Liberal Arts Major
Danish 102
Summary of Class: Danish 101 turned out to be as easy as expected, primarily because I already knew the majority of the Danish used and more and was therefore easily capable of filling in the blanks. It was also a night class and whenever I didn't feel like going... I didn't.
Then I got to this black hole, which had a different professor, was a morning class, and was between one and two hours before any of my other classes. Oh, and unlike the biweekly Danish 101, this one was five times a week. This wasn't so bad, I thought while registering for it like a chump, as I could just skip it whenever I didn't feel like getting out of bed at 7 AM.
Turns out attendance was 20% of the grade. Works cannot express how truly awesome that made this class. Needless to say, I got like an 86% on that particular component. Which wouldn't have been all that bad, except in addition to the insane attendance requirement, the class had the worst grade-assignment curve I have thus far encountered: 99-100% was a 4.0, 97-98% a 3.9, and then it got progressively less painful/more irrelevant. Even if I had managed to get 100% on everything (extremely unlikely in a world where spelling counts), the highest score I could have gotten without actually going to class every day (i.e. realistically) was a 3.9.
This is Danish 102. Aren't 101-103 classes supposed to cushion your GPA?
Summary of Grade: 3.8
Summary of Summary: Ugh.
Intermediate Macroeconomics
Summary of Class: I came into this class expecting a low-ish grade based on the experiences of a classmate of mine. After getting 100% on the first test, I revised that expectation to a 4.0.
I really should have waited for the second test before making such wild predictions. I decided to be completely retarded that day (example: one question from the short answer section, worth 3%, I marked wrong and then explained, in parenthesis beside it, exactly why I was wrong) and got a 93%. This wasn't the end of the world, however, because a 93% on the last test would have given me a 4.0 anyway.
That last test was a complete clusterfuck, but apparently it was more of a clusterfuck than I had anticipated. I took the entire two-hour period to do it because I couldn't remember fine details like what depreciation is or how arbitrage works or what, exactly, the Marshall-Lerner condition is. Still, I thought I should have guessed my way into a 90-93%.
It turns out I got an 82%.
Summary of Grade: 3.7
Summary of Summary: I need to seriously improve my guessing skills.
Introduction to Linguistics
Summary of Class: It should come to nobody's surprise I knew the vast majority of the content of this class (with the exception of the worthless trivia I will never and have never cared about, e.g. Gricean maxims for communication). It should also come to nobody's surprise that, despite the broad array of knowledge at my disposal, I still managed to make incredibly stupid mistakes everywhere, from completely ignoring the existence of highly-inflected languages (like, say, Romanian) to mistaking the phonetic transcriptions of words in predictably stupid ways (e.g. smother vs. smoother, <w> for /w/ - like "wrapped" - and so on).
By the time I got to the final, I needed a 57/60 to get a 4.0 (95%). What I actually managed was a 56/60, which got me a 94.64%/tears of failure instead.
Summary of Grade: 3.9
Summary of Summary: I'm actually a linguistics major.
Linear Algebra
Summary of Class: Joke class.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: Turns out I can still do addition!
That gave me a 3.83 on the quarter and a 3.87 overall, which is still in magna cum laude contention but just barely. It's also unfortunate that Intermediate Macroeconomics is a relevant grade for grad school, but I intend to take Advanced Macroeconomics as well and maybe I'll get a better grade in that (haha, oh me!).
Next quarter I have to take Danish 103, which is just as bad as Danish 102 for all the same reasons, and I'm only taking 14 credits as of this moment so it looks like the highest reasonable grade is a 3.928, which isn't enough to wash away the inadequacy and incompetence of this quarter and I won't get it anyway because the other two classes I'm taking are English (lovin' those graduation requirements) and Computer Science I (where my imminent failure should surprise no one).
tl;dr: =(
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Message last edited by Ogordemir99 on 3/23/2010 at 06:24:30 AM
Liberal Arts Major
Senior advanced mathematics/DSP. Win class. Theory went well with Senior Design.
Grade: 4.0
Senior Design
Designing and building a robotic arm controlled using bio-potentials in the arm muscles. Project website: http://uncbme.com/RobotChicken/
Grade: 4.0
Electronics I
Electronics.... Gay intro class that I didn't give enough of a fuck about. Woops.
Grade: 3.0
Microcontrollers
Probably the most useful class I've taken in college. Learned to program the PIC18F4520 microprocessor in Assembly and C.
Grade: 4.0
iGem Research
Genetics research project that we fucked up pretty badly and failed to enter into the competition b/c we suck. We made a bacteria that glowed in the presence of Arsenic using YFP and I made a circuit that measured the amount of light given off to make a crude biological arsenic detector.
Grade: 4.0 lol
Engineering Mathematics
Uh....I'm not really sure what I did in this 1 hour class aside from showing up and like 3-4 Matlab hw assignements....
Grade: 4.0
Independent Research
I never signed up for this 1 hour class. I never went to a single class. I have no idea wtf this was.
Grade: 4.0
---
Alestra77: you seem to have glossed over the fact that you treat all women like prostitutes
Alestra77: "k, so, I bought you coffee... when do I get my handjob?"
Goddammit, I hate you so much. ~ Kenri to me (3 times)
Alestra77: who the fuck is porky
Editor
I never signed up for this 1 hour class. I never went to a single class. I have no idea wtf this was.
Grade: 4.0
...
I want to go to your college. <_<
---
"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic
Liberal Arts Major
:D
---
Alestra77: you seem to have glossed over the fact that you treat all women like prostitutes
Alestra77: "k, so, I bought you coffee... when do I get my handjob?"
Goddammit, I hate you so much. ~ Kenri to me (3 times)
Alestra77: who the fuck is porky
Liberal Arts Major
I never signed up for this 1 hour class. I never went to a single class. I have no idea wtf this was.
Grade: 4.0
Maybe it was linked to senior design or something.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
Danish 101
Summary of Class: As described above, this was pretty easy. The instructor was a big fan of the immersion method and consequently spoke primarily in Danish, which was quite a shock the first day when she bounded into the room and started asking us our names in Danish ("Hvad hedder du?" "Jeg hedder..."). This class also got me to re-examine the distribution of /i/, /e/, /I/, /V/, and /o/ in Danish because of how differently the instructor pronounced everything vis-a-vis what I was expecting (and of course, the 102-103 guy pronounces things still differently).
I got a 98.5%.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: Maybe after Arabic I should have tested out of my other language requirement.
Intermediate Microeconomics
Summary of Class: I wasn't at all thrilled to be taking this instead of/not alongside intermediate macroeconomics this quarter, but this is a prerequisite for macro for no good reason whatsoever. Anyway, the guy teaching this decided we all needed to brush up on our multivariable calculus despite the fact that the class only listed calculus I as a prerequisite and half the class didn't know what a partial derivative is, let alone Lagrange multipliers.
That said, the class was pretty formulaic and simple, except formulaic and simple things are way beyond me and I got a number of terrible, terrible grades (e.g. 37/60) because of my inability to do complex algebraic operations like multiplying both sides of an equation by the same quantity. That said, the class was curved favorably (nobody knew anything) so my incompetence didn't totally destroy me as it did in intermediate macroeconomics.
