Forbidden Things

A list of tools, materials, behaviors, mindsets and methodologies not used in the EDS.

Forbidden Things

The list below has evolved over decades of working with undergraduate and graduate students on course projects, research, external collaborations and competitions. The EDS encourages ways of working that lead to successful outcomes while not requiring the use of any of the below undesirable tools, materials, behaviors, mindsets, and methods. The hope is for as many people as possible to move from a mindset of "but wouldn't it be okay just this one time to use lizard brain thinking?" to one of "actually, it's not because I'm told not to, it's that I don't even want to revert back to lizard brain thinking"

1. On-campus manufacturing. This is the greatest sin. This is a crime against your future and the future of the ecosystem around you and will leave you addicted to a way of working that is unrealistic, extractive, and childish. These tools serve as anti-tools, as you will quickly devolve and limit your thinking to only consider concepts that can be easily fabricated using the machines and materials that are freely available on campus. You will never consider things from outside the bubble because they're not free. When you graduate, you will not have access to any of these resources, and you shouldn't be scheming ways to regain access post-graduation. Move on. Do great things elsewhere. Use your time at NYUAD to prepare yourself for the true reality of your future, unburdened by NYUAD's resources.

2. Building prototypes for class projects. The EDS is specifically set up to help students work on projects not directly connected to classwork. The professor teaching your class should provide tools, materials, and space to complete your project without requiring resources from the EDS. Feel free to write code, simulate, or test software in the EDS. Please don't work on random rats' nests of labs or projects in the EDS.

3. Giving (likely bad) advice to students working in the EDS. If you're reading this list for the first time, and you've been running around the EDS telling people how to approach their project work, please stop giving my students advice. You are likely perpetuating myths and nonsense from a bygone era. The EDS is encouraging students to think beyond these out-dated approaches. I appreciate your enthusiasm; though, I'd appreciate if you'd direct that enthusiasm towards revisiting your own approaches to working. Being fast at cranking out vast and mediocre randomness is an anti-behavior and is deeply discouraged in the EDS. You likely don't quite understand the EDS, and your "advice" serves to undo the hard work being done to encourage students to refrain from taking the shortcuts you're likely peddling.

4. Thinking you can "fix" the EDS by making it look more like something you already know. It's nice to know that the space has triggered your imagination. However, I can already imagine which tools you're going to suggest we should buy. We're not a maker-space. We purposefully do not host workshops. We don't provide technical consulting. We don't lend tools. We don't supply parts or components. Come talk to us about ideas, instead. The lab, though ever-evolving, has been carefully crafted to be exactly what it is in the moment you're seeing it today. While it might seem like it's "missing" something, the room, itself, is a provocation, demanding students ask themselves why they think they need a particular resource. Likely, students are working on assumptions that amount to pseudo-addictions to DIY / maker approaches that aren't part of any professional value creation processes they should look forward to in their future careers.

5. Duct Tape / Duck Tape. If you've truly designed a system that requires Duct Tape, congratulations you're well on your way to becoming an HVAC system installer, but that's not something the EDS can help you with. If, on the other hand, you've made such horrible mis-calculations and errors in kludging together a last minute prototype and just need duct tape to hold it all together, we also cannot help you. As a rule, the EDS does not engage with students while they're in such chaotic phases of projects, as saving students from bad thinking at the last minute can only serve to tarnish the reputation of the EDS. Duct tape is for emergency repairs only and is not an engineering material. Design your systems better, and you'll never need duct tape.

6. Hot Glue. If you've truly designed a system to require hot glue, I don't believe you. Hot glue is the last resort of the absolutely desperate to just hold something together for five minutes to show in class. The EDS does not have hot glue and will not help you find hot glue. Do not bring hot glue into the EDS. Hot glue is for arts and crafts and is not an engineering material. Design your systems better, and you'll never need hot glue.

7. Nails. If you've truly designed a system that requires nails, congratulations – you're doing wood-working or carpentry, and I hope you're enjoying those hobbies. The EDS has no tools or materials to support this kind of work. You're better off going to the Scene Shop or the Wood-working Studio in the Arts Center. Nails are not engineering materials and are not allowed in the EDS. Design your systems to both go together and come apart, and you'll never need nails. Also, please do not bring your wood-working projects into the EDS; seek safe harbor elsewhere; they're not welcome here.

8. Super Glue. If you've truly designed a system to require super glue, I most deeply don't believe you. Super glue is the lazy way of holding two things together that you didn't properly design to be held together. It's a messy cheat that serves to shortcut the logical thinking that engineers must be capable of. The EDS does not have super glue and will not help you find super glue. Do not bring super glue into the EDS. Any super glue found in the EDS is subject to immediate disposal by anyone who sees it. Super glue is for fixing your broken glasses and is not an engineering material. Design your systems better, and you'll never need super glue.

