Oh, September… you’re early! I haven’t even gotten properly dressed yet!

September 5th, 2011 • Academics, Goals, Student Life • 2 comments

I’m going to save the seemingly obligatory “What I Did This Summer” essay for a little later and jump right in to this poor, dilapidated, ignored-for-seven-months blog. (As you can see, I’ve signed on for another year of Blogsquadding, though hopefully this will be a year with a little more regularity on the posting front.) So, to reacquaint myself (or newly acquaint myself, as it may be, with new readers that don’t want to sift through old posts).  I’ll be rounding out my fourth (out of a total of five years) at UBC as a Computer Science student in the Faculty of Science. I live on campus in the Marine Drive residence with three other girls. I have lots to say about the aforementioned, believe me.

For those so inclined and well-versed in the succinct categorization geeks are best at, my Geek Code is: GCS/S/FA d? s: a– C++++>$ w+ PS+ PE t+++ R+ !tv b+++ e>++ h– r++.

As far as this year goes, it’ll hopefully go by without too much trouble. This year’s timetables will mostly be filled with graduation requirement classes (a.k.a. not about computers and therefore of questionable interest) so that next year will be devoted to directed studies and thesis writing. Specifically, for first term I will be taking Chem 111 (I tried to weasel my way out of this one but apparently it’s absolutely necessary for my graduation, by some twisted logic), CPSC 317 (“Internet Computing”),  CPSC 344  (“Introduction to Human Computer Interaction” – essentially making computers and robots alike more friendly) and Math 221 (standard linear algebra). Nothing is really piquing my interest, apart from the HCI course, so my hope is I can just plug away at it and chip off the credits one by one.

As I mentioned above, I would like to keep up with this blog on a more regular schedule so as to bring some semblance of discipline into my internet life (since, according to some, diligence with Reddit does not count). One thing that I would like to focus on is carrying on Eric’s fine tradition of UBC 101 posts, since he’s kindly let me thieve the idea. As Eric puts it:

Each [UBC 101 post] will focus on a specific aspect about UBC that I’ve learned/observed. I hope this will help all students considering or already at UBC to get better marks, more sleep, and have a good time at university. Because we don’t pay $4000+ tuition to die before getting our degrees.

I love reading his posts (and all posts of that ilk) so hopefully mine will be useful in some form, if only to see what passes as advice these days. Ho ho!

My more immediate goal, however, will be to somehow, against all odds, get back onto a regular sleeping schedule with as much sanity intact as possible. Over the course of the summer, I became steadily more nocturnal until present day, where bedtime is considered to be 7am. (The fact that I’m writing this post at 4am should speak volumes as to how successful I’ve been, so far… ugh.)

All in all, I’m looking forward to another busy, fun, pleasant-in-retrospect-but-oh-god-the-stress school year.

The drawing, incidentally, is one of my own. You could theoretically view more of my drawings on my website; this, however, was a summer project that got usurped by the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. 

Not Much Busier, but Stress++

February 2nd, 2011 • Academics, Student Life • No comments

This morning started out comically good compared to most other mornings. Generally, I take one of the express buses along to get to school which is fine so long as you leave early enough. With a 9:00am class, “early enough” is generally around 7:30 to 7:45- an hour and a half early when you live ten minutes away! Otherwise, the bus degenerates into a teeming, sweaty cattle car where you are literally squished against the front windshield, and that’s if you get lucky and a bus actually stops.

Not the best way to start the day.

Alternatively, there is a smaller bus (no, not a “small bus”) that comes once an hour. Whenever I can, I take it since it is hilariously better than the other buses. For example, this morning I managed to catch it at around 8:00ish. The bus route moseyed along Spanish Banks, which looked out upon the pink and golden sunrise against the ocean and the North Shore mountains. The driver was a charmingly jovial elderly man that greeted each person with a little quip. I actually saw puppies gamboling along the beach. Upon arriving to school with time to spare, I grabbed breakfast from Bernoulli’s and strolled leisurely to class in the frosty sunlight with a toasty bagel in one hand and coffee in the other. Tiny birds and butterflies alighted on my shoulder and, at one point, I saw a unicorn! (Not really, but the morning was so nice that I may as well have.) The picture above, by the way, is one I took during the bus ride.

