VARUN ADVANI

3/14/24
CUMULATIVE REFLECTION
A REFLECTIVE JOURNEY: NAVIGATING MY CUMULATIVE EXPERIENCE AT
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
In my junior year of high school, I was part of a five-member team dedicated to constructing a
robot for the 2018-2019 FIRST Tech Challenge. This endeavor expanded my admiration for
computer systems, particularly the synergistic relationship between hardware and software. The
project was more than a mere extracurricular activity but a pivotal experience that directed me
toward a future in computer engineering. Concurrently, my engagement in a space settlement
design competition provided a glimpse into the realm of engineering design and problem-solving
that further fueled my interest in pursuing an engineering degree. These experiences during my
formative years solidified my resolve to pursue a degree in Computer Engineering at Iowa State
University (ISU), and I began my journey in Spring 2021.
My freshman year was mostly just introductory programming and fundamental engineering
courses. I was doing well and enjoyed my introductory programming courses. Still, as someone
who grappled with concepts of chemistry and calculus, I remember getting extremely frustrated
with my performance in some fundamental engineering courses. I felt like they were irrelevant to
what I was doing. I remember expressing this frustration with my roommate, who gave me an
insightful analogy, comparing these fundamental engineering courses to athletes who lift heavy
weights, not necessarily because they will perform the exact motions in their sport but to
condition their bodies for overall performance. Similarly, he suggested that these introductory
courses in engineering were not about direct application but rather about conditioning the mind
and preparing it for the complexities ahead, which stuck with me. Another concept introduced in
my freshman year in CprE 185: Introduction to Problem-Solving in C was that of Team-
Based Learning wherein we would have to collaborate in groups of 4 to solve some in-class
problems, have discussions, and eventually work on a Final Project. After getting past the initial
phase of awkwardness, I got to know my teammates and their experiences leading up to their
decision to join the ISU engineering curriculum. It was an enjoyable experience to work with
them and solve problems, which now when I look back at it, seem somewhat trivial but were the
basis of many important concepts to follow. Most importantly, I learned how to communicate
confidently, which has only grown since I took CprE 185 in my freshman year, and taught me
the skills required to work in a team that has translated into the research and senior design
project teams I am currently working on. During my freshman year, I realized that I was not the
best at taking tests and always left an examination feeling like I did not put my best foot forward
even though I had the knowledge to do so. I realized this was mainly because of the stress I
would put on myself during the exam, lack of confidence, and mentally overworking myself
before taking the test.
My sophomore year was when I opened up to different opportunities on campus and used the
resources available to us as students. My grades were improving, I was getting better at taking
tests, and as I started taking more courses related to the core ECpE curriculum, I started having
more fun with my courses and interacting with more people with similar semester schedules.
During my sophomore year, I took CprE 281: Introduction to Digital Logics, which was the
first of the core computer engineering courses at ISU and was the course that made me realize
that I had a strong inclination toward computer architecture and digital hardware design. As part
of my final project, I designed a stack arithmetic unit that could carry out various stack
operations such as push, pop, push with add, push with subtract, and display the output on the
DE2-115 Altera FPGA Board. This was my first challenging project, where I had to create a top-
level design, integrate the lower-level components, and then test them out on actual hardware.
 VARUN ADVANI
3/14/24
CUMULATIVE REFLECTION
A REFLECTIVE JOURNEY: NAVIGATING MY CUMULATIVE EXPERIENCE AT
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
The design for this project was a challenge in itself. Still, the biggest challenge and also my
biggest takeaway from this project was the ability to debug the issues I was facing in more of a
brute force way and from my lower-level derivations out of KMAPS, finite state machine design,
and so on because we had not been introduced to testbenches or anything of that sort. Beyond
the resources provided to us in the form of lecture notes, textbooks, and instructor help was
working on issues with the people around me that helped me to learn a lot and succeed in this
course.
As the summer of sophomore year came around, I took another core CprE elective, CprE 288:
Embedded Systems, which ascertained the direction I wanted to take as a future computer
engineer. The course taught me an essential skill, and that was to read. There was always a
sense of restlessness and impatience that would keep me from reading textbooks and just for
leisure. However, I quickly realized that reading manuals and datasheets is paramount to
succeed in an embedded systems course. This was a short semester, so I had to pick up these
skills quickly. Over the eight weeks, we learned about several concepts related to
microcontrollers, device communication and protocols, and Hardware/Software co-design, and
eventually concluded with a final project in which we designed an Autonomous Valet Parking
Service using the Roomba provided to us with the Tiva microcontroller. At the end of this course,
I wanted to pursue a career in embedded systems design, whether in research or industry. The
summer of my sophomore year was also when I took up my first on-campus job as an
undergraduate research assistant in the Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering
department. I remember being overwhelmed on my first day by all the information given to me
regarding the research work they were doing and the contribution they expected from me. I was
working with a team of people from different engineering departments, all of whom had different
skill sets, and it was the first time that my skills and efforts would be used towards real-world
applications. My job was to integrate three different imaging technologies into a gantry system
that would then be used to image defects on engine blocks. I remember figuring out where to
begin. My manager, Mr. Paul Kremer, was a great source of help during this process as he
guided me in the right direction repeatedly and gave me confidence in what I was doing. I would
get the occasional earful when I misunderstood certain things. Still, as I got more comfortable in
the environment and developed a team relationship, we produced some incredible results and
are currently working on putting together a research paper on our findings. In addition to
working on this multi-phase project, since everything around us nowadays is run by computers,
sensors, and so on, I was working on a few side projects that gave me a great deal of
confidence with data acquisition system hardware, signal processing, developing LabVIEW
code for operating various machinery in the structures lab and learning MATLAB for image
processing work.