9. Soldering. Sorry, but the EDS is not a maker-space or workshop. One should only ever need to solder in the rarest of circumstances, limited to reworking surface mount components on PCBs or assembling final products that contain components that could not be assembled by a robot. Most students looking for a soldering iron are doing neither of those things and are usually staring at a pile of random hardware they pray will work, having done none of the systematic thinking needed to have confidence in their misplaced and desperate hopes of being saved by solder.

10. Alligator clips or crocodile clips. Sorry, no. These are strictly for hobbyists. If you're prototyping, please devise a better plan before jumping into building. Aim to build more robust and professional prototypes, and before doing any prototyping, have a solid design for the system architecture. More than anything, use software tools to plan and test your design. If you are really at a phase of prototyping that requires probing electrical signals, consider using precision test leads with micro-grabbers instead. If you are supplying power to a system, use more robust wiring. Alligator clips have a tendency to slip and disconnect, and this rarely ends well.

11. Design Thinking. Hell, no! Where to start? This unholy concept was unleashed on the world and promoted to death by David Kelly of IDEO. There is nothing fundamentally wrong about viewing problems from many angles and including constraints discovered by exploring a challenge more deeply. However, the classic reduction of design thinking from a process down to a brainstorming exercise in front of a whiteboard with post-it notes is a crime. This perverted version is what's most widely practiced and reduces what could be a very enriching deep-dive into a subject down to a bunch of ill-prepared and uninformed (but enthusiastic) individuals dumping their brains onto a surface, hoping that an idea will emerge. The typical outcome is that the ideas of the loudest and most extroverted become the "agreed upon" path forward when time runs out. This is already how the world works - the noisiest get heard most often, so we shouldn't expect that this group that is volleying around un-researched ideas will generate anything of value. The alternative is for the individuals to feel a deep sense of ownership and to research the ideas independently before gathering for such a conversation and to remove the impetus to arrive at some conclusion from random post-it note vomiting.

12. Being busy for the sake of being busy. There is a widely-held misconception that simply being busy is the same as being busy working on something worthwhile. One way of re-stating the problem is to say that "Motion is not the same as forward movement", and if you find yourself in a situation where performative vibrating or spinning in circles is celebrated or demanded, run away, in a straight line, as fast and far as you can.

13. Playing "boss" and worshipping making / keeping others busy. This is just a way of stroking your own ego, "boss". See "Being Busy for the sake of being busy". Don't inflict this nonsense on other people. Be a better leader. Lead by example of showing how to better choose what to work on.

14. Flooding the Zone. You're in BAD company. This is a strategy used by Steve Bannon. It amounts to being so chaotic and creating so much confusion for others by flooding them with things they should pay attention to. His hope was that his party could get away with political "murder" because his opponents wouldn't know what to pay attention to in the flood. As an individual, this presents as you pretending to be "an ideas person" who flings so many random ideas into the mix that you are clearly hoping that the people around you who deeply use their brains will get so confused by your actions that they will reach the conclusion that you MUST be smart and successful because you're always talking about or "working on" a new idea. STOP THIS. You are driving others to insanity by way of your anxiety-inducing behavior. Your noisy "work" is crowding out the good thinking and genuinely good advice that others in the EDS can offer by sharing their work and processes. As with the "Boy who Cried Wolf", your friends and colleagues will (and should) find ways to stop listening to you. It is a move of desperation, a Hail Mary. You can only ever do this once in a generation, and you should seek to never do it, at all. It violates the baseline agreements humans have for what constitutes a civil society.

15. Sucking up all the Oxygen in the room. I know your parents think you're special. Let the rest of us decide for ourselves. If you always need to be the center of attention, or are loud for the sake of being loud, please stop. Your personal insecurities create more brain-dead-ness in the world. Because you think everyone can learn from you, you never leave room for any real learning to happen.

16. Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). The only serious CAD is Parametric CAD. Find a proper tool that isn't the equivalent of a chisel for hammering into marble. All actions must be un-doable, re-orderable, and reconfigurable (without using "Undo" as a "tool").

17. Giving students advice on how to extract more from NYUAD. Stop this. Help your friends find and follow challenging pathways. Help put an end to copy-pasta.

18. Thinking that someone owes you a favor. No one owes you favors. Stop asking for them. Stop wasting them when given. You are asking another person for something for free. They don't have to give that to you. No one owes you anything, and the more you self-righteously walk around thinking people should want to endlessly do you favors, the more you are ruining your own reputation. Do a serious favor for someone else, for a change.