I’m thankful for the pleasantries of this morning because I’m so exhausted right now that anything more stressful would have made me collapse into a pathetic, whimpering heap of stress and bus-induced misanthropy. I’m not really significantly busier than last week, but I feel like I am getting a lot more strung out. I’m not entirely sure why- I’ve been OCD-ing out about stuff for a bit so that probably has something to do with it. I just finished my Stat200 assignment (boring, frustrating, overly simple) and after this I am going to spend the rest of the day studying for my CS320 midterm (interesting, frustrating, challenging) tomorrow. After that, though, I have the rest of the weekend to work on the 422 project JX and I are doing due on Monday. It’s a fun assignment so I’m really looking forward to having the time to focus on that and only that. My boyfriend and I might go to Vancouver Island to visit some friends of ours during the weekend too, so I’m super excited for that. Our friends live in the most idyllic part of the island imaginable and the last time I went, I saw baby deers!

Something that might be of interest to my CS-friends is a talk being given tomorrow by Nando called “On Learning”. Based on the abstract, it seems like it’ll just be a general talk on Machine Learning, which is my favourite thing ever, so I’m looking forward to it. If anyone wants to go, it’s from 3:30-4:50pm in Dempster 110. Details are here.

TODO revisited!

January 28th, 2011 • Uncategorized • 1 comment

In a semi-rare moment of flagrant voyeurism, I’m going to post up my current to-do (or as computer types call it, TODO) list spanning the next week… just in case anyone is curious about the exciting, assignment filled life of a CS major. (I’ll admit that I have a perverse interest in looking at other people’s to-do lists, haha.) Onto the fun! It’s really not as bad as it looks. (Though the formatting is pretty bad because WordPress is horrible.)

 

Trains, TODOs and a Curious Sense of Calm

January 28th, 2011 • Academics, Student Life • No comments

Just remember that when YOU openly sneeze everywhere, it only looks gross, not strangely provocative.

Today was a culmination of many events, one right after the other.  Now that they are all done, I feel a strange sense of emptiness and I’m not quite suer what to do with myself. I mean, I have lots to work on, just nothing that’s immediately due. Not that that’s a bad thing… at all.

First of all, this morning at 9:00am, I had a CS313 (Computer Hardware and Operating Systems) test- the first of four “midterms”, if you will. Now, I took this class’s precursor, CS213, last spring and TA’d it during the second term of summer as well. While I did quite well in the class, I felt like I didn’t actually learn very much, nor did I find the material particularly enthralling. So, I came into CS313 with low expectations insofar as my interest levels were concerned, but I am actually finding this class pretty enjoyable so far. Our professor, Andrew Warfield, is quite amiable and a good lecturer, which is pretty essential at nine in the morning. Also, lo and behold, the textbook is useful! In CS213, we didn’t use the textbook that much since Professor Feeley wrote a “course companion”, like a mini-textbook, to be used instead. The few glances that I took at the textbook suggested that it was a densely technical, monochrome behemoth but actually reading it now, it’s a great resource.

Anyway. I finished my test around 10 minutes early and then made the long trek (across the Dempster lobby) to my CS422 (Intelligent Systems) class, where I had time to fiddle around with the projector. A relatively large component of our final mark for this class is based on a total of three “mini-projects”- what these are is we essentially investigate applications in the field of AI that are somewhat relevant to the course material, find one that we think is cool and talk about it for three minutes. Today my project was on DepthX and its underlying algorithm SLAM, which probably no one but my nerdfriends from CS will care about. I think that my presentation went pretty well, although there minutes is an incredibly short timeframe to talk about anything meaningful.