Summary of Grade: 3.9
Summary of Summary: 7th grade math is hard.
Elementary Music Theory
Summary of Class: Throughout the course of my high school life I managed to avoid doing any performing arts hogwash, in part because I spent the previous three years playing the flute in band and I both suck(ed) at it and was the only male with that particular instrument, so, you know. Screw that noise. (Oh God the noise.) Unfortunately, the UW's admission requirements include a semester of this sort of thing.
My plan was to point out that I'd been playing piano for roughly a decade, which worked for my freshman application, but didn't work for my transfer for some reason (or so I thought) and I was required to take a music, art, theater, or similar class within the year. Since I only had 15 credits I opted to take this two-credit waste of time, and I did fairly poorly on account of my underlying stupidity combined with my disinterest.
Two months into the quarter I found out my requirement had been fulfilled after all and I had taken this class for nothing.
Summary of Grade: 3.4
Summary of Summary: Who cares?
Masterpieces of Scandinavian Literature
Summary of Class: I originally didn't intend to take this doozy of a class; I had wanted to take the introductory linguistics class for majors (as opposed to the one I ended up taking, which was for scrubs), but it was full, and since I didn't want to take only 12 credits and I was/am considering a minor in Scandinavian studies, I jumped into the first potentially-non-terrible open class at a convenient time. Also, I got a writing credit (you need two)(ugh), which was a bonus I guess.
The class itself actually wasn't bad. Most of the reading was uninteresting to me, but I hadn't read any fiction for over a year beforehand so maybe I just don't care for it. The most amusing part of the class was the final paper, which I wrote twice: the first time with a premise so senselessly bad I had to totally scrap the idea, and the second time with a premise that was merely stupid. Nobody pointed this out in the [graded] peer review session, though I did learn such gems as "don't use contractions in academic writing" and "don't have an introduction". Humanities majors, man.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: Peer review is the best thing ever.
That left me with a 3.9 over all and on the quarter. Then this quarter happened.
tl;dr: eh
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Message last edited by Ogordemir99 on 3/24/2010 at 11:45:39 PM
Editor
at first I was like
o_-
but then
I lol'd
---
"There's a pony in the shop, but don't buy it. It might do something unfortunate to you." ~from the first Summoner's Seal topic
Liberal Arts Major
Yay!
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
Here are all the homework specifications.
HW 1: 9/10
Reason: So apparently I was supposed to eliminate everything redundant, which was kind of obvious from the specification but whatever. Instead I made a method for each verse, as per the specification, and one for each line, then combined the two. The malt line always precedes the house that jack built line, though, so woops. Also, I tend to align parts of my code because I'm special, so when I had to call a bunch of functions/methods/fuck Java one after the other I made sure all the () lined up, like
methodOneIsLong ();
methodTwoIsnt ();
only closer since it's not a pitiful HTML approximation. The grader had this to say: "I see how you're trying to line up the (); part of the methods, but it is pretty unnecessary, I've never seen that before." You heard it here first, folks - I'm a pioneer.
HW 2: 16/16
Reason: The only comment was made on how I fulfilled the requirement that the ASCII doodle of our own design use at least one for loop or method - which was to copy/paste main into a method and call it a day. Apparently this is frowned upon. My doodle itself was amazing, like all my artwork: I tried to draw a star, failed, then added a bar in the middle and got a sailboat on a table instead. It should be framed and cherished forever.
HW 3: 19/20
Reason: The "subfigures" (i.e. circles) in the specification always had their heights equal to their widths, but the method I wrote asked for each parameter and allowed for their values to be different, which got a point marked off. I'm not sure what I should be learning here. Is the lesson that the code we write ought to be as rigid and narrow as possible? I guess so. I also made another mistake due to my unfamiliarity with the graphics object, but it didn't cost me any points - namely, I had the method draw a bunch of redundant circles, because when writing the code it didn't occur to me that the fillOval method just fills the space with colors stacked by z-index and if everything's the same color you're just wasting cycles. I'll pretend I missed a point for that instead of the stupid parameters thing. Also, apparently my comments are supposed to explain what the parameters are. What, is "this method [drawSubfigures] draws some circles" not exhaustive enough? Pfft.
HW 4: 19/20
Reason: This one was really a clusterfuck. I wrote it up as quickly as I could and submitted it without checking if it calculated every possibility correctly. It turns out it didn't: I wasn't paying any attention to how grades like 30/20 should be processed in the assignments section and so they weren't done correctly. I still don't know how they wanted us to handle them; I don't really care. This week's nuggets of wisdom I will ignore include "don't put carriage returns between if and elseif statements" and "don't declare new variables just for typecasting", although in the later case I only do it so I can keep track of things and I'll remove the variables before submitting the assignment. I forgot to this time because, uh, I didn't care enough.
HW 5: 16/20
Reason: In continuing the proud tradition I set after literally missing my midterm in this class, I was initially confronted with a 17/20 on this assignment because: (1) my work-around for the vagueness of the specification with respect to the placement of the fucking haiku was apparently a "hack" and therefore unsatisfactory; (2) I apparently don't know how to use while loops, as I added a line of code within the loop that would only execute at the loop's termination instead of placing it outside the loop (which I did to complete an if-else tree for aesthetic reasons); and (3) I didn't comment enough apparently. After a long and somewhat horrifying e-mail conversation with the grader I determined I should submit the assignment for a regrade over (1) and (2) (I considered the comments issue a lost cause); lucky for me, the professor, who doesn't really like me, was the one who caught the regrade, so in addition to an immediate dismissal of my arguments I got marked down another point for - I kid you not - using one-letter names for Scanner and Random object variables, which is apparently not good style. So I got marked down 20% for the computer science equivalent of penmanship. The kicker? The code actually had a fairly humorous error that I only caught after I turned it in and the due date passed: namely, when I substituted a constant for the argument in random.nextInt (arg), I forgot to subtract one, so the random number generator was picking a number between 1 and max + 1 instead of the right range. Neither of the graders caught this, possibly because variable names are a more important issue than whether or not the code actually functions. Mmm, kindergarten.
HW 6: 20/20
Reason: Nothing to see here folks.
HW 7: 17/20
Reason: I missed a point because I'm unfortunately still not re-accustomed, after years of "data types? who needs those?" PHP, to how integers work, so I used an if/else tree when I could have just divided by 2. Woops. I then got marked down twice for a single problem, namely, my main () was apparently not a concise summary. To this day I still don't know how the fuck these people want us to treat main: on one hand they tell us it should basically do nothing, on the other hand they want it to do things. Then they mark you down for not guessing correctly. This, folks, is computer science for you.
HW 8: 20/20
Reason: I'm not sure anyone even looked at this code.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Message last edited by Ogordemir99 on 7/21/2010 at 03:56:19 PM
DSB Moderator
---
"Critics of lemmings tend to overlook how awesome it is to run off of tall things."
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
---
Alestra77: you seem to have glossed over the fact that you treat all women like prostitutes
Alestra77: "k, so, I bought you coffee... when do I get my handjob?"