19. Thinking someone owes you access to their network. They don't. Who we know is a valuable thing. As a student, you don't get to ask everyone to instantaneously open their network for you. Do good work. Prove yourself. You shouldn't need to beg people for introductions. They should be naturally forthcoming.

20. Using "Final" in the name of a file. Cardinal sin. Shows your naivety.

21. Believing that an idea is good due to your affection for or association with it. Big red flag. If you like an idea, you've likely been too nice to it. You shouldn't expect others to be nice to it just because you like it. If that's what you want, don't share your ideas with others. If you want real feedback or critique, brace yourself for hearing words that might feel like personal attacks. Hopefully, they're not, but the process is painful, nonetheless. Painless feedback comes from those who can't be bothered to engage. They say "Good Job" and go back to their life, without ever giving your work a single serious thought.

22. Claiming you "have midterms this (and every) week". Sorry to say, but students at NYUAD who are studying engineering will have "midterms" across the span of many weeks in each semester, especially when taking a mix of 14-week and 7-week classes. It's too easy to use this reason to not carve out time in your schedule to work on projects you care deeply about. Learn how to have not a "work-life-balance" but a "school-passions-life-balance". Keep in mind that your schoolwork will rarely be something exceptional that you will look back on fondly. Do your best work outside of class. These out-of-class experiences are the ones in which you'll learn the most and will be the unique things you're able to speak about at length, relative to your classmates who simply focused on their GPAs. Beyond applying to graduate schools, no one will ask about your GPA ever again in your life. When given the chance to care deeply about something, learn how to care deeply, in the absence of threats from an authority figure.

23. Being Low-Agency. Life is not a cruise. No one, besides you, is responsible for planning or orchestrating your learning, happiness, etc. Go off-script and try some boldly different things.

24. Misunderstanding Work-Life Balance. As a student, your head is pumped full of nonsense about a "work-life-balance" by adults who don't do any serious work. The truth of the matter is that, as a student, you have a "work-life-balance" by way of having weekends off, fall break, winter break, spring break, and summer break. Do the math. In a typical academic year at NYUAD, students who work on the weekends and holidays spend only 64.11% of the year on campus. Students who refuse to work on holidays and weekends are only "working" 46.85% of the year. You're living in some kind of retirement fantasy if you think you need MORE time off.

25. Coveting arbitrary awards.

26. Showing up Randomly and wanting attention. You can always expect a polite hello, but if you're trying to burn through hours of your day by being entertained by the people working in the EDS, this isn't the place for you. People here will be kind, up to a point, but don't test their patience.

27. Procrasti-chatting. Talking about 1000% BS and trying to lure others into your loud and pointless conversation. Just because you've made bad choices that have landed you in a situation where the only feasible action is to trash all available time in order to be able to say you "ran out of time" on something, don't drag others down with you. They should walk away from you mid-sentence, if they know what's good for them. Do this kind of nonsense in your dorm, not in the singular place on campus where students have explicitly chosen to be as productive as possible. Leave us alone.

28. Mimicking others' pathways to success. Blaze your own trail. Expect and embrace the obstacles.

29. Using neuro-divergence as an excuse to be a horrible human. Please try to own up to your thoughts, choices, and actions more than this.

30. Not listening to an idea as it evolves. Projects evolve. Ideas evolve. If you insist that there must be a simple, consistent, and never-contradicting set of advice and feedback you receive or discover while working on a project, you're trying to force something to be meaningless. Meaningful ideas and worthwhile ventures will pass through many phases, and your job is to pay attention to, learn from, and extend, all the time.

31. Not having high-level, external targets for a project. If you never externalize your requirements, you are doing it wrong. You should have an ever growing list of features and anti-features that you check your ideas and designs agains to determine if your idea is successful. Your idea MUST evolve across time, as must your constraints. If your final deliverable looks EXACTLY like the first idea you had, you've not done anything interesting; please don't share your process with others.

32. Pretending to produce excellent work without effort. This is best embodied in the lies that designers unleash upon the world. Designers often share a "photo" or a "scan" of a page of their notebooks, and these are ALMOST ALWAYS fake. They have gone back and re-drawn the page for public consumption, trying to appear as a genius. This is a disservice to all, as it conceals your true process (everybody poops). Don't do this, and don't encourage others to do this.

33. Starting with writing a paper. If you're in academia, you will likely have been poisoned by the concept of starting at the point of "writing a paper". What the HELL does that mean? How can you start at the end? The process begins with thinking and research. Writing a paper is the final step. Don't bring this kind of thinking into the EDS. We don't want your publication-addicted mindset in the EDS.

34. Thinking you know more than others because you've worked in some BS lab on our campus. Sorry, most labs in academia are doing NOTHING interesting. Don't show up to the EDS and claim expertise due to having spent time playing with tech in some other lab.