Finally, at 3:45pm today, our second CS320 (Intermediate Algorithm Design & Analysis) assignment is due. Let me just say thank goodness for my exceedingly intelligent friend Chris Thompson and his infinite patience with me (and his willingness to collaborate). Not only did I get my assignment done on time, I actually understood (thoroughly understood, as in had the whole “aha” moment thing) every single question. It’s always a pleasure to work with intelligent people, and you really do find that two heads are better than one. I handed this assignment in about half an hour ago.

… so, like I said, strangely empty since nothing is due until mid next-week.

Actually, something non-UBC related happened that’s really neat. A friend of mine from highschool has worked at a design firm for quite awhile, and he recently contacted me saying that they needed a last minute illustration for a kids’ t-shirt for Rocky Mountaineer. Cool, right? I generally do little illustrations from time to time, but I don’t have time to be a full-fledged freelance illustrator… pretty nice when a job falls right into my lap! The best part is that there weren’t really any restrictions besides the fact that they wanted one of their trains in the illustration somewhere. Free rein to draw adorable forest creatures- I seriously could not ask for a more enjoyable job! I’m also happy to report that it sounds like both the design firm and Rocky Mountaineer are pleased with what I’ve done. This kinda stuff really makes me miss being a “professional” artist… Maybe once I get a website set up I can more actively pursue some part time illustration work.

I’d also like to make a public service announcement to everyone to remember to wash your hands! Even if you are indifferent to spreading your own pestilence around with dirty hands and not covering your mouth when you forcibly eject fluids (seriously? how hard is it to cover your goddamn mouth), you should probably care about getting yourself sick. I recently got over a nightmarish bout of stomach flu that left me hating my insides for a week- a week of school missed!- so seriously, be proactive in your hand washing. One sick day can be a nice break, but missing anything more than that is a pretty good way to screw up the rest of your semester.

I’ve also been thinking of drawing inspiration from Eric’s UBC 101 series and starting my  own set of “how to survive UBC” articles, especially now that midterm season is almost upon us (or already here, for some!). If that’s ok with Eric, of course! Hmm…

Things I Love ___day

January 14th, 2011 • Things I Love Thursday • No comments

I’ve been grumpy as all get out today due to the routine morning cattle car (i.e. a ride on pretty much any bus that leaves from 4th and Alma), a distinct lack of coffee and two hours of mind-bogglingly boring lectures. All this piled on top of my baseline crabbiness generally turns me into a miserable, seething knot of misanthropy and misery and that’s never a nice feeling. So, I wanted to cheer myself up with a list of wholly cheerful things, even though it’s not Thursday. (Sickeningly positive, I know.)

♥ Passion Pit, Passion Pit, Passion Pit! My wonderful friend Euge “reminded” me of them as I, like everyone else, had previously heard their single “Sleepyhead” on the Little Big Planet trailers. It’s like an injection of sparkles and happiness to listen to them.

♥ A clean room. Many people know that I am messy, but few people know the profound extent of my mess-making capabilities. For the past forever, my room has been akin to a disgusting badger warren. Essentially, it was just a nest of dirty clothes, unnecessary paper and old teacups. A friend wanting to come over put the fear of my secret being exposed into my heart and I tidied everything to perfection in the span of about three hours, vase of tulips and everything. This, I assure you, is a herculean feat considering how bad it was before.

♥ Chinatown. My friends Dave and Kit accompanied me to Chinatown where I spent way too much Christmas money on voodoo skull bracelets, barbecued pork buns and cute stationary (my kryptonite). I can’t wait to go back.

♥ Tumblr! is wonderful. So wonderful, and more addictive than Facebook.

♥ Things working out for the best. Last weekend involved a small family emergency, but everyone has turned out to be ok, thank God. I’m so grateful that I live close enough to my family that I can visit easily.

♥ Peppermint chocolate patties are so good.

♥ This (from my friend Brittany):

First Week

January 7th, 2011 • Academics • 1 comment

Image is Life as a Wookie by Nate Beaty

Well, another rousing Friday night in the life of a computer science student… though my quandary of boredom is not related to academic overload (for once). My boyfriend is a professor at an art school (I shall not say more, or else I’d be forced to cut out your tongue to make you guard my secrets) and is teaching a four hour class tonight that started three hours ago, with another one yet to pass. I’ve been whiling away the hours by reading about why Macs (purportedly) don’t get viruses, but I am indeed infected with my own virus (rife with irony, isn’t it… I have my fifth cold of the season) and running on about two hours’ sleep. So I figured that I’d share my misery with you guys since that is what a good blogger does.

