Yup, it’s that time of the year, when high schoolers start dreading exams, regular- and 8-streamers are relieved to be done, and I have 4 months left until 1st year is over. That does, of course, mean that in 4 months, I will no longer be writing this blog, and it will likely be one of you out there in cyberspace who will be taking this position from me (from my cold, dead hands, still clutching at it with rigor mortis, or, y’know, when They lock me out of my sign-in page). But, alas, I have less than 4 months left to go (summer term is rather short, ending on August 16, exams and all) with which to detail the last moments of my 1st year here at UW (all roughly 937440 of them). So, as I sit here in the SLC Great Hall at 2 pm on a Friday afternoon, sweating from head to foot after my recent DDR escapade and waiting for my legs to stop killing me, I try to think of what to write. Hm…perhaps an overview of my first week back here at UW would be in order? Sure, just for the heck of it.
Well, my first week here has been rather…eventful. So far my classes are awesome, with some exceptions I’ll get into later. As I said at the end of December, I’m taking Math 146 (Advanced Linear Algebra), Math 138 (Basic Calculus 2), CS 241 (Foundations of Sequential Programming a.k.a. Compiler Development), MTE 120 (Circuits), and Japan 102R (Japanese 2), just for reference.
So far, Math 146 has been pretty good. Professor Marcoux teaches it. He subbed in for Professor Willard one class last term when Prof. Willard couldn’t make a Math 145 class. He was pretty good that class, but I’d heard some rumours of Professor Marcoux over my work term and they turned out to be true. While I enjoy the class and it doesn’t seem *too* difficult (but then again, I seem to remember saying the exact same thing about Math 147 last term and look where that got me), Professor Marcoux lectures at a very rapid clip. Especially when you’re taking notes in MS Word like I am (I should probably stop that), it becomes difficult to keep up with what he’s saying. Luckily prety much everything thus far has been mostly review of Math 145 or Grade 12 Data Management (a course you should be taking, and if you’re not taking it, well, you should have taken it). Right now, Professor Marcoux is teaching us about Vector Spaces, which is kind of a difficult concept to explain in a limited amount of space, so I’ll leave it at that. He’s already given us an assignment (not due for 2 weeks) that I’ve taken a look at and it looks to be pretty easy, at least for the first couple of questions. It seems significantly longer than Prof. Willard’s homework from Math 145 though. At least we don’t have to deal with Z[sqrt(2)] anymore 
Math 138…what can I say? Perhaps it’s my professor, perhaps it’s the design of the course, perhaps it’s just me, but this course seems to me like CS134, except slightly less. Granted I have only had 2 classes so far, but it seems when they designed the course, they picked an arbitrary point somewhere in the Integration unit of Math 137 and started the Math 138 curriculum there. Not at the beginning, not at the end, but some arbitrary point in the middle, which makes you wonder exactly when the real meat of the course is going to start. What’s even worse than that though is that not only are we reviewing Math 137 material, but Nataliya (I believe she’s a PhD student and she asked us to call her by her first name, so I will do so) teaches at an only slightly-faster clip than Professor Case did last term in CS 134 (i.e. 6 hours on LinkedList vs. 10 minutes on Riemann Integral, without once using the word “Riemann”). She also seems to be very nervous when teaching. I don’t blame her; I can understand that standing in front of roughly 200 people teaching a class all by yourself can be daunting, but it definitely does impact on the learning experience when you can’t understand what the prof is saying because the prof isn’t sure of herself. I definitely understand it, but I hope she stops it soon because I’m unable to switch to a different 138 section and I’m having trouble understanding what she’s talking about, even when I know the material already.
CS241 is awesome, with a capital AWESOME. It really is that good. Nomair (another PhD student-prof who asked us to call him by his first name) is exactly the opposite of Nataliya. He seems to really know his stuff, and he teaches it well. He told us his PhD has something to do with compilers (forget what exactly), so it’s going to be really cool learning from him. So far, we’ve started learning what’s called “Machine Code”, which some of you may know as “Hexadecimal”. Yeah, that’s right, we’re writing code in Hex. And it’s bloody awesome. And yes, for those newcomers of you, I am a CS nerd. Deal. We haven’t gotten an assignment for 241 yet, but Nomair said it’s going to be done in Machine Code (hereafter MC) (or at least part of it will), and Colin (the TA) said we’ve got one more function to learn before we start. I’m not quite sure what the assignment will look like, since we’ve only learned how to add and subtract in MC so far, but I can’t wait to see it.