35. Not caring about a project because it's not directly related to your major. How dare you! You should be ashamed to ever say this. If you can't discover opportunities and ways to use your brain on all types of challenges, you're not preparing yourself for the real world. The classroom is a fantastical, isolated, segregated environment, and nothing worth working on in the real world is ever so nicely and cleanly sliced into pristine work that requires knowledge in a singular narrow field of expertise.

36. Not being additive. If you've only ever consumed, you are a burden on others. If they don't tell you this to your face, you should be thankful for their kindness. No one likes people who take, take, take. If you are not doing anything serious in the EDS, and yet you show up daily expecting or feeling entitled to free coffee, free ramen, free water, free snacks, a desk, two 4K monitors, an $1,100 chair, and sympathy and guidance, in short, you are a burden. Seek to do excellent work and get really smart about something. Don't interpret the push to "do something interesting in the EDS" as a push for you to force a terrible idea into existence (that requires guidance and materials from the EDS).

37. Coming back to NYUAD as an alumni and pretending to know everything. It's great to see you. Welcome back. Just because you've graduated and are experiencing the real-world for the first time, though, does not give you permission or authority to return to the EDS and spew advice to students that goes against the carefully-considered principles of the EDS. University is a special time, and it should be used to explore things in ways that are distinctly different from the real-world. If NYUAD wanted to strictly be an ideal-employee-generator, it would rebrand to a trade school and teach only presently-marketable skills. (an approach that, BTW, almost always lags the actual skills valued in the market by 4 to 5 years due to the time that it takes to spin up an accredited program in a new field.) So, please don't come back and tell people to learn precisely what you do in your job. Feel free to share some universal approaches to good thinking that align with the thinking we encourage in the EDS.

38. Being proud of getting away with doing nothing in a class. Again, how dare you! You are ruining the university by sharing your sense of pride about such things. The result will be that those who come after you will suffer the punishment devised in response to your actions. Think of others, for once in your life.

39. Faking Poverty. Being "cheap" and constantly asking others to support you, pay for you, and give you free things while, in actuality, taking advantage of this kindness and secretly using the money others helped you "save" to take extravagant trips or live a charmed life. This is gross, sociopathic, and will lose you friends quickly.

40. Using an on-campus job as an excuse for being busy. Never. Quit your job. If you care about working on something enough to ask others for guidance and support, you owe that thing and the people supporting you 100% of your free time. As of 2025, students earn less than $15 per hour at on-campus jobs. Do the math. This will never add up to a significant amount of money. Even if you max out the allowable working hours, it's a pittance in comparison with the money someone is investing in your being present at NYUAD. Stop insulting your parents or the entity who provided you financial support to be here. Quit your job, and do something more serious with your time. Also, get in the habit of not demanding to be paid to work on things you care about. Just work on them BECAUSE YOU CARE ABOUT THEM.

41. Using membership on a sports team as an excuse for being busy. No one of any consequence outside of NYUAD will ever care about the time you waste on varsity sports. NYUAD is not a feeder to professional sports teams. Exercise. Play sports. But don't take them so seriously, though. The most under-valued systems on university campuses are pick-up sports and intramural leagues. These approaches to sports recognize and celebrate the reason you are at university: NOT FOR SPORTS. Be present at NYUAD for the reasons that someone is investing an unholy amount of resources: LEARNING and GROWTH.

42. Being a locust. Seeing every situation as an opportunity to over-consume, not thinking of the reality you will leave behind for those who come after you. You don't need everything, all the time, and all at once. Try under-consuming, for a change.

43. Speed-running. Speed-running life, projects, and concept development are all just party-tricks and do not result in a world where your presence is a pleasant and welcomed surprise to those around you.

44. Making it Big and Red. This is a joke from the world of design. "If you can't make it good, make it big. If you can't make it big, make it red." Hold this mirror up to your work on a regular basis. There are a thousand other equivalent phrases that should, likewise, haunt you. "If you can't make it good, make it quickly, cryptic, cliché, silly, a one-liner, personal, purposefully bad, undecipherable, pretentious, esoteric, awareness-raising, etc"

45. Raising Awareness. I'm quite sure we're already VERY aware of whatever it is you think you need to raise awareness about. BTW, this is the job of marketing teams and advertisers, not engineers. Choose to work on more relevant things where you can flex your individual passions and expertise.

46. Faking having a startup but relying solely on NYUAD resources. First, you are in legal hot-water. Projects that are substantially supported by the university's resources, by definition, contain intellectual property that the university has a right to lay claim to. Second, stop pretending. Just go out and start a real company. If you're hired in a professor's lab, you are not working in a startup. If you are selling products 3D printed on NYUAD's printers, you are stealing.