Today marked the end of week one, and as far as classes that I really like go, I think I am batting around 2.5 out of 4. Or maybe like… 1.5. It’s sort of too soon to tell. I am enjoying CS320 with Patrice so far, mainly because he is a fantastic teacher and I really appreciate his structured teaching style. Plus the fact that he writes on the whiteboards vs. blazing through slides makes good use of my brand spankin’ new (though they’re already a bit chewed up) spiral notebooks. CS313 is ok… I mean, I got 90-something in CS213 and TA’d the material, for goodness sake, but I still feel like I don’t know anything about computer hardware/operating systems/assembly code, etc. A frustrating experience. This is also the first undergrad class our prof has ever taught, which can be quite good or very bad in my opinion. Time will tell with this one. CS422 is not bad so far… it is very project oriented, which I like. I have my fingers crossed that the material will be more interesting than 322. Finally, Stats 200 is seriously enough to put me asleep ten times over. I am bored out of my skull so far. That combined with the fact that the teacher has a very soothing, melodic voice and it’s my last class of the day usually means I am fighting for every ounce of awakeness I can.

Oh my god… Still fifty minutes left. I am so tiiiired…

First Day Back

January 4th, 2011 • Academics, Student Life • 3 comments

Well, it’s Day 0 of 2010W2. Or is it 2011S? Or the spring term? Or… I never know how to properly refer to the terms.

Anyways. My first class is CPSC 320, “Intermediate Algorithm Design and Analysis”. I’ve heard murmurings that this is the worst/hardest class of a CS student’s entire UBC career, though I am not trembling at the knees yet. I come equipped with the past assignments, notes and expertise of a handful of friends that took this last year with the same prof. I’m also imbued with a semi-manic vigor to kick this term’s ass to make up for the pathetic four months that was last term. So, Bernoulli’s bagelwich (delicious) and Starbucks coffee in hand, I’m ready.

Speaking of last term, however, my CS312 grades were finally posted. I did quite well- probably not as well as I should have, and a lot of it is due to my amazing partner who picked up a lot of my slack last term (much to my embarrassment). Also, the average was 81%, for anyone who cares. Kurt’s classes do tend to have higher averages, but I’m not complaining.

Also, I’m not sure if I’ve gone over what I’m taking this term yet. As I said before, I’ll be taking CPSC 320 (“Intermediate Algorithm Design and Analysis”) with Patrice Belleville, starting in an hour or so. Thankfully, this is my only class on Tuesdays and Thursdays! Then my Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays consist of CPSC 313 with Andrew Warfield(“Computer Hardware and Operating Systems”), STAT200 with Eugenia Yu (“Elementary Statistics for Applications”) and CPSC 422 with David Poole (“Intelligent Systems”). Not a bad term! It’ll be nice to have three computer science courses, even if they aren’t ones I was particularly looking forward to. I sure hope that 422 is better than my 322 fiasco from last term.

I’ve bought some spiral notebooks, in hopes that it will help me keep to my New Term’s plan of diligently taking notes in every class. An important part of that being, of course, that you don’t lose your notes, and what better way to do that than have a notetaking format that won’t get lost unless you actively rip out the pages. Ha. I actually have a love-hate relationship with spiral notebooks… love them for the aforementioned reason and the fact that everything is all in one place, sequentially. However, whenever I buy them, I always abandon them because (a) I’m a perfectionist bordering on OCD (in fact, I legitimately do have OCD, but that’s different than just obsessing about notes). This means that if I make a tiny mistake on a page, I have to rip out the page and start over. This generally results in sad, skinny notebooks and me getting frustrated. The other reason I give up on spiral notebooks is (b) there is no good way to insert handouts, etc. However, based on Math 302 last term, where we got a lot of handouts, I actually found it confusing to intersperse them with my handwritten lecture notes anyways.