Goddammit, I hate you so much. ~ Kenri to me (3 times)
Alestra77: who the fuck is porky
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
---
Alestra77: you seem to have glossed over the fact that you treat all women like prostitutes
Alestra77: "k, so, I bought you coffee... when do I get my handjob?"
Goddammit, I hate you so much. ~ Kenri to me (3 times)
Alestra77: who the fuck is porky
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
Danish 103
Summary of Class: Basically a repeat of Danish 102, except attendance was weighted half as enthusiastically (possibly in response to student complaints) so I got back .1 of the .2 it more or less single-handedly ate out of my grade the previous quarter.
Summary of Grade: 3.9
Summary of Summary: There's a good chance attendance is going to be the reason I don't get a 4.0 average in classes toward my major in linguistics, in which case there will be facepalming.
Intermediate Writing: Inventing Comedy
Summary of Class: Much like that music class I wouldn't have taken if it weren't for The Man, this class was taken to fulfill an arbitrary general education requirement for a composition class that was put into place alongside the "two writing classes" requirement because the people responsible for general education requirements have no idea what they're doing and/or are unaware of life outside their cloistered university existence.
I chose this particular English class for two reasons: first, I was anticipating being able to force my way into a then-full math class ("math reasoning", a requirement for the math and stats majors that I had failed to get into the quarter before), which I didn't end up achieving, and this class was well-scheduled vis-a-vis the other; and second, I figured, English class or not, a class theme like "inventing comedy" couldn't be atrocious. Right?
If I had been less stupid I would have gotten a syllabus and subsequently would have rethought this line of reasoning. It turns out attendance was worth 30% of the grade (later amended to 35% because hey, why not?), plus an added twist: the base grade for attendance would be 3.5, and you would lose .1 for each important event you missed and gain a number of points between 0 and .5 depending on, say, the political disposition toward unicycles of Taiwanese post office clerks. (I didn't miss anything super important so I got a 3.5.)
Moreover, the grading of written work was fairly undesirable as well; for example, I got a 3.7 on the first paper - and that was the highest grade given for that assignment. I then got a 3.9 (for a paper on Jerry Seinfeld no less) and a 3.6 (for another paper on Jerry Seinfeld no less). The papers themselves were unpleasant to write; the term "inventing" in the class theme was an explicit reference to a particular rendition of poststructuralist rhetorical theory, and the class was loaded to the brim with the sort of intellectual attitude typical of the postmodern literary theory crowd. The TA was a PhD student in English rhetoric, so at least that fit.
Summary of Grade: 3.7
Summary of Summary: Attendance strikes again, but even if it hadn't I would have lost out to grading standards unfavorable to coasting anyway. Oh and fuck general education requirements.
Computer Programming I
Summary of Class: My failure here was eminently predictable, though the particular mode I happened to fail in was a surprise. There were two things that applied significant negative pressure on my grade in this class:
1. Homework grading policies. This was what I figured would do me in originally, having been vicariously exposed to the arbitrariness of the grading practices of this class in the past and knowing how little effort/interest I would put into all of my work. I detailed all my homework grades and the significant comments given for each of them above, but I think this example best sums it up: my worst assignment, a 16/20, was graded by my section TA and then regraded at my request by the professor - both of which failed to see the only actual error in the code.
2. I missed the midterm. By which I mean, I thought it was an hour later than it actually was and, accordingly, showed up just as the TAs were leaving the room with a big box full of completed tests. Woops! The professor, in hearing that a simple mistake had been made by a 3.88 student with an A on all his homework assignments, told me he basically didn't care, and advised me that: "One reason to attend lecture would have been that it would have helped you remember the time of the midterm." (He was unwilling to elaborate when I pointed out that would have been the only reason.)
The event with the midterm began a long and utterly pointless inquiry into ways of rectifying the situation: a circuitous affair that went through two advising offices and the ombudsman to conclude with "lol no". (Though the ombudsman, who was very nice despite reading only portions of my e-mails and completely forgetting about me multiple times, assured me the professor had very good reasons for his decision! Reasons too good to mention, of course.) Luckily, I realized early that plan was fruitless and switched the grading of the class to pass/fail to protect my GPA - which due to the timing cost me $20, why not?
I did end up passing (with a 76.x% - 75% being passing) on the back of my post-11%-curve 100% on the final. Of course, the final had its own quirks, including an arbitrary 8% deduction for an alternate (correct) answer and a 4% deduction because the grader(s) had some trouble distinguishing between a 10 and a 6... that they wrote.
That's the computer science department, folks.
Summary of Grade: Satisfactory (2.4)
Summary of Summary: I now have to take Computer Programming II (and not miss the midterm) in order to gain leverage with the statistics department, which wants me to convert this into a numbered grade and destroy my GPA. I would have taken CPII to begin with, but the statistics department wanted CPI specifically and I figured it would be easier. Yup.
Danish 490: Supervised Reading
Summary of Class: Part of the fallout from changing from a graded to a pass/fail scale in computer science was that I no longer had enough credits to make the Dean's List, which would have sucked. Luckily I was fairly comfortable with my Danish TA and my old Masterpieces of Scandinavian Literature professor, who were willing to set up a course of independent study three or so weeks before finals. Signing up for it took another $20 but, hey, I'm made of money.
The "class" itself was largely of my own construction: I was to read Problema I of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling in Danish (which I found online here) and then write a short (five-ish pages) paper about it, quoting from the source in Danish. After slowly maneuvering my way through the twisted maze of Kierkegaard's unfriendly writing style I figured I could just write the whole paper in Danish instead. Five pages of extremely dubious analysis and blatantly circular logic later (plus some proofreading by my TA because it turns out I don't actually know Danish), I had my only 4.0 of the quarter.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: Get like me.
That was a 3.85 on the quarter with a 3.87 overall. Unfortunately now that I'm a math major my GPA has nowhere to go but down; it's been a good run with this "more than a 3.5" stuff, but I'm pretty much doomed. Especially if I do end up converting Computer Programming to an actual grade and losing >= .05 GPA points.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Message last edited by Ogordemir99 on 7/21/2010 at 05:25:36 PM
Liberal Arts Major
Electronics II
Digital electronics. Labs on average took about 10 hours to complete. This is because most were 5 hours but a few took over 20. Class itself focused on pre-microcontroller digital electronic circuits (chips, ADCs, DACs, timers, sensors, etc). 2 major projects. Digital lock, which is the infamous electronics II project where you build a lock using no memory chips or processors (otherwise I could make one in about an hour) and an interface to open it with. Most use a gay 3 switch and enter button scheme b/c they're dumbasses and unless you also use a timing scheme, it can be broken in a few minutes. I used an encoder, 6 buttons, and timing between each sequence, giving it 8640 possible combinations assuming you knew the time between each entry. Needless to say, no one cracked it. http://www.unc.edu/~pchtch90/lock.php Second project was designing a building a filter. My partner and I made a bandpass filter (attenuates frequencies outside a specific range) that passed 120kHz-120.5kHz (tiny roll-off) which was pretty win.