47. Seeking fame when having done nothing of any consequence. Please drop this concept completely. Do good work. Do lots of it. Do it consistently and across many years. If your work is great, you will be recognized. If not, others will easily recognize your desperation. You can only hope they'll be kind enough to ignore your neediness and pitiful yearning for recognition and the approval of others.

48. Closed-source, expensive software. This is a disease that most are incapable of avoiding. It takes time and dedication to learn about and become proficient with tools that are widely available to all humans. You're better off if you can imagine a future in which you don't need to steal expensive software or beg students to share access codes with you after you graduate.

49. Breadboards. For the love of all things holy, NO! This is an idea from the mid 1900s that was never intended to be more than a "Board for demonstrating electric circuits" or as an "Electrical instruction board". If you find yourself working on a project you care about, and it's heart and soul are only present on a solder-less breadboard with a rat's nest of wires, what you are actually demonstrating is that you DEEPLY do not care. In the contemporary world, electronics ideas can be designed, prototyped, and tested in software and so easily and affordably produced by professional fabricators that the act of "breadboarding" is a crime against engineering.

50. USB Sticks. Here, plug this in! Look into devices like the USB Rubber Ducky, and you'll never plug a USB pen drive into your computer again. Use networked file sharing instead. Either share files in the "cloud" or establish self-hosted pathways to share data between teammates. If a guest needs to give you the PPT of their presentation, send it by email or cloud storage. If you must plug in an unknown USB drive, try to do so on a machine whose contents and operability you care little about.

51. Treating Engineering like a hobby. Have hobbies. Do engineering. They're not the same things. They can, and should, inspire and inform each other, but by making the false equivalency that tinkering with an idea as your hobby is the same as "doing engineering", you're likely doing very non-serious work.

52. Treating the EDS like a living room.

53. Using middle-school and high-school knowledge to execute university-level projects. Elevate your process. Don't just do things because you already know how to do them. Try new, hard things.

54. Bringing fully-solved problems to the EDS. The EDS is a place that welcomes and celebrates individuals who arrive with a passion for a certain thing. It's best if they don't "know the answer" to how to work on that thing, though. It's even better if the faculty running the EDS also don't "know the answer". It's best if the world also doesn't "know the answer". The EDS exists precisely to support individuals navigating these types of ambiguities.

55. Working on ill-conceived and non-critically-assessed class projects or capstones in the EDS. This causes noise and distraction to others who have committed to deeply consider the work they're undertaking and is not allowed in the EDS.

56. Working in the EDS on projects from another lab on campus. Unless there is a well-established collaboration between the EDS and the other lab, this type of behavior causes confusion about where the work was done. Normally, the other lab will claim credit for the work while the person working in the EDS will have drained our resources.

57. Getting "guidance" from a random professor on a project being worked on in the EDS. While this sounds innocuous, it comes down to credit and not poisoning the approach that the EDS supports. In the EDS, we encourage students to get smart without having to go to an authority figure to ask if their answer is good. In academia, there is so little success to go around that anyone who touches a project that is successful will try to claim ownership of it. Be careful with your projects and take care that you're doing your best not to accidentally expose yourself to this credit-sucking vacuum.

58. Becoming addicted to "Free" things on a university campus. These things are not actually free, and you should not expect or demand that NYUAD makes these things available for free for the rest of your life. If you want this or try to force this, you're being a petulant child. From day one on campus, your job is to learn about these resources, as well as their alternatives, and by the time you graduate, you should have clarity on how to enter the world without needing NYUAD's special permission to access tools, software, resources, or ideas. This includes software, libraries, manufacturing, guidance, discount codes, etc.

59. Becoming addicted to the NYUAD lifestyle. The "NYUAD Lifestyle" is a fiction, and students should not seek to model their future daily routine after the faculty or leadership of any university. The real world looks very different from the luxurious, low-agency, cruise ship environment of NYUAD. If you seek to continue experiencing this for the rest of your life, you are seeking to waste your NYUAD degree.

60. Becoming addicted to NYUAD's resources.

61. Becoming addicted to the UAE lifestyle. The "UAE Lifestyle" is a HUGE fiction. You shouldn't be talking about brunches and yacht parties in your 20s. You should be hungry to go out into the world to do something. If you constantly reward yourself for having done nothing, you will continue to do nothing.

62. Demanding to hear "Good Job".

63. Adhering to a world-view that worships the ownership of a super yacht. Just do crime and stop wasting everyone's time. Aside from tech-bros, the majority of super yacht owners didn't do anything too interesting in their careers, aside from extracting wealth from the earth's minerals, sketchy business deals, exploiting poor people, being annointed by a corrupt politician to distribute a required public resource, or simply doing crime. Have loftier goals.