One thing, though: PR (Prabhakar Ragde, an ex(?)-CS135 prof and member of the UW Forums which I would highly recommend joining, for those newbies out there) said that people who took CS135-136 tended to do better in CS241 than people who took CS125/133-134 like I did, and I can understand why. MC looks a lot like Scheme in its basic form. There will probably be other similarities too, but that’s one thing I’ve noticed.
MTE 120 has been pretty good so far. Again, for the newbies, at the end of the Fall term, I applied for an option called “Digital Hardware”. Any student in CS can do this by filling out a quick registration form. Essentially, Digital Hardware is a mixture of CS, ECE (Computer Engineering), and MTE (Mechatronics Engineering). Every term until 3A from now on, I will be taking a course from this option, the first being MTE 120, a course on electrical circuits. So far, the course has been pretty much a review of electrical theory from Grade 11 and 12 Physics, so it hasn’t been too bad, but I’m sure it’ll get harder soon.
A word of warning: Engineers have very heavy schedules. Mathies generally have somewhere between 20 and 25 hours/week in 1st year, Engineers generally have upwards of 30. By itself, MTE takes up 7 hours per week in my schedule, including a 3-hour lab on Wednesday alone, which is almost as much as 2 other classes put together. I’m not saying to not take it, but if you choose to take Digital Hardware, be prepared to spend a lot of class time on it.
And then there’s Japanese. 102R was not nearly as difficult to get into as 101R. There are roughly 25 people in my class (enroll cap was about 22, if memory serves), with no wait list. So if you’re thinking of taking Japanese at UW and you know basic grammar, try starting with 102. You won’t have to have a T3 internet line to enroll in it before everyone else, and you’ll probably have a better time of it too. I’d still recommend 101 to anyone who hasn’t taken Japanese before.
The first class was relatively uneventful. Maruoka-sensei still teaches the lectures, although she’s easier to understand this term somehow (perhaps I’ve become better, I dunno). Fumie-sensei doesn’t teach the tutorials anymore; instead we have Misato-sensei who…well, I don’t really know how to describe how Misato-sensei teaches. She seems to be more hard-lined than Fumie-sensei, and she speaks in almost as much Japanese per class as Maruoka-sensei. I can’t complain though, cause I can still understand most of what she’s talking about. She’s apparently teaching the 101 tutorial as well, but I haven’t had a chance to ask anyone in 101 about her yet (although I do know some people taking 101). Misato-sensei seems to be…I don’t know how to say this without it coming off the wrong way, so I’ll just say it…more interested in teaching than Fumie-sensei though (not to say that Fumie-sensei was bad or anything, because I enjoyed having her as a teacher, but you’ll understand what I’m talking about in a little while). Every class, we have to read 2 short skits written by Maruoka-sensei showing us how to use whatever the grammar structure of the week is (this week we started the “te” form). A few people in the class were having trouble reading the hiragana in the textbook, so Misato-sensei took about 15 minutes out of class to show us a couple ways to learn it better, which I found quite helpful.
One other note: Renison College has this policy where they won’t let you in their class if you know too much. That’s how I got my spot in 101. As such, I was paranoid about learning extra Japanese over my work term cause I didn’t want to get shafted out of 102. Unfortunately, it appears I was the only one. Even though I managed to learn the Katakana chart and tried to remember as much vocabulary as I could and learn more by listening to music, it seems everyone else in my class had the same idea, but did it better. So once again, I feel shafted. But, whatever, I’m not going to do that again next term for 201, as it seems Renison’s policy isn’t as strict for the upper-level courses. I’ll probably pick up a Japanese textbook to study over my next work term or something.
