Finals in the Mi(d)st

December 6th, 2010 • Academics

I’ve just finished a 30-minute stretch of practice finals and am luxuriating in my 15-minute break. (Might have to do this current post in stints, actually.) As I think I stated in my last post, I have three finals this week. I figured I’d give a little recap as to how classes have been going- I’d also like to write something on how I go about studying for finals because, even though I’m far from an expert, I genuinely like reading about other people’s work habits.

The first, on Wednesday the 8th (at 8:30am, wtf) is for Math302, my probability class. Strangely enough, I’m sad to see that this class is over. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to taking this at the beginning of term, and figured that it would be just another math class I’d have to attempt to have an interest in. My professor, Michael Kozdron, proved me wrong, however, and made the class consistently relevant, accessible and, dare I say it… a little bit fun! In fact, this is the only class that I’ve stayed caught up with throughout this hellish term since I genuinely liked coming to class and my grade is not so bad either. I’m hoping that the final exam will go well to give a good start to the, er… “season”. So, I’ve been motoring (slowly) through as many practice finals as I can get my paws on.

Then, on Friday the 10th, I have my Ling 101 exam with Strang Burton at the somewhat more reasonable hour of 12pm. This is another interesting class but one that’s sort of fallen by the wayside. I’ve kept up, sure, but I am by no means consistent with my studying. This is probably due to the fact that two of my very good friends in the Computer Science department hold degrees in Linguistics, so any time I need some last minute (ahem, often very last minute) help with an assignment, they’re around to help me through it. So, as a result, I have a very thorough understanding of the material but I am a bit guilty for not working on things once every couple of days like a good student. So far, our midterms have been tricky but not impossible, and the questions are often thought provoking. Arts classes are nice that way (though, in my opinion, Ling is certainly one of the most “sciencey” disciplines in the Faculty of Arts).

On Saturday the 11th (which, coincidentally, is my mom’s birthday) at 3:30pm (that’s more like it), I have my CPSC322 (Artificial Intelligence) final exam with Cristina Conati… which I am dreading. Truly dreading. This class has been the bane of my existence this term, which is both ironic and disappointing since I have been anticipating this class since coming to UBC. A student on RateMyProfessors said it best when they said the class wasn’t what they expected (“where are all the cool robots and stuff?”). Obviously I knew that we wouldn’t be programming the next league of cyborg overlords, buuuut I didn’t expect it to basically just be search algorithms, search algorithms and more search algorithms. I was sort of looking forward to stuff like neural nets, machine learning, etc. but those are saved for other courses, it seems. Anyways, I’ve fallen crazy behind in this class. Like wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because you had a horrible nightmare about this class’s final exam sort of behind. Basically, I have to thoroughly teach myself the last month of material in the next six days… especially since because I did horribly on the midterm. (The midterm that I thought that I SURELY had gotten an A on, too… sigh.)

Finally, I have my CPSC312 (Functional & Logic Programming) course with Kurt Eiselt on the 17th at 3:30pm. Have I mentioned how Kurt is my favourite prof? Well, it bears mentioning again. He is. I am somewhat behind in this class as well, but I have a programming “blitz” planned with some friends for Tuesday (so dorky) and I think that’ll make me a Prolog pro. B)

Anyways. My “end of fun time” alarm has gone off twice and I’ve been ignoring it… time to go back to writing old final exams depressingly poorly… :/

Good luck studying, everyone!

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