64. Adhering to a world-view in which you believe you will become a famous footballer. Statistically improbable.

65. Producing Meaningless Proofs-of-concepts.

66. Not thinking hard enough about what to work on and why to work on it.

67. Rushing others to not think hard enough about what to work on and why to work on it. You are not a genius, and your process is likely very shallow. Allow others to work with their ideas at a sensible pace. You could likely benefit from mirroring a bit of their behavior, not the other way around.

68. Working smarter, not harder. No. No. No. Likely, you've never worked hard in your life. Finding new ways to be lazy and circumvent thinking or working is not the reason someone is investing massive amounts of money in your university education. Any roid-riddled crypto-gym-bro can "work smarter, not harder". In order for the masses of scumbag scammers to be able to say such nonsense, some humans ACTUALLY have to work hard to create new ideas. The EDS is a place for that second group of people. Scammers and scumbags should seek safe harbor elsewhere.

69. Grind-set nonsense. There are only 24 hours in a day. You will not wake up at 3am to start your day. If you fall down this rabbit hole, you're fooling yourself DEEPLY.

70. Thinking you know everything. You don't.

71. Thinking Capstone will be your time to shine. It likely won't be. Sorry.

72. Thinking you can compete on price alone. You can't, and no reasonable person should or will believe you.

73. Thinking you can produce a "low-cost" anything. You can't.

74. Valuing "correct" answers over "good" answers.

75. Uncritically accepting or promoting any idea.

76. Uncritically accepting or promoting an idea because it came from a source with vast amounts of money. (Emperor's New Clothes)

77. Choosing teammates poorly. Because you know them, room with them, went to the same high school, are from the same country, or speak the same language. Broaden your horizons. If you find yourself speaking a language other than English more often than not, you're wasting everyone's time at NYUAD.

78. Choosing teammates by application. No. No. No. Guard your baby. If you're working on something you care about, hand-pick your team. Don't rely on a random poster or a post on a social media platform as the way to build your team. Also, keep it small. An over-loaded small group is better than an under-worked army.

79. Leaving dirty dishes in a sink. This is annoying but less evil than pretending to wash a dish.

80. Pretending to wash a dish, without using soap, then putting that dish back into circulation. YOU ARE THE ACTUAL DEVIL. This is the most ridiculous thing I've discovered in my time at NYUAD. Some people have grown up never washing a dish properly, and even when shown and told how to, they revert back to some toxic idea that simply running water across a dish is equivalent to removing dirt, bacteria, and viruses using soap containing a surfactant. There are NOT a plurality of acceptable ways to wash dishes that celebrate the heritage of different cultures from around the world. There is simply either properly washing dishes or NOT properly washing dishes. If you don't completely cover all surfaces of a dish with soap, rinse it off, and allow it to air dry, you are doing it WRONG.

81. Walking into a room while screaming, laughing, or talking extremely loudly. A doorway is a threshold from one place to another. Be thoughtful, and, by default, expect you're entering a quiet space. This is a simple life rule that works universally. No one has ever been angry at a person who quietly entered a room.

82. Shouting someone's name at any point or any location in a room. C'mon, how desperately and urgently do you need to get this person's attention. Message them or coordinate with them some other way. Shouting indoors is reserved for serious reasons only (like breaking any of the rules on this list).

83. Squealing like a pig with unhinged laughter. No. No. No. I don't care if "that's the way I laugh" or "I just saw a hilarious video". The EDS is a workspace, and unhinged laughter is evidence that you and your friends are likely NOT ACTUALLY working. It's very distracting to others when you are joking around constantly. Please don't do this.

84. Clicky mechanical keyboards. Nope. No way. You can use an external keyboard, but not some mechanical noise maker. I don't care if that's "what works best for you". Use it in your private life but not in spaces shared with others. It's an EXTREMELY personal choice that forces others around you to suffer. Don't do this. It's a jerk move. Stop giving people additional reasons to hate you.

85. Having Loud Conversations in the EDS. The EDS is not a play-place. If you want to have raucous conversations, tell jokes, or laugh maniacally, please go elsewhere.

86. Having Loud Conversations in the EDS in a language people around you don't understand. Same as above, but you've taken the extra step to be even more rude by speaking in a language that no one has a chance to connect with. Please stop. This is beyond selfish.

87. Thinking that "Being loud = being right". This is the one trait that students, especially those who have studied in authoritarian or punitive educational environments or who have been on the Debate Team, mistake as a strength. Being loud is a red flag. Any reasonable listener should assume that a loud person is trying to cram an idea into their head and that the idea being crammed is not worth knowing.

