EOT review

Posted by: stak
Posted on: 2005-12-23 16:04:34

so, another term comes to an end. i think that 3B was the worst school term we've had so far. it seems like each term just gets worse and worse. anyway..

CS448 (Databases) - this course gets the award for worst-managed-course-in-the-history-of-the-universe. having two profs for a course who don't talk to each other is really annoying. nobody could understand the prof for the first half of the course, and the second-half prof refused to teach us anything that was actually used in the real world. ridiculous. combine that with assignments that only covered the first half of the material, and round it off with a super-hard midterm and final. need i say more?

SE 463 (Specs n' Reqs): this course gets the award for the most-BS-ever-packed-into-a-course. a 120 page document that cost us many sleepless nights and overall health deterioration. not cool. i think the only saving grace of this course was i learnt how to do all sorts of funky stuff in LaTeX. i hope that comes in handy sometime.

ECE 354 (OS): the other time-consuming course (the main one was SE 463). at least it was fun. writing an OS was cool, although it still didn't live up to my expectations. i think it was mostly because we were writing it for a coldfire board that we can't really use to do any neat stuff. if the OS had been for an x86-based machine, and we could run it on our home machines, it would have been much cooler. (i believe real-time uses x86 - just another reason to look forward to it). anyway, a pretty good course overall, even though i didn't learn too much non-obvious or new stuff.

ECON 101 (Microeconomics): typical larry smith course. lots of fun, very entertaining. however, since i'd done microeconomics in high school, a lot of the material was not new. but still, larry smith makes it good :)

GER 101 (German): of all the courses this term, i probably learnt the most in this one, probably because i started it off with zero knowledge of german. there were some technical issues with the online system that the course used, but other than it wasn't too bad. although the next time i take a language course, it won't be by distance ed - actually interacting with other people improves learning immensely.

SCI 206 (Physics of how things work): ah, the bird course of the term. i took this course purely out of interest (doesn't count towards my average or any of my electives), and it was cool. the course required zero work, and i skipped a few lectures too. however, a lot of the demos that the prof did in class (e.g. making icecream using liquid nitrogen and then letting us eat some) were fun. i didn't learn much, but it was pretty entertaining as far as courses go.

overall, i think the term was low on actually learning stuff, and very high on pointless, time-consuming donkeywork. i'm glad it's over, and can't wait to get started at google next term :)

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