So… my feelings on spiral notebooks. Now you have them. Enthralling, right?

I still have an hour or so before class starts. May as well do some pre-reading or… something. Have a great term everyone!

Academic Wrap-up: Winter 2010

December 23rd, 2010 • Uncategorized • 4 comments

It seems to be becoming a BlogSquad tradition to do these wrap-up things… I’ll admit, whether out of sympathy or a common suffering, I love reading them. As I’ve said about a zillion times in the past, this hasn’t been the greatest term for me. However, the grades were finally released yesterday (most of them, at least) and, despite my crappy performance, my GPA didn’t move an inch since the grades I got in the end were actually pretty good, considering. That can be good or bad, depending on how you look at it, I guess… but as long as my average is higher than 80 (the approximate requirement for UBC’s computer science grad program), I’m fairly content. (All of the grad students and faculty I’ve talked to say that so long as you meet the threshold, no one really cares about grades after that… research is what counts.) Anyways. On to the classes!

CPSC 312 – Functional and Logic Programming
Professor Kurt Eiselt
Final grade: don’t know yet
Class average: don’t know yet

As of this writing, my grade hasn’t been posted on the SSC yet. I’ll update when I find it out, but barring a failing grade or some other bizarre happenstance, I doubt whatever I get will change my opinion of the course very much.

Alas, if it were not for how much I dislike Prolog, the combination of Kurt + programming would make this my favourite class. This was a class, similar to CS322 below, that I let fall by the wayside as a sacrifice to the gods of “oh lord please let me pass” for Math 223. This means that I did start the class on sort of a bad foot, but programming classes are great for being generally easy to pick up so long as you do a lot of practice coding… and I love coding of any sort so practice was a (d-dare I say it…?) joy. For Haskell, at least. Programming with Prolog was about as enjoyable as clipping my banshee cat’s nails.

Anyways. This class had four assignments, which were, for the most part, solving a few little puzzles each. No big deal, even though I missed a couple of them. They were only work around 1.3% each. There were also two larger projects: for one, we had to program a peg game called Oska, and for the second, we had to program a game that would assist with kicking butt at Clue. The most important point is that these projects were mandatory to be done in pairs… which, I guess, can be great in certain circumstances (so I’ve heard) but in my experience, pair/group programming very, very rarely works. I won’t go into it much here, but this was probably the least enjoyable aspect of the course. So, if anyone is taking this course with Kurt and he implements the pair project again, make sure you set up some guidelines and expectations from the beginning or you could find yourself in a sticky situation. However, I am pleased to say that our Clue project won our partner and I $20! Bernoulli’s Bagels, here I come…

The way to succeed in this class is hardly a secret… program and program a LOT. If you go through all of the little algorithms in the slides (for example, the Prolog interpreter can span 50+ slides but it’s important to trace through it for real so you understand the process), and then just do all of the assignments, given practice problems and (if needed) textbook problems, you should be a-ok. Beyond this, perhaps a little bit of textbook reading is necessary for cementing some of the more theoretical ideas, but in my experience with Kurt (both as a student and a TA) he tends to focus a lot more on the practical than the theoretical, which I much prefer.

CPSC 322 – Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Professor Cristina Conati
Final grade: Above average. (Not bad at all, considering I thought I was going to fail.)
Class average: 70%

I went into this class having read the following review on RateMyProfessors: “I guess I was just disappointed that the course was not what I expected… ‘Where are the cool robots and stuff?'” “Pff,” I scoffed. I wasn’t so naive as to believe we’d get to be building hardcore robots (or even Roombas) or building neural nets… which was true enough. However, I didn’t think that CS322 would be so far removed from real-world applications as it was.

