Miscellaneous

Prof Personalities – Derek Wright

How long have you been teaching at waterloo?

I taught sessionals in 2010, 2011 and 2014. Then I started here full-time in April 2015.

What courses do you teach?

Lately I’ve been teaching the circuits courses ECE 242, ECE 445 and BME 294. Those are kind of the big courses that I teach. But I also teach these little nothing courses: ECE 200B, ECE 300A and ECE 300B. They’re pass-fail and nobody quite knows what their purpose is. There’s a historical purpose but that’s long gone. So, that was actually nice for me, because it was a test-bed for new ideas. It has been unbelievably helpful. I effectively made it optional for students. Students that are interested in whatever it is that I’m currently testing, can opt-in and help out.

Favourite course to teach?

I really like ECE 242 because I remember it being really confusing and complicated when I was an undergrad many years ago. And that’s the biggest joy for me as a teacher is to give students a synthesized version of the knowledge. At least as synthesized through my head. Maybe that’s not appropriate for everybody. But I certainly feel it’s an opportunity for me to help students avoid the mental and tactical pitfalls. For example, a topic that may have been introduced to me with the professor walking up drawing a circuit and writing equations, I start with what’s the big picture. Why are we doing this? What’s the ultimate goal? How are we going to use this in the future? Is this useful for you and try to put it in context.

How’d you end up as a professor?

Just to be clear, I’m a graduate attributes lecturer. If I have to sign a legal document that’s what I would put. But students call me professor and I still answer. I would describe my journey to becoming a faculty member as circuitous and twisted. In undergrad, I ended up sticking around for a master’s with professor Sachdev, who’s incredible, the former chair of the ECE department, because I really, really liked the topic. At the time there was no dedication to industry, I just had that feeling that I wasn’t quite done, I knew I’m not super motivated by money, so I wasn’t itching too bad to get into industry. And it was a fantastic decision. It was a really wonderful experience.

I thought at that point, I had enough school, seven years of school back-to-back. I went out into industry and within about a year, I realized I’m still not done yet. I really, really feel passionate about learning. I don’t want to say it’s a problem because it’s turned out to be a great benefit. I’m interested in just about everything. There are very few topics where I say that’s boring and I don’t want to learn about it. And so that in and of itself kind of motivated me to go back to academia, where I have the latitude to learn what I want to learn. Then I went and did a PhD in joint biomedical and electrical engineering at U of T and I focused on medical imaging, because it was nice bridge, between what I knew and the biomedical world. I did have a feeling that I wanted to help people. I went back, did that for 4 years.

That’s when things changed. I had a postdoc lined up at a company in town, called MapleSoft, who makes the Maple software and they make a tool called MapleSim. MapleSim is a modelling and simulation tool, so you could do circuits, but you could also do a vehicle for example and you could model the interfaces between them. And a big part of my PhD was modelling physics. I went intending to do that postdoc and I did the postdoc, but very quickly within 6 months I was in sales because I really enjoyed being in front of customers. They really saw a benefit in putting me in front of customers and I think they wanted to round me out to see how far I would go on the business side. And that kind of started a 6 year journey. I did a year and a half in sales, a year and a half as their product director of MapleSim. That again was another eye opener, that the engineering analytical mindset is applicable across the board and this why you see so many engineers that become doctors and lawyers.

I left MapleSoft at the time because I kind of made a decision, actually with the advice of some of my mentors industry and academia, that my key differentiator, was my well roundedness, not my dedication to a particular topic. I really like learning, I love learning and I’m well rounded. They said that’s a really good fit for an executive at a tech company. That’s the kind of MO, that’s the profile of somebody who does that. And I thought you know what, that’s something I can embrace and feel good about. I didn’t want to walk away from tech, because I just spent all that time doing it and I was able to teach sessionals on the side, so that part of my brain was still active. I was working with PhD level engineers on a day-to-day basis. It’s not like I was want for technical content.