Grade: 4.0
Systems and Signals
Digital signal processing. Math/programming used to filter out noise and shit in incoming signals.
Grade: 4.0
Instrumentation
Medical instrument reverse engineering focusing on circuitry, FDA regulations about making medical devices, visiting different clinics (surgery, artificial implants, EMS) and learning about their devices
Grade: Well, my prof wanted to retire for the last 3 years but they kept forcing him to teach so after the last day of classes he left for China. He never turned in grades or anything.... He's not coming back. It just says "P" w/e that means.
Senior Design II
We designed an autonomous blimp that navigates using ultrasound sensors. I also made a touch screen remote for it when in manual mode. It was godlike. When we brought it in for the presentation, we put it in-between some tables so air conditioning drafts wouldn't make it fly away while it was off. I forgot to turn it off though, so during our introduction, it spun around, got the layout of the room, rose up out of the hole, found the door, and flew out of the room. It was a great moment in my life.
Grade: 4.0
Robotic Motion Planning Algorithms
Class where I learned to program what the blimp did above.
Grade: 4.0
---
Alestra77: you seem to have glossed over the fact that you treat all women like prostitutes
Alestra77: "k, so, I bought you coffee... when do I get my handjob?"
Goddammit, I hate you so much. ~ Kenri to me (3 times)
Alestra77: who the fuck is porky
Liberal Arts Major
It probably means "pass" although I guess it could mean in progress. You could check UNC's handbook or catalog or something.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
A Term - Phonetics
Summary of Class: I didn't expect much out of class as phonetics isn't a really deep topic on the introductory level and is basically all memorization. We did a lot of extra work with acoustic phonetics - more than I expected - either because there's really not much else you could do in a class like this (except perhaps look at the phonetic inventories of various languages) or because it happened to be adjacent to the TA's doctoral research area. Suffice it to say, I saw a lot of spectrograms.
Otherwise, we were assigned the task of exploring the phonetics and phonology of a language of our choosing that we weren't fluent in and writing a paper. We didn't go out and record any native speakers (although at least one person decided to do so just for kicks) because there wasn't enough time, according to the TA. I chose Standard Arabic, which afforded me plenty of space to complain about the annoying disagreements among phoneticians on the topic: disagreements facilitated by the fact that there's no such thing as "Standard Arabic Phonology" due to the severe degree of dialectical fragmentation. This was probably the most worthwhile thing I did in the A Term.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: Phonetics is easy. News at eleven.
A Term - Syntax
Summary of class: Although in theory I like syntax more than phonetics, which I find pretty underwhelming, this class was completely unremarkable with the exception of the peculiar quirks of the TA.
For starters, her English was less than perfect when it came to idioms, so I missed some points for [unwisely] using them in my examples. Second, she took the sort of hands-on approach to teaching I would like to see less of, trying to take control of our notes. Once she was reading over my shoulder and, displeased with my use of shorthand for a syntax tree, appropriated my pencil and traced out what she would have wanted it to look like. That was pretty disconcerting.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: My notes are aggressively abridged, and I'd like to keep them that way.
B Term - Advanced Macroeconomics
Summary of Class: This one was really frustrating. As it was my last class, representing roughly ten months of school, I had checked out before it even started. Meanwhile I was agonizing over my grades and the fact that this class would actually mean something to graduate schools (as the material is near graduate level). So I was a nervous wreck.
That came into play with the midterm. I don't know what it is about midterms, but I frequently fail them or just plain do terribly. Introduction to Logic, two midterms in Probability & Statistics, Intermediate Microeconomics, Differential Equations, and of course Computer Programming: midterms are my mortal enemy. And when it came time to take this one, I was totally freaking out.
The problem was that our practice material consisted of the two previous midterms the professor had given, which I thought were pretty easy but while doing them generated some random results that looked off to me (despite the fact that they weren't), so my expectations for the midterm were set firmly in the realm of "deceptively simple".
Then I got to taking the test and encountered what was to me an ambiguous expression ("classical dichotomy") in the very first part of the first question. It was all downhill from there. I spent at least an hour on that question alone, thinking every single aspect to death - though, curiously, never jotting down any notes to keep track of my lines of thought, because I'm retarded. Then I got to the part where I had to do actual math and I was boned. It's hard to do algebra when you're vividly imagining the consequences of your imminent inevitable failure.
All told, I made the following mistakes purely based on my inability to handle day to day life:
- I ignored the idea of marginal rates of substitution (and marginal anything really) on an IS-LM-AS model (i.e. macro 101) and declared that capital and labor were perfect substitutes in a homogeneous production function with constant returns to scale. This lead me to draw exactly the opposite conclusion for the results of an adverse capital shock. (5%) I also made some other mistakes because I was imagining relations that weren't reflected in the model (e.g. given LM : M/P = l(Y,R), dl/dR < 0, I said a change in M would result in a change in R) but I didn't get any points taken off because, I guess, I eventually reached the appropriate conclusion as to the direction of equilibrium, which was what he was looking for.
- I got entirely bamboozled by a rational expectations question which involved finding an expression for equilibrium in the labor market and using it to derive a labor market function as a function of the difference between the actual and expected price. I got the labor market function but couldn't figure out how to rewrite it to show the requisite relationship. Turns out I just had to simplify. (7%) Curiously, I made the same kind of mistake on the Intermediate Microeconomics midterm, on basically the same problem. More evidence that I suck at algebra.
- I wrote some weird nonsensical calculus down "explaining" the correct answer on an optimal control problem. (3%)
- When drawing a couple of phase portraits, I mistakenly drew the stable saddle-path alongside one of the phase lines when it was supposed to be askew. I realized this and fixed it, but I didn't go back and rethink what that would do to the shift I was supposed to be diagramming. Instead I just drew an arrow. (3%)
- I drew a concave instead of a convex adjustment path despite having drawn the proper adjustment trajectories in a graph a few inches higher on the page. (2%)
I got a 78% over all. For those keeping score at home, had I not made those head-banger class non-observations I would have had a 98% - the remaining 2% would have gone to stuff I never would have thought of. I was slightly (1-2%) above the mean.
For the final, I decided to try to reduce the stress in my life and to stuff my face (as opposed to my usual diet of starvation), which may or may not have gone a long way to reducing my anxiety. I got presumably the only 100%, though that was in part because the test was ridiculously easy. The mean was 90%. What I found kind of humorous while taking the test is that, had you made a "cheat sheet" for the equations like you were allowed to, the test was basically just an exercise in copying down your notes. Of course, I didn't and haven't seen how one of those would be worthwhile, so for me it was an exercise in using an eraser.
Unfortunately the class average was too high and I wasn't able to swing anything that would improve my overall GPA.
Summary of Grade: 3.6
Summary of Summary: I need lithium.
So that's a 3.87 for the quarter, which matches my 3.87 for the year. That's right on the magna cum laude line! Now I just have to go through 50+ credits of math classes without getting any worse and I get delicious baccalaureate honors.
(I will not be getting any delicious baccalaureate honors.)
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Message last edited by Ogordemir99 on 8/26/2010 at 01:34:53 AM
Liberal Arts Major
Jew cunt.