The first half of this class was studying search algorithms, divided up into uninformed search (things like depth-first search, breadth-first search… mostly review from CS221) and informed/heuristic search (like A* search, best-first search, etc.). We then got into constraint satisfaction problems, or CSPs. These are just what they sound like… solving a problem given a set of constraints, like scheduling classes. This was more interesting than just learning and tracing search algorithm and search algorithm, I’ll give you that. In fact, I would say that CSPs were my favourite part of the course, since it was easy to see how one could actually implement this and use this. We touched on a weird (and seemingly obscure) representation of problem solving using STRIPS (don’t ask) which was… weird. That sums up everything before our midterm.

Post-midterm, or pre-final depending on how you want to look at it, was three sections. First was a short section on logic (basic predicate logic like we learned in our second-year CS classes, combined with some proof strategies that would be easy if you’ve taken something like CS312). Essentially, we learned a Prolog-like language and used it to represent problems, or “worlds”. We then moved onto probability theory. I thought that this would be a piece of cake since I’d been taking Math 302 at the same time, but the way everything was presented was weird and unintuitive and it took me awhile to learn everything, even though in the end I already knew everything from 302 (which should tell you something about the presentation). This lead into stuff like Belief/Bayesian nets, which was interesting but it’s the sort of thing you could easily spend a whole class on to really get something out of it. Finally, we had a couple of lectures on decision theory. This last one, I taught myself the night before the exam so I really can’t remember enough to comment on it.

In fact, I’ll admit that I taught myself a lot of this course just for the final exam. I fell very behind in this class after my Math 223 fiasco, which was really dumb of me. The lectures followed the textbook very closely, so I falsely assumed that I could easily teach myself everything in a couple of days from the textbook alone. This might be true if the textbook were a little easier to read, but whenever I would sit down to tackle it, it felt like the sort of thing where you have to spend ten minutes processing each sentence because they are so dense and information heavy. (So, my somewhat praise-less exam is certainly coloured by this, but I stand by what I say.)

The midterm for this class was a strange experience. I studied reasonably hard (a lot of it was last minute memorization of search algorithms, etc. since a lot of this class is memorization) and came out of it feeling like I surely had gotten an A or higher. Surprise, surprise… I got my lowest grade on a midterm ever. Meaning, a bare pass. Woohoo…? To compound matters, the teaching staff decided not to post a solution guide, and instead told us to “just come to office hours” to discuss where we went wrong… where they promptly told us to “just read the book”. Hmm. In fact, the whole “omg, I did sooooo well” to “what… the… hell… THAT’S my grade?” thing was common across every student I talked to, all students who (including myself) are used to getting very good exam marks. So that’s something else to consider.

Professor Conati sticks to the book fairly closely, though I have a feeling you’d get this with any CS322 prof since (a) it’s a precursor to 422, with David Poole and (b) the textbook is written by David Poole himself. Some people like this and some people hate it; personally, I’m indifferent, though it can be useful when studying to know that everything will be in the textbook. I am grateful to Professor Conati for meeting with me when I was really sick and offering to help me in any way she could, and she is willing to give you extensions if you really need them. She also provides you four late days, to be used on any assignment you want, which I thought was great.

Anyways. Overall, I was disappointed with this course. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting into AI research ever since learning about CS. (I love things like neural nets, machine learning, etc.) This class has made me reconsider that for sure, despite the fact that I know basing your career decisions on one introductory course is sort of a silly thing to do. If you do treat this as an introductory course, for the sole purpose of building the somewhat boring foundation you need for “cool robots and stuff”, then it’s a bit more palatable. I’m going to continue on with 422 next term to see if that’ll satisfy what I thought this course would have been. I wouldn’t not recommend this class to CS students, especially because it’s a pre-req for cool stuff and you do indeed learn things that will be useful to you, but while you’re in the thick of things, it’s hard to see it as anything beyond rote memorization and tedious assignments.

Math 302 – Introduction to Probability
Professor Michael Kozdron
Final grade: In the A range
Class average: 74%

This was one of those classes that I figured would be a necessary evil. I hated probability in high school, and so went into this class with indifference and a hope that I would just get through it with a decent grade since it was a prereq to bigger and better things. In the end, I lucked out with a really good professor and material that, lo and behold, was really interesting after all.