Well, that’s my course overview of my first week here at UW. But of course, school isn’t all that ever happens here. Somehow, by a number of flukes and coincedences, I’ve been out of my room for more time in the past few days than in the whole of the fall term. It’s amazing what happens if you sit in the Great Hall in the SLC long enough, or meet the right people. I got to UW on Sunday morning, and that very afternoon, a friend of mine from my res invited me out to play Frisbee with some of her friends from the Pure Math Club (actually Pure Math, Applied Math, and Combinatorics & Optimization Club, but Pure Math Club or PMC for short), so it was a nice day and I’d played enough Warcraft, so I went out. Frisbee turned into going to a (somewhat) nearby Dairy Queen for ice cream, and she and I going for dinner (to the V1 caf, but still, come on).
Wednesday night is usually Pizza Night at the V1 caf. The pizza there is actually pretty good and pretty large, so if you have class close to res around lunchtime the next day, you can usually have it for lunch. However, Wednesday night is also my Japanese class, so I had a bit of a conflict, and Japanese won. Unfortunately, I spent too much time playing Warcraft before dinner, so I had to grab a chocolate bar and jet to Renison instead of eating something substantial. It seemed to turn out for the best though; the guy who sat beside me (who is also in his 1B term who I originally met on the UW forums [see a recurring theme here?] and is in my CS241 and Math 146 class) became fast friends with the girl sitting in front of me (well, in front of him), and we went for dinner after class to a Chinese restaurant in University Plaza. The food was alright, but I got to get off campus for a little while and meet some new people. This is why I recommend taking Arts courses; you meet all kinds of people you’d never meet if you stick to Math (or even Science, and especially not Engineering). So, while it was “just dinner”, it was definitely an enjoyable time. Lesson: Meet people in your classes, especially in small classes like Japanese. Don’t be a hermit.
What happened to me last night was completely random. I was sitting in the SLC Great Hall, about 15 feet from where I’m sitting right now, when I happened to notice a guy with a Nintendo DS. As a gamer myself and a person who saw a cute girl a while back outside the Cove (campus arcade, a.k.a. the DDR place) with a DS in hand who I was unable to strike up a conversation with due to my lack of DS on-hand, I’ve learned to carry my DS with me wherever I go. Turns out this guy was an executive member of the UW Gamers club last term, and he was waiting for a bunch of other ex-execs to meet for dinner and discuss club stuff. So I sat with him and joined them for dinner (another recurring theme: UW students meet over food). I got a bit of insider info on the Gamers’ Club and am likely going to join it after Club Day next week, but it was great to meet some of the guys and learn a bit about the club before I join.
Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering, the game he (and the cute girl I met outside the Cove a while back) was playing was Pokemon Diamond. He’s 23 years old. That’s for you Pokemon naysayers out there. Lesson 1: You never know who you’ll meet if you sit in the SLC Great Hall long enough with a video game. Lesson 2: Don’t diss Pokemon. Lesson 3: Always carry a Nintendo DS. It wasn’t 2 hours ago that I met a bunch of people playing Tetris DS and joined in (got clobbered 4 games straight, but it was fun anyway).
That’s all for now. As always, feel free to write me at uwmathblogger@gmail.com if you have any questions. Until next time,
Lyle Waldman
As this Thursday/Friday are Clubs Days, I’ve signed up with a couple other clubs as well. So far I’m registered with UW Gamers, who I had dinner with last week and spent about an hour and a half with today, playing such games as Super Smash Bros. Melee and Guitar Hero 2 at their booth, and KonJa, a.k.a. Konnichiwa Japan, a.k.a. the Japanese club, who had a BBQ last week which likely contributed to the sunburn I currently have about my forehead, nose, and neck (so yeah, I’m the one sober guy on campus with a head the colour of a tomato). I’m likely going to register for the Select All club (a.k.a. CTRL-A, the Club That Really Likes Anime) tomorrow, and am going to a meeting of the Cheese Club tomorrow to kick off my weekend. At some point I might join the Pure Math, Applied Math, and Combinatorics & Optimization Club (commonly known as “PMC”) as well.