---
Alestra77: you seem to have glossed over the fact that you treat all women like prostitutes
Alestra77: "k, so, I bought you coffee... when do I get my handjob?"
Goddammit, I hate you so much. ~ Kenri to me (3 times)
Alestra77: who the fuck is porky
Liberal Arts Major
3.87 is like an F
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
Introduction to Mathematical Statistics/Econometrics I
Summary of Class: I chose to take this class because I needed it to fulfill a number of random stats prerequisites as an alternative to the usual path to doing so, which was closed to me because of scheduling issues. What I neglected to notice, however, was that despite being listed as an undergraduate stats class, it was cross-listed with Econ 580, the first of the graduate series in econometrics. The class had a handful of undergrads in it, but just about everybody turned out to be a graduate student of some kind.
That said, I had low expectations for my GPA, and I fulfilled those expectations swimmingly. Granted, the class wasn't actually that hard - I had taken a much less rigorous class at BSU that covered 75% of the "execution" of the material while the rest was more or less covered by the semester of AP Statistics I taught myself in high school (with moderate success). However, there were a lot of theoretical questions that were way above me and my pitiful understanding of all things math-shaped.
Still, I may have pulled as much as a 3.7-3.8 had I not failed so abjectly on - surprise! - the midterm, as is my style. This time I missed 19 of 80 points, 12 of which were off things I didn't need to miss at all. My mistakes included not copying a rather important 1/x from one part of a question to another (resulting in an integral with no closed-form solution that I spent a good deal of time trying to evaluate), using the Law of Iterated Expectations exactly backwards, and using the uniform distribution pdf instead of the cdf for the cdf method. My experience taking the midterm was reflective of my performance, as the copier had only produced copies of half the test and after I finished that it still took the professor twenty minutes to get the other half copied and distributed to everyone. Before I got part two, I was thinking "hey, this is pretty easy!" Yet another glorious math achievement for the record books.
The resulting ~76% (which put me in the bottom quartile for midterm grades, meaning some graduate students actually did worse than me somehow) torpedoed me so hard that a perfect score on the final would have gotten me a 3.6 at best. Of course, I didn't get a perfect score on the final, but luckily I didn't bone myself too badly and ended up with at least 90% - though I didn't ask for the exact grade because quite frankly a test where one of my answers includes the phrase "I can't think of the geometric distribution pdf off the top of my head, so I'll use the binomial with n = 10 instead" isn't getting framed on my wall anytime soon.
Summary of Grade: 3.5
Summary of Summary: I really need to check cross-listing more often.
Mathematical Reasoning
Summary of Class: This is the first in a three-quarter series on real analysis that most math majors and all stats majors are stuck with. Early on, I was doing pretty well since it was all predicate calculus that I had already taken a class for at BSU and there was no addition to throw me off.
Then I took the midterm (on my birthday no less!) and the party was over. Though I only missed one point on the first four questions (as a consequence of my creeping illiteracy), the last question reamed me as only algebra can. The goal was to provide a proof of a proposition in number theory. In the course of attempting this not-so-arduous task, I made an argument alone these lines:
1. (2n + 1)^2 + (2m + 1)^2 = 2sqrt[(n^2 + 1)(m^2 + 1)]
2. ???
3. Profit!
Needless to say, I didn't get that one right. I ended up with a 33/40 (the best grade in the class was a 36) and a bruised ego. Then we started doing random set theory and power sets and God knows what else and at this point in the year I wasn't too hyped up about anything really, so I started getting lost in the muddle, although I did manage somehow to only get boned on one homework assignment.
The final was four hours after the agonizing mathematical statistics final and at that point I was ready to check out, so my performance was less than stellar. Three of the five proofs seemed rather easy, but the first two questions involved power sets (which tend to tax my English-major mind) and cofinite sets, which he decided to throw on the final for the lolz considering it was the first time he had brought it up during the class. I came up with a rather nice proof for the cofinite set that made sense to me but read like it was written by a toddler and then I came up with some gibberish for the power set proof that I only realized was gibberish on my way home.
My overall grade was a bit worse than I expected as a consequence of these rather subpar performances. All in all, my performance in this class didn't benefit from being paired with the timeslot for mathematical statistics.
Summary of Grade: 3.6
Summary of Summary: Why am I a math major again?
Financial Crisis
Summary of Class: Speaking of unfavorable timeslots, this class was scheduled three hours after my twice-weekly double-whammy of math and as a consequence I didn't go to it too often, and when I did I usually used it for nap time. As a result, I barely had any idea what was going on at any given time. As I had chosen the class to fulfill a writing requirement and because it sounded vaguely interesting, this was totally fine.
A major part of the grade came in the form of a term paper. My initial draft was returned with a note saying I should compare the correlation between expansion and contraction sizes and vice-versa for 1900-2010; however, I only had access (via five seconds spent judiciously on Google) to industrial production from 1919 on, and the better correlation only came out to a fairly pitiful r^2 of .006. I then did what any enterprising young scholar would do and added a bunch of numbers together in order to get an r^2 of 89% in the direction my paper supported (expansion size determines contraction size). Economics is awesome.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: Maybe we'd have fewer financial crises if people could stay awake in their financial crisis classes.
Semantics I
Summary of Class: My token linguistics class of this quarter, semantics is also the field I will probably write my Master's Thesis in, so the outcome of this class was rather important to me. Also, I had a 4.0 streak in linguistics to keep up! Especially since linguistics is now the only subject in which I will get 4.0's for the next two years.
That streak was almost threatened by an attendance score valued at 5% of the grade overall, but I don't know if this was even factored in because eventually he stopped taking attendance altogether (or maybe he just didn't do it on the days I dragged myself to class). Regardless, I don't know if I attended even half the classes, so I was worried. I was also worried because although I got a 100% on my midterm I knew I didn't get more than a 96% on my final. (One of the questions I knew I missed involved escaping rabbits. Cue Elmer Fudd parodies.) But my worrying turned out to be unnecessary as I managed to keep the streak alive regardless of some last-minute choking.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: At least I know why I'm a linguistics major.
That brings me to a 3.79 on the quarter and a 3.85 overall, a .02 reduction that takes me out of magna cum laude range for the first time since I graduated from high school.
Booooooooooooooooooooo.
In order to get back into magna cum laude I need to average something like 3.9 over the rest of my classes. I only have five more linguistics classes to provide me with 4.0's (although Syntax II, which I take next quarter, will likely break that streak). The rest consists of economics classes I will probably do poorly in, statistics classes that offer a glimmer of hope, and upper-division math classes I will be lucky to pass. Looks like I'm not going to get there.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
For instance, having an E-mail conversation with the professor after missing the midterm while having a glass of "oh God I just missed a midterm" wine was probably not the best idea, nor was explaining to him exactly why I don't go to class. (Short version: Because CPI is literally retarded.) Additionally, though the homework grading rubric still seems pretty stupid, I think I agree with more of the reasons I lost points now. For instance, as noted above, I got docked for putting a line that terminates on the execution of a loop inside the loop instead of outside. Though this was done specifically because there was an if statement that I thought I could pair up with the termination line, it's obviously just a lot cleaner to put this outside of the loop. This is certainly something worth marking off for in a class where loops are supposed to be treated like some brand new idea hot off the presses.