88. Using the phrase "I don't know how to..."

89. Bargaining to receive full or partial credit for objectively bad work

90. Waiting to take a course before learning something

91. Worshipping humans with the title "professor"

92. Saying "I ran out of time" instead of "I didn't dedicate enough time"

93. Searching in the ocean for a child lost in the woods. This is a version of the streetlight effect.

94. Valuing academic research over industry research and development (in engineering)

95. Trying to compete, head-to-head, with industry while in academia

96. Thinking that semesters mean something to adults in the real world

97. Thinking that summer vacation is a normal thing for adults in the real world

98. Sprinting to be a unicorn with a glaringly-obvious idea

99. Tool Training Sessions / SOPs

100. Demanding money before starting. I will pay you to fill in a McDonald's job application.

101. Not realizing that life is one big interview. All your work, behaviors, opinions, and personality traits are part of a never-ending interview process. Expect others are paying attention (even when they're not), and you'll end up doing excellent work that others will find impressive.

102. Expecting praise for trying to do everything at the last minute. Sure, all-nighters may be necessary from time-to-time, but if you've wasted an entire semester, not thinking about a project, and you expect sympathy or support when trying to squeeze a semester's worth of slow-burning and authentic curiosity about a subject into one night of frantic "writing" (we all know it's AI), you're insane. Stop doing this. When others invite you to become curious and you demonstrate, across many weeks, that you are not curious, you have no right to demand that they believe you've suddenly found a deep curiosity in the final 24 hours. Your work is likely meaningless and will be discarded, as it should be.

103. Expecting others to accept your excuses.

104. Getting paid to work in the EDS. Nope. Never going to happen.

105. SIG thinking. Nope. 1 hour per week gets you nowhere. Don't bring that mindset into the EDS.

106. "Borrowing" tools from EDS

107. Using COVID-era excuses and mindsets for not working hard enough

108. Using AI-era excuses and mindsets for not working hard enough

109. Thinking a presentation or pitch deck is the hard work

110. Having weekly "check-in" meetings. You should see your teammates daily.

111. Claiming to be working on a hard problem with someone remotely (even just across campus).

112. Blaming tools for your bad choices.

113. Being busy for the sake of being busy.

114. Mistaking a weekend project for a serious project just because you've let it balloon into a monster waste of time

115. Virtual Reality, blockchain, crypto, metaverse, NFT, etc. Chasing trends is not your job.

116. Worshipping social media influencers

117. Asking time-wasting questions because you're socially anxious about silence

118. Thinking that the classroom is the singular way to gain new knowledge

119. Thinking that a textbook is the singular way to gain new knowledge

120. Thinking that a professor is the singular way to gain new knowledge

121. Thinking that a course is the singular way to gain new knowledge

122. Thinking that the value of a University Education is the courses taken

123. Demanding that the leash stays on (or is put back on). When someone takes off the "leash", don't flail about aimlessly, cause chaos, and return back, immediately, and demand they put the leash back on. Don't say things like "I work better with clear constraints". By demanding that an authority figure puts you back on the leash, you express an inability and lack of desire to figure out how to navigate off-leash. Life happens off-leash. Get used to it. Learn to love being off-leash.

124. Commuting to NYUAD. Not possible. If you commute weekly, you only spend 63% of the week on campus. If you commute daily, you only spend 23% of the week on campus. You are wasting your NYUAD education. You are making it impossible for yourself to be part of anything big or interesting at NYUAD. Your classmates never know you, and you never know them. You make it harder to be part of a group, and you likely pressure others to do your portion of the work because you're never available for an impromptu chat.

125. Treating NYUAD like high school. It's not about dances, social groups, SIGs, extra-curriculars, etc. Going beyond the university, the world needs you to be able to demonstrate deep curiosity, passion, determination, self-guidance, and critical thinking. Making teacher happy to get on the honor-roll is not the goal.

126. Chasing trends you've read about in the news or social media. It's too late. You are too late to the party.

127. Refusing to waste time on things you're passionate about.

128. Not being passionate about anything.

129. (Never thought this would need to be said) Glorifying or promoting ideas based on nationalism, ultranationalism, fascism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, blind patriotism, MGTOW, misogyny, religiosity, conservatism, racism, sexism, fanaticism, cults of personality, etc. Fix your brain, please.

130. Walking into Tarpits (Y-Combinator: Tarpit Ideas - What are Tarpit Ideas & How to Avoid Them) (Y-Combinator: Tarpit Ideas - The Sequel) (Y-Combinator: How to Get and Evaluate Startup Ideas) (Paul Graham: How to Get Startup Ideas)

131. Building first (and always). Thinking... Never. Trust me, I've been around since before maker-spaces existed, so I know what you're trying to conceptually bargain for: incremental improvement by way of rapid prototyping. I don't buy it. If someone is demanding this type of behavior from you, push back. Use your brain. Before you start making anything, be sure you have a good reason, one that an antagonistic stranger would believe, to convert a useful and valuable raw material into future garbage. Despite so many cults suggesting otherwise, there is not an impetus to build, build, build. This is one of the most convenient of all misconceptions and self-delusions, as it absolves the holder of any responsibility in explaining why they're not thinking.