Michael Kozdron is a visiting professor from Saskatchewan- I can’t remember why he’s here at UBC, but I think he was only here for the term. Interestingly enough, he actually did his undergrad at UBC and had taken the very class he was teaching us. This is a shame, because I really would have looked forward to taking more classes with Professor Kozdron… damn those URegina students.

Anyways, Professor Kozdron prefaced the class with saying that the textbook was optional, and that even if we did get it, he wasn’t planning on following it. This immediately raised some red flags for me… for a no-textbook arrangement like this to work well, in my experience the teacher has to have either stellar lectures, in which you can’t miss a single one, or thorough slides. Of course, having the best of both worlds would be ideal, and this is exactly what Professor Kozdron gave us. His teaching style is such that he introduces a concept intuitively at first, generally through some sort of scenario you can understand without knowing anything formal about probability. (Drawing balls out of a bucket or whatever, for example.) He’ll then work us through deriving an equation from the example, and only then will he introduce a formal formula and terminology. This really made the material relevant and easy to stay interested in, especially when he took the time to make the examples pertinent to lots of disciplines, including computer science. His lectures were engaging (even though I think he inadvertently came across as condescending at times) and he typed up in-depth handouts summarizing each lecture.

We had a weekly assignment and, while they could be tricky at times, they were certainly doable. Professor Kozdron also made himself very available for hep… I must have met with him for five assignments, and I doubt I would have done as well on them had I not taken the time to do so. Hmm… what else. The class had two midterms- the average was very high for the first one (I forget what it was… maybe 78%?) and a bit lower for the second one. The final was challenging for me because it covered material that I hadn’t studied as thoroughly, but I guess I did ok on it… my final grade was a bit lower than I’d liked, probably due to the final exam (since my course grade leading up to that was pretty high).

So… I guess I really don’t have many negative things to say about this class. I’d say this was easily my favourite class of the term (sorry CS312, but Prolog sucks) and I’m actually looking forward to taking more classes in probability now.

Ling 101 – Languages of the World
Professor Strang Burton
Final grade: In the A range
Class average: 71%

I went into this class thinking that if I didn’t end up with at least a 95%, I would have failed myself. “A 101 arts class, come on.” However, I forgot that 100-level classes can actually be the most challenging, if not for content then for the sheer breadth of information one must learn in an introductory class. So, maybe in the end with two dear linguistics major friends helping me and a year of university under my belt, I should have gotten that 95%, but for an arts elective class that “doesn’t really matter” for my degree, I’m happy with my grade.

I’d say that the breakdown of this class was probably 80% phonology and the rest a little bit of syntax. (At least I think that’s right… I always get these ling disciplines confused.) We touched on language/sound systems for Hawaiian, German, English (naturally), Mandarin and a language called Halq’emeylem (which is a Salish language from around BC), so some of the material was about comparing and contrasting sound systems and how they arise. A good portion of the class was simply learning the IPA piece by piece and transcribing English words phonetically. The assignments, midterms and finals all followed this format quite closely. So long as you know the IPA (and can quickly scribble out a vowel chart after your exam starts) you’ve already achieved an easy C+ on a test.

I guess there’s not much that I can say about this course… Professor Burton is a really nice guy and has a knack for making lectures very interesting. I wouldn’t call him a super difficult professor insofar as testing and stuff goes, but his questions can often be a bit tricky and require a bit of thinking beyond the obvious answer. (“Pick the best answer when all are possibly right” sort of thing, for example.) I found the tutorials pretty boring and arduous and they felt a bit like high school all over again (I guess I’m not used to classes with lockers, dick drawings on the wall and seventeen year olds giggling anymore… such a curmudgeon) and could’ve done without them, even though they were unfortunately mandatory, as was the 9% participation mark (umm…). However, those things just come with the territory of taking a first year class and overall, it was pretty good.

Math 223 – Linear Algebra (Honours)
Professor Hendryk Pfeiffer
Final grade: W
Class average: Not sure. (Since I withdrew, the average doesn’t show up on my transcript.)

