Week 0 down, 12 to go!
September 13th, 2010 • Uncategorized
When you think of it as only twelve weeks, it really doesn’t seem that long… good or bad, depending on your perspective, I guess.
Anyways! The first pseudo-week is over, and it has been a hectic one for me. I’ve never had to shuffle around so many classes after they’ve started before, which is a somewhat nerve wracking experience. I just count myself lucky that, for once, I didn’t indulge my keener tendencies by buying all my textbooks a month early. Turns out that one of my classes doesn’t even use a textbook… score! On the other hand, I ordered my Math 223 textbook a week and a half ago and I have no idea where it is. Considering that I have reading to do this weekend and an assignment to do on Friday, it isn’t the best of situations.
I didn’t end up going to Imagine Day (even though all UBC students are expected to go, I hear) and instead spent the day in a dentist’s chair getting my teeth drilled. When choosing between a campus full of thousands of shrieking students, and the combination anesthetic needles and fluoride (ew)…. well, it’s a bit of a toss-up. What I did manage to make it to, however, was the Computer Science welcome thing which involved putting some faces to very familiar faculty names and receiving a Student Service Award! And then burgers were had. I didn’t see too many familiar faces there, unfortunately, apart from the ones I dragged along with me, but I’m sure we’ll all run into each other soon.
Classes so far have been both good and bad. My honors math class that I was so worried about seems like it will be promising- I really like my professor’s teaching style so far, and that makes such a huge difference. (More so in math than other subjects, I find.) And who would have thought that getting up at 6:45am to make the 9:00am class time is pretty enjoyable once you get into the swing of it. Coming from a chronic night owl, this is a huge deal. In fact, today is Sunday and I actually got up at 8:00am without an alarm. What have I become!
I’m also still registered in CS 312 and CS 322. 312 is a functional programming class with Kurt Eiselt, who is only my favourite prof in the whole wide world (with the exception of another computer science prof, Kim Voll). Professor Eiselt actually taught CS111, which was the class that started my love affair with computer science so it is super fun to have him again. Plus, come on… a class where your sole purpose is to learn two new programming languages? So awesome. CS322 is an introductory class to artificial intelligence. Because it is a class where you learn mainly the building blocks of a discipline (with very little programming) it seems like it could be a little dry, but intro classes are a necessary evil I guess.
One class that I ended up dropping was Stat 200… the prof was nice enough, but her accent was so thick that I found I spent most of my time trying to decipher what she was saying rather than paying attention. The other class I dropped was Cogs 200, much to my chagrin. I was really looking forward to this class too, but 40% of your final grade was based on groupwork, and I very much dislike having that much of my grade put into the hands of others. 10% specifically was to be derived from the performance of a group we were assigned to in a “quiz show” thing- basically 10% of your mark is calculated from something that you only participate in for one day. I think that’s absolutely unfair and, as such, I switched that class over for Ling 101 with Professor Burton to fulfill an arts requirement (and hopefully have another easy-ish course.)
On another note… I hate the geography building. Way to be precisely 12 minutes away (no matter how fast I walk, seemingly) from every other class I have. Ugh.
