Five Mistakes I Made During Undergrad and the Lessons I Learned

2 minute read

I spent five years in the lab before starting my PhD in 2021. Here are the top five mistakes I made and the lessons I learned that can help fresh graduates.

1. Not Taking Notes

I often found myself repeatedly looking for the same information and spending a lot of time trying to understand old, undocumented code. This was because I didn’t take proper notes. I used to tell my wife that not taking notes was my biggest mistake during undergrad. In the last two years, I’ve taken over 6,000 notes in Obsidian, which helps me every day. I no longer rely on my memory for technical information.

Taking notes doesn’t take much time. I even have a YouTube series on how to take notes quickly.

2. Not Documenting Projects

I designed hundreds of PCBs, wrote many Arduino and C libraries, and built numerous circuits, but I didn’t document any of them well. As a result, I couldn’t make them open-source and kept most private. Now, focusing on power system studies, I don’t have time to revisit those projects and have forgotten much of them.

3. Not Making My Projects Open-Source

Many of my designs, codes, and libraries are just rotting in my Google Drive and private GitHub repo. Making them open-source would have created a better portfolio and helped others. People often ask me for schematics or code, and I don’t have the energy to recollect the information. If they were open-source, I could just share a link.

4. Not Focusing on Revenue Generation

During my undergrad at BUET, I aimed for excellence and sacrificed my academic results for it. I never tried to monetize my experience or projects and didn’t think about money, savings, or investment. This led to financial struggles. While excellence is important, sustainable income is even more crucial.

5. Not Moving into Industry After Graduation

I graduated in 2017 and immediately got a job, but I left it after three months when figured out the company is a fraud . I freelanced for years before taking a real job in February 2020. I would say, working in the industry under pressure, with teamwork and deadlines, significantly improved my productivity and personal growth.

Feel free to share your thoughts or similar experiences!

About Me

Hi, I’m Shuvangkar Das, a power systems researcher with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University. I work at the intersection of power electronics, DER, IBR, and AI — building greener, smarter, and more stable grids. Currently, I’m a Research Scientist at EPRI (though everything I share here reflects my personal experience, not my employer’s views).

Over the years, I’ve worked on real-world projects involving large scale EMT simulation and firmware development for grid-forming and grid following inverter and reinforcement learning (RL). I also publish technical content and share hands-on insights with the goal of making complex ideas accessible to engineers and researchers.

📺 Subscribe to my YouTube channel, where I share tutorials, code walk-throughs, and research productivity tips.

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