As I’ve detailed in other posts, I was super into taking this class since, at the time, I was keen on doing an honours computer science degree… which didn’t pan out well at all. This class was a terrible experience in feeling like a dumb bumpkin, though I guess I should thank it for forcing me to re-evaluate exactly why I wanted an honors degree (protip: I didn’t, really).

I wouldn’t consider myself terrible at math or anything, but I wouldn’t say that I am super intuitive at it and I don’t have a long history of super duper IB or honors math or anything. (Cripes, the last time I took math before last year was like… five years before that.) All I can say is thank God I learned how to do proofs in computer science because that’s all this class was… the assignments, the tests, that’s it. I actually did well on the assignments for the most part since I think they were marked quite leniently, and I wish I could say the same for the midterm but… I really, really can’t. I bombed that thing. With a capital B.

So… considering I only did half the course (I had to withdraw because the stress of it was both compounding some pre-existing health disasters I had at the time and screwing up my other classes majorly), am not amazing at math in the first place and am not particularly keen on proofs, take my advice with a grain of salt. But, unless you’re super duper into math or you really have no other choice but to take this class for a pre-req for something, go with Math 221. Someone actually advised me of this beforehand and I waved them off saying that I liked a challenge but… this is less of a challenge and more of a masochistic, self-imprisonment kind of deal. And that’s only a little bit of hyperbole.

Things I love… Monday?

December 20th, 2010 • Uncategorized • 2 comments

I am a bit ashamed that I’m already behind on my second Things I Love Thursday post, but a Friday exam and a Saturday full of desperate house-cleaning and a dinner party kept me firmly away from the internet… torture indeed for a computer science student. However, the upside is that I have even more lovely things to coo over:

♥ For Christmas, my boyfriend took me to get professional photos taken of my golden retriever. I love that dog more than anything in the whole world (in fact, I even have his name tattooed on my foot) and this was the best Christmas gift I could have asked for. :) I was lucky to have my incredibly talented friend Shane Oosterhoff work his magic behind the camera, and I seriously can’t wait to see how they turned out.

♥ My sweet better half also got me all sorts of wonderful gifts, including a monster hat and an adorable panda dayplanner for the new year! (I have a serious fetish for stationary, particularly the cute stuff.) The best part was that I got to give him his gifts as well, which he loved.

♥ A bunch of friends came over tonight to play boardgames and stuff ourselves with way too many desserts. I finally made a lemon meringue pie that didn’t fall to pieces. AND Cranium is the most fun game I have ever played.

♥ My kitten is growing into a lanky, awkward teenager cat and it’s adorable. He is truly my familiar- he stays up until 5am with me, drinking my tea and purring in my lap and keeping me company while I draw.

♥ Speaking of that, I’ve been drawing a whole lot again and it feels wonderful. (I was a “professional artist” (in the sense that I made a fair bit of money from selling paintings) for many years but art school ruined my love of painting, until now). I’m going to be setting up my website soon so then I can share it all. :)

♥ Did I mention that FINALS ARE DONE? Today marks my second full day of freedom and thank God for that, is all I can say.

♥ My boyfriend is going to Alberta for Christmas which sucks, but on the bright side, I am going to park myself in front of his enormous iMac computer and play videogames and draw nonstop. I am only going to move for tea and possibly pie and go to bed at 8am and not wake up until 4pm and that is a promise.

♥ … starting on Monday, I guess, since I am going to see Kid Koala at 8pm tonight (Monday) at the Biltmore. I’ll probably be exhausted but it should be fun.

Happy holidays everyone! I know the very last of you will be finishing up your exams on Tuesday, I think, so good luck. And for the rest of you that are already done, enjoy your freedom!

Doomed.

December 10th, 2010 • Uncategorized • 5 comments

Have you ever had the feeling, while looking at the learning goals and final review materials for a class, that you’re totally, unequivocally screwed?

… I didn’t, until now. There is a very real possibility I’m going to fail my CS322 exam tomorrow and I feel horrible. :( :( :(