I moved over to BlackBerry and did 3 years of business development on their partnerships team. So that was interesting because the scale of what I was doing was times 100. I went from ten thousand dollar deals to million dollar deals. It really just again showed me again the engineering analytical mindset is applicable on many, many different scales. I was hedging my bets at the time, things were downsizing for blackberry. I really enjoyed teaching sessionals and a position came up. I didn’t realize it was a faculty position when I applied. But once I realized it was a faculty position I thought wow this is actually quite an opportunity. I really went hard for it and got it and its been fantastic and I love coming into work everyday.

Favourite part of being a professor?

I think it comes down to the experience for the individual. The idea that I’m slightly older, I’ve had more time to digest the material and I’m generally well-spoken. I feel like I have all the ingredients at my disposal to facilitate student’s learning to make it easier for them to learn. To try to lower the barrier for some of the more complicated topics. Frequently they aren’t nearly as complicated as they seem at first. The underlying concepts are really straightforward. There’s only a handful of concepts that show up over and over and over again, just in many, many different forms. So that’s what really motivates me. I love standing in front of a group of students and trying my best. It’s never like I want to kick back and have the glory of standing and look I’m a faculty member, it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with forming the relationships with the students, helping them to succeed and watching them succeed. When you’re in industry working on a product, you try to move that product along and watch it grow. There’s all these crops growing and I get to help them all grow and I’m not working on one particular plant. I’m helping thousands of humans, that are going to become engineers to succeed in life and that is a really different scale of opportunity for me and I love it.

Hardest part?

At a curriculum level there’s changes my colleagues and I want to make. We feel that it’s the right thing to do, but the time scale is so much different than at a company. At a company you get buy-in that something needs to change and you go and change it. Even if you’re supposedly locked in, you go talk to people, come to an agreement and you change it. Here, if I want to change something and we all agree that we’re going to change it in fourth year, it will be five years before that change occurs in reality. And that was very hard and frustrating for me to adapt to. I’d say it took me a good year or two to really just let that be OK.

Teaching philosophy?

Here’s the condensed version of my experience with undergrad and then what happened afterward. You learn 50,000 different concepts in undergrad, that seem like little islands of knowledge. In fact, I would say each course feels like a little island of knowledge with other islands in them. And for me it was about 5 years after undergrad that I really had the feeling that it started to gel into a coherent picture. All these little islands you start to realize are just facets of the same thing. That’s one of the joys for me as a teacher. to show students yes let’s say you’re learning for example analog control systems. Well why as a computer engineer would you possibly care about analog control systems. I can actually give a coherent answer to that, because I’ve seen it, I’ve had an opportunity to let it sink in and to see it in context across many different industries and in academia. It’s very satisfying for me to pass that on.

If you weren’t a professor what would you be doing?

I really enjoy product management and product strategy. So not product management in the stomping out bugs sense, but really what problem are we solving, what market segments do we play in. The more abstracted I got in that role, looking at the bigger and bigger and bigger picture, the more I liked it. So really corporate strategy, product strategy and I enjoy kind of a specific version of that was partnership strategy as well. On the strategic side I really enjoyed it and it was rare because it takes awhile but you develop this fantastic strategy, you execute this strategy and to watch it succeed there’s no better feeling.

Now I get to do that here. I get to do strategy for ECE, I get to do strategy at the faculty of engineering level. And it’s very satisfying it just takes a lot longer to see it come to fruition. Sometimes it doesn’t. Like we started an initiative called ECE design days. It’s iterative, we’re working on it. We’ve started to see some little successes here and there. And it’s thrilling to watch strategy come to life.

 Interviews are around the corner. Any tips for engineering students?

As somebody’s who’s hired many co-ops before and has been a co-op, and has been a full time employee and has hired full time employees, enthusiasm and passion for the topic, immediately brings you to the front of the line. I think students often panic about their marks and that may be a vetting tool for some of the bigger companies, but in general you don’t look at the marks. There’s too many applicants to go through and look at all the marks and I don’t think that many people think that marks are a good indicator of job success, to a certain degree.

