[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.
Tag: faculty interaction
[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.
[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
[330-337] I got to see another side of my systems programming teacher, because I was a TA junior, basically. An in-class assistant for Python programming labs this past term. And he was the course coordinator. So, he would run a couple meetings updating everybody on what’s going on in the class. And he’s really just a normal human being and hilarious, and awkward, and very different from his in-class professional persona. And I love seeing the personal sides of the professors. Beyond that, I don’t know. Just all of the teachers that I’ve had this past term have been really nice and they want to share their knowledge with you.
[7-54] After Thanksgiving, I realized that I was going to fail a class. I had to choose between engineering and physics. The engineering was just statics, and it was a very first engineering class and the very first one that involved math and physics to a more practical degree. I decided to stop going to that class so I could focus on physics. Physics I realized that I had to pass it. I stopped going to the mechanical class and I’m taking that class now. I’m doing a lot better in that now, so there’s hope. During the last few weeks of the semester I realized that I wasn’t going pass physics either. I ended up going through the class and I got a ton of second chances from my TAs and my professor for pulling my grade up. Because of my depression, I didn’t have enough energy to pull myself through those hoops. My problem was that I thought I knew everything. I ended up skipping the class. I ended up failing. and the depression didn’t help. In the end, I ended up failing both statics and physics. Which is fine. I ended up talking to an electrical engineer who has actually helped through failing classes for the past few years. He’s someone that I look up to highly. Hearing that I was going to be okay, it really helped. I feel less bad about failing classes now.
[33-54] I went back home after finals. On the ride home, I talked to my mom about my mental health and about how I failed the classes because she has access to my grades. I let her know that it was a combination of both the difficulty of the classes and my mental health. And now, over thinking it, I think a lot of it was just the mental health because it was more me trying to get the energy to do work. I do struggle with that still. My mom, she doesn’t quite understand mental illness quite as much as my sisters and I would like. My younger sister is going through mental illness. She is diagnosed with depression, anxiety and ADHD. Last week, I was just diagnosed with major depressive disorder. My mom is having a hard time understanding why can’t you get over this and just focus? I went to therapy without telling my mom. I didn’t want to seem weak or low. I relied on a lot of my friends and my therapist. Finally, being able to tell parents about the mental health boosted me.
[150-165; 189-194; 187-204] My Physics 2 class was all conceptual and was in a giant lecture hall with an older professor. He was very good and knowledgeable in physics. But he didn’t understand his students. His examples were too smart. His analogies didn’t make anything simpler. He tried to do was have us visualize these in certain ways, and I felt like that just complicated things. However, I appreciated him because he actually had class participation. He gave us a chance to ask our own questions. He gave us opportunities to work in groups. The reason why I failed it was mostly because of me. He gave me multiple second chances to bring my grade up. And it came down to my lack of energy.
[169-186; 221-229] My statics teacher was very enthusiastic. His accent was a little hard to discern but other than that he was one of the best teachers I’ve had. If I had the teacher again, then I would gladly take him because he’s good. He asked or he drove class participation with grades. I think that’s what helped a lot. My statistics teacher was the best one. If I don’t become an engineer, then I’ll be a statistician just because of this teacher. She did everything that my Physics 2 professor did, but she had better examples and conveyed her ideas a lot better. She went through the problems concisely, and the steps were all clear. One time, somebody corrected her in class. They followed out the steps that she was doing on the paper and realized there was an error. She checked her work and, indeed, the student was correct. They got rewarded. But weirdly enough, the graphics teacher was my worst teacher that I’ve had. The class was a hot mess. My professor came back with material from 20 years ago. According to other sources, like my friends who took the course before, they didn’t have to hand draft. I was sitting there drafting out a weird-looking screw in isometric 3D by hand. He felt like a little behind the times. I understand why we did the things, but I also feel like we could have used our time better. He seemed like he wasn’t organized at all. I had a lab at a separate time. During that lab we learned AutoCAD, SolidWorks and Creo by our TAs. I felt like I learned a lot more because I learned something relevant. But I still ended up passing the course. I think that course in particular was low level and very forgiving.
[312-325; 334-340] I got my faculty adviser last semester. He is an actual professor in mechanical engineering, so I can talk to him about related issues. He was actually interested in me, which is a lot harder to say for the people in the Central Advising Office. I’m actually going to talk to him in a couple of hours to talk about my next semester. I’m excited for that. I really should go to more office hours, but I’m nervous to talk to my professors. And I’m looking into joining a club in the Engineering College, so I can get more interaction with friends and faculty. I don’t interact much with peers in engineering field, but I’m looking for more. I’m in clubs that are not related to engineering. I was only in a club last semester and we didn’t get much things done. Because a lot of our members were seniors and they were dealing with senior design