breakthroughs first spurred in a Computer Engineering class of all places. And, no, I’m not saying that I want to switch my major. What I realized was how totally unbounded you are in EE when it comes to designing a system. This all came from learning the principles of Digital Logic in CPRE 281 with another great professor, Alexander Stoychev. I learned how the mathematical language called Boolean Algebra, invented by a self-taught mathematician, George Bool, in the *mid-19^th century, and all possible thanks to a groundbreaking 1948 paper by the electrical engineer and information theory pioneer, Claude Shannon, can be implemented in circuits through electrical switches—such as vacuum tubes, relays, or the great things we have today known as “transistors”. Furthermore, in his class, we were introduced to a more powerful type of device, called a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). This is a system on a chip (SoC) that runs on a low-level hardware descriptive language; it is much more expensive and flexible than an Arduino. (They both have their pros and cons.)

Like the Arduino, this sparked again that initial idea that the possibilities were endless, but this time in a more wholesome way. Not only was the device verifying all our Boolean equations and circuits, but the theory felt profoundly elevated in my eyes. Towards the end of the semester, we were assigned a final project to implement on this board (DE2-115). Also, we were given the option to propose our own project idea. I happened to be the only one to propose and successfully complete my own idea in a class of about 200 students. My project, “Lockpicking”, is a logic puzzle game like the old board game “Mastermind”, except with a randomly generated combination that you are timed to break. It took me probably a hundred hours (I stopped counting after 40). I received a 100% on it, yet it only brought my grade up 2 percent. That’s not to say it wasn’t worth it, because it was. I had fun and learned a lot. (I’ll send you a link to the demo video for the project when it’s up on YouTube.)

After I finished the project, I emailed Prof. Stoychev and asked if he would be interested in mentoring me or starting a club where we could do audio or video processing on the FPGA boards. He told me that he teaches all of that in his graduate-level course, CprE 575. I jumped on board and signed up immediately. My interests are now geared towards making audio processors or guitar effects pedals. I’ve been playing guitar (electric and acoustic) since high school. So, naturally, I loved the idea of making my own effects. This winter break, I plan on spending a lot of time reading about audio processing and circuits design to get ideas for making these kinds of devices. Overall, I’ve become much more motivated to learn, and I look forward to several other classes I am planning to take, which I’ll talk about next. I’ll also let you in on what I plan to do after I get my bachelor’s degree.

I’m excited for CPRE 288, EE 330, EE 435, EE 465, ENGL 304, ENGL 306, and many more. These, I think, are the main ones that make me look forward to continuing and broadening my education. I’ve chosen these core classes because, in them, I imagine I will get to work on some fun projects and make further breakthroughs in the endlessly profound thing that is Electrical Engineering, and the English classes were chosen because I enjoy writing and reading poetry and fiction, as you can probably tell from this essay.

If I don’t get an internship by my senior year and have few job prospects because of that, I plan to apply to graduate schools sooner rather than later. I know my dream job is to be mixed signals systems engineer, which requires at least a master’s degree. I want to make specialized hardware that solves problems for people who need faster results. And that’s so broad that I can work under any imaginable domain of scientific discipline. However, I was going to take my dad’s advice and get some work experience before going back to school. I’m not yet sure which schools I would apply to, maybe AZ state. I would be interested, if my GRE score is high enough, in applying to an ivy league or two. Although I don’t see how I would get the letters of rec. or have enough experience in my portfolio or have the money for that, though.

My current focus is not only on learning but on making memories and bonds with peers and professors, building up a portfolio, and hopefully making money. Money is becoming more and more important the further I go along in school. I’m currently taking on student loans and they don’t cover enough for housing or food. Although hashing out the details is not trivial, I’m glad I’m not back to square one. Although it’s not perfect by any stretch, I’m glad I can proudly say “I know what I want to do with my life.” Ultimately, this winding journey has taken me to great heights and to ever more beautiful vistas.