[453-460] Jumping back into school from doing nothing to having no free time is killer. Some of my teachers are really, really good. They’re really smart and passionate about their subject and want you to learn, but they’re also some professors that I have that are not amazing in terms of lecture ability and ability to bring passion for the subject and ability to make you not hate them. It’s tough to find the will to pay attention during lectures, in, for example, Circuits II and Signals and Systems, but it’s really easy to follow along during Electronic Devices and Advanced Programming.
Author: godwina
[472-478] My electronic devices professor often, at the beginning of lecture, he usually sums up the last lecture. Just to remind you and get you back on the same page. He also does a very good job of writing on the chalkboard, which I like because it goes slow and you can see his thought process and follow along. He’s also very grounded in reality and gives you great examples of how it’s used and why it’s important all the time. He is funny, and he knows my name, and those are definitely bonus points for him, so it makes having to deal with Schrodinger’s wave equation a lot more digestible.
[480-495] My Advanced Programing class is taught by this guy who is probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He started out as an electrical engineer, even though he’s teaching at a computer engineering class. He worked for Microsoft and was a software developer and knows all these sorts of things that I couldn’t even begin to dream about learning about. He really teaches with a, listen, if you want to learn, you got to do it, you got to practice, you got to go out of your comfort zone, and he does not spare us on the difficulty on the homework assignments, labs, and midterms. I walked out of the midterm thinking I had gotten absolutely no more than a 50. I ended up with an 80, so that’s good. This is the first time he’s teaching the class, so he really still has the passion for it, but he definitely wants to teach us more than he can. One of the things I really like about him is that he is working on research outside of class to map neural networks. I mentioned that earlier as being on the forefront of science and technology, which it is, so yeah. That’s really exciting. I think what makes him a step above my Circuits professor is that he cares about if you’re paying attention in class. If you’re not, he’ll call you out on it. His lecture is still interesting. He cares about the subject matter. He cracks jokes and tells stories and things.
[500-504] This one guy from my Signals and Systems class, he’s just annoying. He zooms through pages and pages of proofs at the speed of light and he says, “If you can’t follow this, maybe you’re better suited in Culinary Arts,” and stuff like that. So rude. He doesn’t even tell us anything other than what’s in the book. Why would I pay attention to him when I could just read it later and not be berated?
[524-528] After he makes rude statements, he just rolls through the material. Nobody talks through that class or anything. It’s not very interactive. It’s very much him telling you things and you writing it down as quickly as you can, and he’s going to keep on going. He’ll laugh at his own jokes, though. I saw a meme that one of my classmates made. They took a picture of him pointing at the board and photoshopped Culinary Arts onto it. Terrible.
[584-590] I absolutely love my TA for signals and Systems. She does such a better job than teaching than he does. She’s really pleasant. I have TA’s from pats terms that I really loved that when I walk by them on the street they’ll stop and talk to me and be like, “Hey, what’s up?” That’s so nice. Overall, you just get your normal distribution of people. There are nice ones, there are mean ones, there are people who are interesting to you and people who are boring. I feel like the staff of college pretty accurately reflects normal humanity
[505-509] As for Circuits II, Keith is a really nice guy, but he’s just too mild mannered to be a good professor. He lets silence hang in the air after he asks a question, and he has a very quiet monotonous voice. His PowerPoints are great and easy to follow, and he does a good job of breaking up the subject matter, but he’s just too awkward to be a good lecturer.
[512-515] Yeah. He’ll half ask a question, like he’ll ask a question but not in a way that you know you have to answer it. He’ll be like, “So, the gain for this amplifier is” … Just like that the entire class on repeat and it’s like you don’t know if that’s a question or if he’s just trying to build up to an answer or thinking about it. Just so annoying.
[636-638; 643-650] The classes that I’m taking are interesting and relevant. Also, I have won two awards from doing well in my extracurricular activities. I’m going out of my way to try to incorporate engineering into the rest of my life, like for the project that I’m working on. I got the IT excellence award or whatever, because I’m on the IT team for my school’s newspaper. I did a lot of work for them this past term, and they appreciated that. I also won the multicultural award for really trying to participate in and go to every event by the Intercultural Community Bridge Program at my institution, which introduces international students to the culture of the local city, institution, and the United States. That was awesome. I really appreciate that. They’re not really like awards, but they’re something and I’m happy about it.
[35-44] While I was abroad visiting family, a very I would say life altering incident occurred that really put me into a bad mental state. And I didn’t start dealing with it until I got back from my trip because when I was there, I wasn’t about to let it ruin the only time I saw my family in eight years. So, I deeply suppressed that, moved on. But then when I got back, I was really not feeling it. I wasn’t doing my homework or going to class. I started smoking cigarettes, and it was not good. Very, very not good. I basically stopped caring about school, and I let this one extracurricular project that I was doing, it’s a LiDAR project, I let that fall to the wayside, and we are no longer doing that project.