Does this make up for the pervasive aura of failure (two graders overlooking actual errors in program behavior because they were too busy obsessing over "hacks", graders docking points on tests because they can't read their own handwriting, docking points for using "Scanner c" instead of "Scanner scan" as a variable name, etc.) in this class? Not a chance. But now that my GPA has been marked for death, I find I'm becoming a lot more mellow, man.
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
although Syntax II, which I take next quarter, will likely break that streak
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Introduction to Real Analysis I
Summary of Class: The first in a two-part series designed, I assume, to weed out the weak and feeble-minded from the ranks of math and statistics majors, this class promised to eat my GPA whole after I got a 3.6 on its prerequisite, That One Class Where You Write Bad Proofs. Luckily for my GPA (and me), that was not the case.
I detailed my travails with all of the tests here - other than the first midterm, an extremely lax grading policy (and very little algebra) made it so that I basically aced everything. The final was interesting, though, in that it was mostly unexpected. Half of the questions required you to come up with examples for things, e.g., "Give an example of a series of functions that converges uniformly but not absolutely." For the most part I just winged those, but apparently I did so well enough to not imperil my grade. This was therefore one of those math classes that makes me think I can actually do math, right before I take another math class and realize, no, I still suck.
Curiously, the average for both midterms was around 65%. I don't understand this, since the tests weren't that hard, they required you to do very little actual computation or algebraic manipulation, and you could even bring notes in case you didn't feel like remembering a handful of convergence tests and/or theorems. I have to assume our final grades were all curved, since I don't think a third or more of the class getting Ds really flies.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: I look forward to 400-level math classes in which I, too, will be getting 65% on every test.
Syntax II
Summary of Class: I had already taken a class with this professor - LING 200 - but it's one thing to lecture to 220 people and another entirely to lecture to 26, so I didn't have a good picture of what I was getting into. I was one of the few for which this was true, however, since she also taught Syntax I in autumn quarter and so almost everyone other than myself had just taken that with her.
Luckily, the fact that I didn't remember anything from the summer didn't hurt me. The class was very easy, and it got easier when, a few weeks in, the professor realized that her method of assessing participation - pop quizzes! - really sucked, and hence stopped doing it. The lectures themselves weren't so bad, though they involved a lot of group work out of the book, which was lame. I developed a grudge against the book's overly simplistic, misleading, and downright haphazard presentation of everything in Syntax I, and doing every asinine "challenge" problem (many of which provided a do-it-yourself extension of the exposition of the text - with no answer key, of course) didn't help matters.
Much to the dismay of my ego, I got a 93% on the final paper, which I actually thought was quite good, although admittedly I developed this opinion after staying up all night to write it. We also had to give a presentation on the paper before writing it, which I did without the aid of PowerPoint or note cards or whatever, and the results of that contrast well with the paper, since I thought it was the worst presentation I had given since 9th grade but I got full credit for it. I guess I don't know anything after all.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: In Danish 101, the only other linguistics major, myself, and the TA got into a discussion in which one of them raised the question of whether there is a systematic dichotomy between people who liked syntax and those who liked phonology. I claimed somewhat blindly to like syntax and not at all like phonology, but at the time I wasn't so sure if my stated preferences were accurate. Now I am. Fuck phonology.
Phonology I
Summary of Class: Speaking of which! When I prognosticated that Syntax II was going to ruin my streak, my prediction was based on the fact that syntax is tedious and I had not developed a strong analytical grasp of all its predictions, so I would theoretically have trouble if we had to analyze a lot of corpus data or whatever. It turns out that I was wrong about all that - except for that whole streak-breaking thing. And it came out of a class where you only had to have a 91% to earn a 4.0!
That was a much taller order than I had expected it to be. I was doing fine up until the last couple of weeks. I had gotten a 95% on the midterm - I missed two points for roughly the same reason I missed three points on the first real analysis midterm, namely, I didn't know how "far" I could go in manipulating the data/premises to explain the right answer and ended up saying something stupid instead. And I had a 92% on homework, a grade that would have been slightly better if (a) I had written a single sentence introducing a table ("This table has stuff in it:"), because apparently a section heading explaining the contents of a table that makes up the entirety of that section is not enough of an introduction, and (b) the criterion for choosing between fortition and lenition to explain a data set had been more robust than "one is simpler than the other". Phonology: real science!
Then I got screwed (mostly by myself) three times in rapid succession. First, I got 18/20 on the last homework assignment. This was one less point than I had anticipated getting, which was unfortunate, although ultimately it wasn't all that relevant... because I got 35.5/42 on the final. How did I manage to mangle that so badly? Well, for starters, I showed up to the last day of class after a night of practicing my owl impression expecting "HW 3 review", as per the syllabus - and surprise! we were actually just taking the final. My confusion was caused by three things: (a) I never went to the lecture because it sucked and therefore had to rely on the syllabus and so on, (b) my finals schedule on the school's student home page thing ("My UW") listed the final three days later, although it said it was a tentative assignment, and (c) although the syllabus did list "HW 3 review" for the last day, it also listed, tucked away in another column, "final exam". Right before a huge blank space representing the following week, introduced as "Finals". Anyway, it turned out that a test devoted largely to tedious explanations of ad hoc solutions to random problems doesn't go over too well when you don't see it coming and also you're half asleep.
(Maybe a lot of people were half asleep. The mean was 31.84/42, which is an acceptable 75.8% - but the standard deviation was 8.75. If the grades were normally distributed, over a third of the class straight up failed the final.)
Lastly, about four people were grad students who were supposed to also write a paper, and we all were assigned to groups responsible for giving them feedback on their rough drafts. My grad student submitted his late and it was essentially an outline (e.g. "fill in details" was his only explanation for a central claim), so my feedback consisted of my saying there's no basis on which to comment on the substance of his arguments, and so I spent most of the space making suggestions about the structure of the paper, since there wasn't any. This was the story for most of the group, although one person with previous experience with the language (Farsi) added some random observations, including a very long dialog about the realization of rhotic consonants in various French dialects triggered by a misinterpreted comment about borrowings from French in Farsi. This feedback was graded on an 8/10, 9/10, and 10/10 scale, and since it was worth 10% of your grade for some reason, an 8 was pretty disastrous. Naturally, that's exactly what I got.
(I was actually rather outraged about this, so I e-mailed and asked what the motivation was for my receiving the minimum score, considering the circumstances. The professor responded only to say that an 8 was "good".)
This assignment was, in a word, terrible. It's actually worse than participation, a feat I didn't think possible. At least for participation most of the time you have some control over it: come to class every day, say every thought that pops into your head, etc. Here your job is to do this:
Everyone in a peer review group must read and add substantive comments to... the paper assigned to their group. Substantive comments might be organizational... Or there might be questions or comments about data... Or the logic of an argument may need to be spelled out in more detail. (Less substantive comments include... pointing out errors in spelling or puncutation [sic lol].) As a peer reviewer, the question that should be foremost in your mind as you read through each draft is... What could the author do to make this a better paper?
