What did I do? Interdisciplinary projects. More specifically, building things which must work in the ocean and be operated on boats by salty old fishermen who aren't willing to put up with anything fiddly.

What did I learn? First, to resist giving up in the face of fears over lack of skills/experience/knowledge or lack of ability to acquire skills/knowledge. Then, to ignore it altogether. Finally, to turn that would-be fear into a motivating force which helps me to focus in on achieving my goals.

How'd I get into all that?

As a second year CompSci undergrad I took a freshman Intro to Ocean Engineering course to fulfill an engineering elective requirement. In spite it being a freshman course, there was a rather lengthy team project. The goal of the project that semester was to build a device which could be dragged along the seafloor by a boat, and which would detect pockets of water with lower salinity (salt content).

My role on the team was to build the sensor package for the vehicle. With ample help from an excellent professor who specialized in water wave theory and insanely low-cost in-situ sensor development (shoutout to Dr. Eric Thosteson) I managed to cobble together a CTD (conductivity, temperature, depth sensor). I'm in my 30s now, and I still remember all the little details of that project to this day. It used a PIC16 microcontroller, a simple pre-calibrated 5V linear analog temp sensor (0.1V = 1°C), a $15 motorola linear analog differential pressure sensor (one side reads pressure within the sealed box, the other side I filled with glycerin and capped with a semi-permeable membrane and reads the pressure of the seawater), and a 'homebrew' conductivity sensor made from a comparator-based relaxation oscillator, where two titanium wires exposed to the seawater serve as the measurement cell, acting as the resistor in the oscillator circuit. The oscillation was balanced around ground so that current flow would reverse with each cycle, minimizing the impact of electroplating on the probe. The sensor package communicated via a tether wire back to a computer on the boat via balanced RS-485. Before starting this project I never knew that these things existed. The idea that I could now write code which executed on a single chip which I could then build into a circuit which does actual things in the real physical world, and that I now had the skills to do this all on my own was crazy exciting to me.

The project made me consider a variety of crazy things and learn a bunch of new skills (drilling acrylic for sealed cable glands is a huge pain). However, I think it made me realize one very important thing: that fear I had over not being an expert already and the worry about not being able to grasp new skills were completely useless.

After the project I did what I could to stick with Eric, the professor who helped me out on that crazy project, and worked as an engineering assistant on any projects he or his grad students had for me. The fact that I could write good code was a huge asset, as most students in the field are already learning so many other crazy things that they can't devote the focus/attention required on learning strong software engineering skills. After doing some grant work for a nonprofit oceanographic research institution, he was asked to come on as a full time employee. Since I'd been assisting with that work, I managed to come along for the ride. The pay was pretty bad, but the experience was priceless. I could easily fill a book with the lessons it taught me. But really, it all just served to reinforce that one big lesson I learnt back on that undergrad project.