132. Believing James Dyson. 5,127 prototypes. Yeah, sure.

133. Working on silly ideas handed down to you from professors. They don't know.

134. Working on silly ideas handed down to you from industry. They don't know.

135. Working on silly ideas handed down to you from government entities. They don't know.

136. Refusing to question the question.

137. Hoping that the EDS will be your magical supply room. We have nothing for you.

138. Stolen Valor. Being associated with something is not the same as owning, elevating, and helping to transform something into a success. Don't be a tourist on projects, and don't use the name of others, without permission, to promote yourself as being connected to them. Ask for introductions; it will help avoid confusion. Though it may appear to benefit you in the short-term, pretending to have done more than you actually have will come back to bite you in the long-term. If, without warning or preparation, you cannot speak deeply, clearly, and concisely about the work you've done on a project, you've likely been a tourist on that project (or just the person who made the slides for the final presentation / pitch deck).

139. Poaching contacts on LinkedIn. There is a fine line between using LinkedIn authentically and the Gen-whatever-it-currrently-is abuse of the platform to connect with anyone their well-connected friends and colleagues are connected to. This ruins the platform for everyone, especially when you use those sparse connections to imply an endorsement from the share connection from whom you've stolen a contact. Stop this.

140. Demanding to be treated like a student. If given freedom to go big in a class or project, don't take advantage of this gift by de-prioritizing a class or project relative to other commitments in your life that are KPI-centric and assignment-centric. This is the default behavior of someone who only responds to threats and deadlines. Doing so demonstrates to the party who entrusted you with freedom that, in such situations, you are incapable of self-control and require policing to be forced into a middle-school like learning environment with pre-homework, homework, post-homework, weekly quizzes, and mandatory attendance. Your behavior can ruin things for future students, and you should care about this fact.

141. Not caring that your actions have implications for others. Students, in one breath, wonder why universities have developed policies that seem adversarial to the student experience, and in the next breath ask "which class is easy and has a free trip?" Guess what? You are making it harder for others when you seek the path of least resistance and maximum personal benefit. You might feel like you've gotten away with something by exploiting all the loopholes, but likely, all you've done is make it harder for those who come after you to enjoy a decent university experience. Be a more thoughtful human, please.

142. Demanding that others entertain you. If you find yourself in situations of being bored or at a loss for how to spend your time, please don't demand that the busy people around you take time out of their lives to entertain you or plan your social calendar. Please, also, don't demand that they join you for nonsensical wastes of time just because you're bored. This holds true at university, when visiting friends, when visiting family, and when showing up as an intern at someone's offices for the summer. Be proactive in planning your own schedule. Don't be needy. Learn how to find ways to entertain yourself. If you identify as a "social" person, bear in mind that not everyone else feels the same, and it's slightly sociopathic to try to force others to adopt your level of need for constant approval and social interaction. Consider for a second whether people are just being nice to you or whether they actually want to be doing the thing; there is a non-zero probability that you are taking advantage of others' kindness, and human's patience for such things easily wears thin.

143. Being female and being the Social Media Officer. Nope. This is too cliché. If you have something to offer to a team, please do not accept the role of social media manager. Refuse it. With force.

144. Insisting that all problems need to take the form of being solvable in 5 seconds by ChatGPT.

145. Watching sports or playing video games in the EDS. Go to a social space to do these things; the EDS is a workspace and lab and does not allow students to engage in these distracting behaviors. Once one person normalizes these insidious behaviors, it spreads like the plague.

146. Compromising too readily to reach a speedy "consensus". This is a recipe for mediocrity. Although it is what students are taught in order to be "team players", it's not good advice. If the rest of your team has the goal of being done with something as soon as possible, and you have the goal of reaching a great answer, you will ALWAYS be asked to compromise quality for speed. Don't join teams like these. Take time to learn how to produce quality; you'll have the rest of your life to figure out how to do things quickly.

147. Thinking that ChatGPT-ing singularly means using ChatGPT. Just like "Google" is a verb, "ChatGPT" is also now a verb. More broadly, it means trying to cram hours of thinking in to seconds of non-thinking in order to be done with something as quickly as possible, having submitted sufficient content that a human looking at it will be incapable of effectively evaluating whether it's your authentic work or the work of artificial intelligence.