That's it - no rubric, no grading scale, nothing. And on this basis, we were assigned grades for an assignment whose points were worth almost twice as much as a given point on homework or any test. Moreover, it's not entirely clear that such an assignment should be graded on anything other than some sort of pass/fail scale to begin with. The quality of your feedback is in part a function of the quality of the first draft of some other student's paper, so if they suck, you suck, unless you look over their research and essentially do their work for them. And if their paper is awesome, you still suck, since aside from a handful of comments you're not going to have anything to say. Either way, this assignment will result in unfavorable outcomes. It's absolutely, indefensibly awful.
Much like this class!
Summary of Class: 3.9
Summary of Summary: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Applied Regression and Analysis of Variance
Summary of Class: Oh man, this class.
In an impressive example of dropping the ball, nobody in the statistics department thought they should inform the professor what, exactly, he was supposed to be teaching. As a result, instead of a class introducing regression to people who had barely seen it before, we got a class introducing the history and philosophical ramifications of regression, in which your job is to reproduce and critique the findings and graphics of published papers in R or another statistical computing package and, oh by the way, there will be no lectures on how to do this and it's not in the book.
There are five anecdotes that typify this class perfectly:
- One of the first handouts we were given was called "Looking Back on Simple Regression". It didn't take long for the professor realize none of us had anything to look back on.
- A student (not me) referred to the term paper, due at the end of the quarter, as the "final boss".
- The professor, who also teaches in Vienna, had to leave for a week and appointed a substitute. During his lectures, the sub would frequently discuss some procedural detail secondary to his point, look out at a bunch of blank faces, and say: "I guess you guys don't know how to do this." This was two weeks before the end of the class.
- During the last lecture, the professor pointed out the title of the class as listed on the syllabus, "Regression and Allied Methods", and contrasted it with the course listing like so: "The title of this class is [Appl Regression and ANOVA]... but that's not what we did."
- On my last homework write-up, after the usual series of comments ("makes no sense" etc.), the professor circled one of my more farcical statements and asked "??Is this a joke?"
I have marginally more knowledge about regression now than I had going into this class, but I do mean marginally. I basically know a little more about R, because all of the homework came in two parts: a computational section where you had to reproduce stuff and an analytical section where you had to write 500+ words explaining why that stuff was wrong. I was almost always able to figure out how to do the programming, much to my surprise, but I had to rely on the tried and true method of looking at pictures and guessing in order to do the analysis.
Compounding the horror, the class was located in, well, the campus basement, a full 1.2 miles away from my apartment one way, and it was an hour after a class that was basically right next to my apartment. Just walking to and from class took 50 minutes. After the first few weeks, after it became apparent that the lectures were all just going to soar over my head, I basically gave up on this class entirely, including trying to go to it regularly.
For his part, the professor was actually sporting about it. He realized he wasn't getting through to any of us and made some adjustments. Unfortunately, the class as a whole was just miserable in every aspect, so there was little he could do without overhauling his entire approach, which is a little too much to ask. Also, I got the impression that he was one of those people who's "too smart to teach", i.e. he was so familiar with the material that he had great difficulty presenting it in a way that would be compatible with people who didn't know what was going on. I'm not entirely sure why he was teaching to random undergrads instead of graduate students, as he does in Vienna. The statistics department is not in the habit of making any sense.
Summary of Grade: 3.3
Summary of Summary: ??Is this a joke?
That makes for a slight improvement in my quarter grade over autumn, at 3.81, and a slight deduction over all, my cumulative GPA falling to 3.84. This isn't so bad - given the circumstances, a 3.3 in the regression was pretty fortunate, and that's what's bringing me down here. (Though regression sets the record for the lowest non-pass/fail grade at the UW, it actually ties my lowest such grade ever, a 3.3 in differential equations at BSU.) Crisis averted! Unfortunately, my 4.0 streak in LING classes is now broken, which might matter in the alternate universe where I stand a chance of not getting into the masters program. On the other hand, my chances of getting magna cum laude look even more farcical.
Spring quarter looks pretty saucy: three math classes, a token linguistics class, and the inevitable nightmare of Computer Programming II, all headlining the best-timed schedule I've ever had. 3.3 quarter GPA, here I come!
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
___
~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
Spring quarter was like a plane crashing into an Enron audit. Not only did I suck, I sucked copiously. Some of my failure was already described in this topic, but it got a lot worse after that. This quarter owns my lowest single score in a graded class, my first nonzero failing grade on a test, and a GPA so bad it not only marks the first time I didn't get on the Dean's List, it also knocked me below cum laude.
Why did this happen? I have three ideas:
1. I am completely terrible at some of the material I was supposed to be learning. Differential equations > me. Computer science is... come on, just look at TFN. Basic algebra is beyond my feeble mind's comprehension.
2. Despite having an excellent schedule in terms of getting my classes all one after the other on MWF and only feeling the need to go to three of my five classes, this schedule was actually horribly put together. Compared to my workload in Winter quarter, I had a whopping 106% increase in time spent on homework in addition to several more hours of class I felt compelled to go to each week. The real killer, however, was midterms. I had four in Winter quarter, only two of which were in a math class. This time I had nine - 1 calculus, 1 computer science, 2 differential equations, 2 real analysis, 3 sociolinguistics. At one point I had between one and two midterms every week. Since math tests are always bad news, this turned out about as well as one might expect.
3. Somewhere halfway through the quarter I found it increasingly difficult to be motivated... at all. (This was around the time I discovered I had no choice but to abandon my quest for the elusive five majors due to my inability to schedule the required overlapping classes. This is a topic I will revisit shortly.) This lead to a substantial drop in many of my grades for the second half, including an apathy hour finals week.
Still, at least I passed all my classes!
Sociolinguistics
Summary of Class: It's good to know I can still 4.0 random linguistics classes I can hardly feign any interest in. There was a participation grade here but that didn't seem to matter even though I only went to class five times.
The only noteworthy thing about the class itself was a research project that required me to bug a bunch of people to fill out a survey about their perceptions of U.S. dialects. Eh.
Summary of Grade: 4.0
Summary of Summary: Fuck phonology.
Computer Programming II
Summary of Class: Like Computer Programming I, except this time I actually took the midterm!
Summary of Grade: 2.8
Summary of Summary: The lowest score on my transcript comes from a class that fulfills absolutely none of my program requirements at all.
Advanced Calculus II
Summary of Class: Since I had already seen literally all of the material in this class in some form before, presumably I should have done pretty well. And in fact, I got like a 99% on the homework in this class. Unfortunately, I bungled the first midterm in ways described in the link above, and on the final I didn't have time to brute force my way through some trigonometric algebra that it would have been nice to have written on my "cheat sheet" except that I never make those. So I wrote that I was unable to come up with an answer and made one up instead (in order to complete the rest of the question). Like a boss.
Summary of Grade: 3.4
Summary of Summary: DAMN YOU, ADDING AND SUBTRACTING!