My junior year was the first time I attended a career fair at ISU, and it was a great experience.
Leading up to it, I remember being extremely nervous about my presentation skills, elevator
pitch, resume, and so on, and I almost decided not to go. However, with encouragement from
some of my friends, I ended up attending the career fair and was not disappointed. While, at
times, it would be frustrating to wait in long lines and present your elevator pitch only to get told
to apply online, the essence of the experience for me was gaining the skill to network and
understand the problems that companies are trying to tackle in today’s world, and how I could
be a part of their mission and contribute to their work.
 VARUN ADVANI
3/14/24
CUMULATIVE REFLECTION
A REFLECTIVE JOURNEY: NAVIGATING MY CUMULATIVE EXPERIENCE AT
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
Junior year taught me a lot about time management and discipline while maintaining a healthy
social life outside school. Having started in Spring 2021 and trying to graduate in Spring 2024, I
had to take 17 credits during each of my semesters in my junior year, but there were specific
courses during this year, like Com S 311: Introduction to Design and Analysis of
Algorithms and CprE 381: Computer Organization and Assembly Level
Programming, that were known to be challenging and often students would have to retake
these courses. In addition, I was also beginning the Electrical Engineering part of my curriculum,
which meant that I would have at least 2 lab courses each semester. This was also not made
any easier with my research work commitment of 20 hours at the Civil Engineering department,
and overall, I was overwhelmed and thought that I would not be able to get through the year
without falling short somewhere. However, with the support of my friends and maintaining a
disciplined schedule, I was able to have a successful year and accomplish more than I thought I
could. While I had figured out how to take on most of my core computer/electrical engineering
courses and computer science courses, there was one that was a different challenge: Com S
309: Software Development Practices. Com S 309 was a semester-long group project during
which we worked on developing an Android application. The course was designed to be an
industry-like experience where we would work in Frontend/Backend pairs to demonstrate core
application feature development to a Teaching Assistant every four weeks. This was the first
time we really struggled with version control tools, but we could also appreciate the power they
possess while working on large projects like this one. This course was an experience that taught
me a lot about best practices when working on developing a product and outlined the
importance of communication with team members. We once had an instance where a backend
team member had made an apparent trivial change by initializing a variable to 0 and pushing it
to our main branch the night before our demo, without informing me and my backend partner.
The result of this was that during our demo, one of our core features, which was filtering
locations from a database, did not work, and we had to reschedule our demo all because of a
single change that was not communicated to us and did not sit right with our frontend code.
Right after this, we had a meeting as a team and while it got a bit heated, we set some strict
ground rules, and everyone was always on the same page since that incident. We ended up
winning Best Project Group at the end of the semester, and till today, my backend partner is one
of my closest friends.
My senior year was the same pace as my junior year, given that I still wanted to graduate in
Spring 2024. However, I was now taking elective courses that aligned more with my strengths
and goals for the future. Over the summer, I took up a second research assistant position at the
ECpE Data Storage Lab, working with Dr. Mai Zheng and his PhD students on experiments
related to caching with different erasure coding methods in Ceph Storage Clusters that were
deployed on Amazon AWS Elastic Container (EC2) instances. Although not the specific field I
was interested in, the experience made me realize that I had a strong affinity to pursue a
research career. I, therefore, decided to apply for the concurrent master’s program at ISU
starting in Spring 2024 to improve my knowledge in the fields of computer architecture and
embedded systems design and contribute to the growing field with some of my research.
My senior year was also the beginning of the 2-semester senior design project at ISU. I
remember being very confused about what projects to select as my preferences. Still, ultimately,
I decided to pick a project related to 5G as my first choice, with the hope of designing
embedded hardware that could contribute to the massive research and development project
 VARUN ADVANI
3/14/24
CUMULATIVE REFLECTION
A REFLECTIVE JOURNEY: NAVIGATING MY CUMULATIVE EXPERIENCE AT
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
headed by Dr. Hongwei Zhang to create a wireless living lab that serves as a testbed for
researchers, in and around the story county area. The project, however, turned out to be
different from what was advertised. Instead, we were asked to design a website to teach future
undergraduate students working with this wireless living lab about 5G and how they can
leverage the tools developed as part of the wireless living lab to create 5G-related experiments
and projects. As I am currently in my final semester as an undergraduate student, I am working
on implementing my senior design project. In addition to this, I am a Teaching Assistant for CprE
281, which has been a very fun, rewarding, and insightful experience up to this point. I am also
currently taking the senior embedded systems design course, which has me spending a lot of
time at Coover Hall but has been one of the best courses I have taken at ISU and has confirmed
that embedded systems and computer architecture are the directions I want to take for my
future.
As I conclude my journey at Iowa State University as an undergraduate student and move on to
pursue a master’s degree and a future in research, I am nothing but grateful for my experience
and thankful to all the people who have helped and supported me in this journey. It feels like
yesterday that I was an overwhelmed, underconfident boy from India who knew that he wanted
to pursue a career related to computer engineering but was doubtful about his skills and
abilities. I still have a lot of learning to do. Still, I feel confident the foundation that ISU has given
me in terms of knowledge, discipline, communication, time management, and many soft skills
that will help me achieve my goals.