If on your resume you can show that you’re passionate about the topic and the company and the industry, that will get it noticed. You put that right up front. If in the interview, you know something about the industry, you know something about the company, you know something about the problems that they’re trying to solve, their customers, that will immediately bring you to the front of the line. You can’t fake that. You need to be a passionate person and passionate about engineering. I think most people are, but because of what we do here they’re really hung up on the marks and the technical details. You should have a strong technical foundation. I would take somebody technically weaker, but more passionate, over somebody technically stronger who I think is just there because they want a job.

3 tips for undergrad?

  1. At the beginning of term, schedule everything. If you know from the course syllabus that you have ten assignments due, you schedule the time to do it and then you need the discipline to do what your calendar tells you. It sounds great when I say it. I certainly didn’t do that in undergrad. But that’s how I operate right now. I put stuff in my calendar. I color code it based on what it is, what topic it is and I just do it. I try really hard not to cancel meetings. I try really hard not to make excuses and I just do it. In the long run it will lower your stress, because you’ll hit the weekend, even if you still have a lot of stuff to do. You’ll know that you’re on target.
  2. There’s this fantastic method and I say this having tried several methods. It is really easy. There’s a one hour video on Lynda.com. You all have free access to Lynda.com as University of Waterloo students. It’s called getting things done. It sounds silly to call a method getting things done but it’s a five step method that works. What works for me is things often get to busy for me to do a method on a religious basis where I show up and the first thing I do is I execute this method. I can’t do that. The nice thing is for me is you can walk away from it and come back a week later and pick up where you left off and it still helps you to keep everything organized. For me, what was intensely stressful in undergrad and today is when there’s things on my mind that I know I have to do and I haven’t captured that anywhere. I have OneNote on my phone and I do getting things done through OneNote and I immediately write it down. I’m always taking little voice notes and the amount that it lowers my stress is unbelievable.
  3. Try to shoot for deep learning. I know that’s not possible in every course and I know you’re busy and I know it’s very, very difficult. But, if you can get to the core of why you are learning something, think hierarchically about what’s the big picture, what are the systems that need to be solved in this context and what are the tools that I have available to do that, that kind of hierarchical learning will help you achieve deeper learning. The other thing that research shows achieves deep learning is to do distributed studying. Don’t cram and again this is the pot calling the kettle black. I was an expert crammer, because as much as I wish our assessment methods were a little more modern, we still have these big finals and big midterms. And we are all expert crammers. You cram it in your head, you flush your brain toilet and away goes all the knowledge. Then next time you have to learn it again. If you do your homework on a regular basis, if you do your assignments on a regular basis that also counts as studying and that’s going to be more durable learning. If you want to look that up, that’s called durable learning.

Favourite memory of undergrad?

It’s probably the memories I don’t quite remember that were the funnest. IRS (Iron Ring Society) was good. IRS was a lot of fun. June Lo, who used to run our CDTs (Computer Delivered Tests) and she put together a special CDT for us. All about undergrad. Had nothing to do with technology or anything. It’s IRS so at the time we were all feeling good and it was just hilarious, it was amazing. It was in the WEEF lab. I came back fifteen years later and the WEEF lab still looked like it was 1982 so I really appreciate that. That was probably my top memory.

How many printed shirts do you own?

Here’s a more meta answer to your question. As I got older and I think also because I’m a stereotypical man, I really don’t like shopping for clothes. I like to look good, but I don’t like shopping for clothes. And Old Navy has made it unbelievably easy for me to say what’s 50% off, yes I’ll buy that and it fits. That’s why I have so many printed shirts. Probably around like 15 or 20. Now that being said, half of my closet is unbelievably fancy. Because I used to be in business for 6 years. I have all these amazing dress shirts, these amazing suits and nowhere to wear them. If you want to invite me to a fancy outing, I’ll be happy to show up looking great.

Anything else?

My only piece of advice that I frequently give students, because I was in that boat too, where you worry about all the decisions that you make, you have so many doors open in front of you, sometimes there’s a particular door that you want to go through but it closes and you panic. Be a life low-pass filter. Trust that you’re making good decisions. You’re here, you don’t get here by making bad decisions. Trust that you’re making good decisions and stick with that. Try not jump all over the place worrying about everything. Keep making good decisions, everything will fall into place.

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