[225-232] Oh boy. Up until the point where we stopped, we had basically conceptualized the idea. And we knew what we wanted it to do and how we wanted it to do it. And we had bought parts, like a Raspberry Pi and wire strippers. And we found the resources that we would need to assemble our design. So, we checked out the machining lab on campus. But then, it all kind of fell apart from there. We got about half the things we needed and then we couldn’t really decide on a power source. And all of us were busy with classes and there was nobody really being like, “Come on guys, we can do it.” So, we didn’t do it.
[45-47] I think that is entirely my fault because I was the sort of rally for that group and the leader of it. And when I stopped making people do things, things stopped getting done.
[48-54] Also, I withdrew from a class because I couldn’t handle five classes at the same time. And I couldn’t handle waking up early and my sleep schedule was absolutely terrible. I was also in some trouble with two of my friends because we had a bit of an argument. So, I was unsure of the friendships, so I was really not good. The only highlights through that period of suffering were a couple of parties I went to where I saw my friends. And Valentine’s Day. I made Valentines for everybody. That was nice.
[92-112] For dynamic systems and stability was taught by a teacher that I had before. And in the class that I had him, he was callous and cruel. But in this class, he really opened up and was friendly. And he would look at me to see if I laughed at his jokes. And it was the first class that I have taken that really has to do specifically with control systems engineering, which is what I want to do. And I picked up on the information really easily because I liked it. And as part of that class, the big project that we did for it was essentially proving that mutual inductance exists. And that’s when you get two coils of wire that both have electricity through them. Because they have electricity, they have an associated magnetic field. And when you put them close together, the magnetic field interferes. And the purpose of the lab was to show did it interfere? By how much? And he gave us very little instruction. He was just like, “All right, prove this exist.” So, me and my good friend Francis who were in the class together, we’re pursuing very similar career paths. We crushed it. We went to the lab three or four times. I formatted our report beautifully. And we got a really solid method going. And we had a couple moments of, “Man, the math really isn’t working out here. Man, we busted our inductors. They’re dead.” But basically, at the last minute, after having started adequately early facing a couple really dumb setbacks. We pulled it all together, turned it in, and got 100. It was awesome.
[117-133] The last class that I had him for was a class called Signals and Systems 1. And it’s required class for all electrical engineers and some other engineers to take. And since it’s a required class, I viewed it as almost sort of a weed-out course, and he made it much more difficult than it had to be. With an obscene amount of homework, very difficult tests that didn’t really reflect the homework. And in class, he pretty much recited the notes that he posted for us. So, it wasn’t super helpful. But in this class, because it’s something that he actually did for a living and it’s more specialized. So, if you’re there, it means you want to be there. He really opened up. He told us stories about how the stuff we were learning had actually applied in his professional career. And it was very well structured. We had one quiz every two weeks, and the quizzes were directly based on the homeworks. His lectures in addition to getting those stories, also had stuff that he didn’t post online. So, you kind of had to go. And I don’t know, he was just much nicer. He made the same stupid jokes that he had made in the class before, but they were less like, “I hate you. Get out of engineering.” And more like, “You can always drop out.”
[135-143] He hasn’t stopped making that joke about culinary arts. In fact, in this past class, he made the culinary arts joke. And he also brought up a new one, which is working for the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. And it just got into the rotation with the culinary arts one he’s like, “The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile is still hiring.” And terrible, right? Awful. But about halfway through the quarter on Reddit, I found a picture of the inside of an Oscar Wiener Mayer Mobile. And I showed it to him. I said, “Professor, before we start class, there’s something I need to show you.” And he absolutely cracked up and he said, “This is priceless.” It was a really good moment
[150-166] So the course that I withdrew from was discrete mathematics. And that’s widely renowned as an easy course. The math is logical. It follows a real-life story that’s not difficult to wrap your head around. However, I had it at 9:00 AM Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That’s the first mistake. The second thing was that although the professor was a good lecture, his assessments did not reflect the lecture material. In lecture, he would give example problems. He’d write out the theory. But then the questions he gave us on tests and quizzes were very tricky, challenging examples. Instead of the straightforward ones he had put on board. And I knew five people in that class. On the first quiz, none of us got above a 17%. And of the five people, all of them withdrew from the class. I withdrew because of a couple of things. I was getting really frustrated with the amount of work that I had to do. I felt like there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be succeeding in a math class. I’m very good at math. And I felt maybe pushing it to a later time with a different teacher would help me succeed. Especially since it wasn’t a prerequisite for anything, so it wasn’t messing with my long-term plan of study.
[169-174] I also took a systems programming class, which followed the C programming class that I took the term before. It’s computer engineering, and I’ve always wanted to know, actually conceptually understand how computers work. And this class got me one step closer. It talked more about how the code actually interacted with the kernel of the computer, the basic operating system. And it was challenging, but it went all right. Not too bad. I feel like I learned a lot.
[197-205] So the challenging part about that class was that it was heavily theoretical and conceptual, and involved less programming than I thought it would. It was very much coding theory and how to avoid bad coding practices, and how the actual memory of a computer functions and stuff like that. And I was really not expecting to learn that through lectures. I was expecting to do some coding to figure out how to be better at coding. And it took me a couple of weeks to realize that I have to read the lecture notes. So, when I realized that basically he was going to assess us largely on knowing the theory instead of doing the practice, I started learning the theory.