Real Analysis II
Summary of Class: In contrast to the professor I had for Real Analysis I, who is easily one of the best I've ever had, this guy was the opposite of appealing. His method of teaching involved primarily the use of examples, which is OK I guess, but the only time we actually delved into, well, analysis was the last couple of weeks when we went over compactness and Riemann integrability. That's also the only time I felt coming to class was worth it.
As far as my hideous performance in this class is concerned, well, suffice it to say I easily could have done a lot better. (Except on the homework. The homework was horrible.) The first midterm is described in the link above. (Featuring me erasing 15% of my grade!) On the second midterm, I got no partial credit on a problem worth 20% despite using the correct reasoning but for some reason opting to choose a convergence test that didn't make any sense (comparison vs. limit comparison); additionally I didn't get any credit for recognizing Stirling's formula since what I was recognizing was actually Stirling's formula * sqrt(2pi). Woops. And on the final, I differentiated cos(x^2) incorrectly (of course!) in one instance but correctly in another, while on another problem I decided that apparently integral(xexp(x)dx) = x(integral(exp(x)dx)). Because, hey, why not?
Summary of Grade: 3.2
Summary of Summary: The only reason I recognized Stirling's formula at all was that it was briefly mentioned in Real Analysis I.
Linear Analysis
Summary of Class: Though this class is called linear analysis for some reason, it's actually just the second quarter of differential equations, including an introduction to PDEs. I did very poorly in it.
On the second midterm, one problem worth 25% of the test involved matching Fourier coefficient formulae to pictures of even and odd functions. On the particular day of the midterm, this was pretty much impossible for me to do. I got a 56% on the test, my worst grade ever on a test I actually took. Woops! And on the final, I got a 69%, a good deal of which was caused by my inability to find the roots of a third-degree polynomial.
I got a 90.4% on the first midterm.
Summary of Grade: 2.9
Summary of Summary: I'm a math major.
My GPA on the quarter was 3.29, bringing my cumulative GPA to a lowly 3.75. Cum laude requires a 3.76 and Phi Beta Kappa, of which I am ostensibly a member, a 3.77. It is safe to say, given the classes I still have to take, I will never be able to reach either of those GPAs.
Additionally, as I noted above, I have abandoned the quest for those statistics and ACMS majors I had planned to seek in order to honor my lust for doing random things. The reason is that I would have to take classes with simultaneous meeting times for three quarters in a row. This would be hypothetically doable, but in order to be able to do so I would need to get signatures from the professors involved - and since the math department only posts who those professors are a week prior to the start of each quarter, I don't have any guarantee I would actually be able to even get into both classes at that point, let alone being able to get the required signatures. I could have tried, but as Finnish pop music tells me, it's braver to give up. (I take all my direction from Finnish pop music.)
As far as statistics goes, this is somewhat unfortunate, since one of the things I liked about this university was that it had a separate statistics department. In fact, I initially took differential equations at BSU with the intention of fulfilling a requirement for the minor in statistics at the UW. Back then I hadn't even heard of topology! ACMS, though, is somewhat irrelevant to me.
This means that both computer programming classes and that regression class I took Winter quarter are absolutely useless to me in almost every conceivable way. My GPA in these classes? 3.02, or 2.83 when taking into account the actual grade I got in CPI. It's also plausible that had I not taken these, especially CPI-II, my other grades for those quarters would have been better; moreover, due to taking these instead of something else, I now have to take a bunch of econ classes in the same quarter which I would have preferred to have spread out.
So, all in all, my attempt to mimic Icarus was a rousing success!
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
Awesome: Danish 101, Phonetics, "Supervised Reading" (Danish 490)
These classes are among my fondest memories, with Danish trailing the pack simply because it had an attendance grade (though one that didn't end up impacting my grade). Danish was awesome because it was the first time I had gotten the chance to be in an environment where Danish was somewhat actively spoken, something I'd been wanting for like six years. It also brought some interesting things to my attention, like the massive dialectal variance in the pronunciation of certain words and/or the shift in various vowels. Plus, the professor was pleasant. Phonetics, despite involving a great deal of phonetics, was great as it remains the most "rigorous" linguistics class I've taken, in the sense that most of it was actual science as opposed to "here's some stuff". Supervised Reading gets the nod because, well, it was easy, productive, and involved zero class time. Score!
Pleasant: Masterpieces of Scandinavian Literature
I came into this class with low expectations but it turned out to be fairly pleasant, in addition to making it possible for me to do Supervised Reading later on. A win, though not one that stands out as much as the rest.
Annoying: Danish 102-3, Linear Algebra, Intermediate Writing, Intro to Linguistics, Syntax I
This is the biggest group and it shouldn't be a surprise why that's the case - most of my classes are inoffensive if not dazzling, and it doesn't take much to make them into pests. Danish 102-3 was actually somewhat pleasant due to the fact that the professor was friendly and the class was reasonably close-knit, but it was made annoying by its horrible time slot (seriously, 9:30 AM five days a week?) and GPA-threatening attendance policy/curve. Linear Algebra was a class I almost never went to but I still had to make the trek to the library every week to get the homework, and that's more than enough to make that a less-than-fond memory. (Coincidentally, that's all I remember from that class.) Writing also suffered from the attendance curse, except on a much, much more irritating level than anything else; it takes the cake for most annoying class this year. The intro class and syntax were annoying in typical linguistics fashion: just enough uninteresting material to make me worry about missing a 4.0, but not really.
Underperformance: Intermediate Micro and Macroeconomics, Advanced Macroeconomics
Interesting how all my econ classes are in one convenient category! The story for Micro and advanced Macro is the same: I was done in by my questionable command of basic algebra. Micro wasn't that bad, since I got a 3.9, but the only thing standing in the way of a 4.0 was my incompetence. Intermediate Macro on the other hand suffered from my very first apathy- and stress-induced psychological calamity, in the form of the final, wherein I got completely destroyed. Though in retrospect, it turns out I could do much worse!
Irrevocable Blight: Music Theory, Computer Programming I
Computer Programming need not be discussed further. On the other hand, Music Theory almost made it into one of the previous two categories. Why did I put it here instead? Well, to begin with, while Computer Programming I doesn't actually affect my GPA and led to my taking Supervised Reading, Music Theory pulled down my GPA and had no positive side effects. But the thing that really made it jump to the worst possible category is the fact that I made a rookie mistake and opted to buy the book for this two-credit class that really sucked a great deal. The $110 book. I paid $110 to be intellectually sodomized. That gets the "blight" rating any day. Interesting aside: ultimately neither of these classes were at all necessary since I've abandoned Statistics as a major and the fine arts deficiency the university opted to mail me a specific threatening letter about turned out to not technically exist. Awesome!
Since there are five categories here, I can give an average rating for the year by letting "blight" be worth 1 point and "awesome" worth 5, then dividing by 15; that average is exactly 3. So my first year at the UW weighs in at a comfortable "annoying" over all. Good use of $40,000!
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
Liberal Arts Major
Spring quarter looks pretty saucy: three math classes, a token linguistics class, and the inevitable nightmare of Computer Programming II, all headlining the best-timed schedule I've ever had. 3.3 quarter GPA, here I come!
And I got a 3.29? So close!
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu