Course review

Helloo!! It's that time again to review the courses I had this semester.
Actually I should've done this a month ago, when the course was still fresh in my mind. Now everything's been pushed away and my mind is filled with thoughts about my next co-op work term in Japan.

cpsc 320 - Patrice Belville
This was the most feared course on my list. cpsc320 is renowned course to be difficult and deathly to all cpsc students. I didn't find it as deathly as I imagined it to be. The concepts were interesting and I hope I will get the chance to review this stuff (algorithms and design) again because all of the concepts seem to be applicable to various fields of compsci. Also, one thing that saved me during this course was the fact that we had cheatsheets for our midterms and finals. Although, it was rarely helpful for the final... I liked Patrice's teaching as it was straightforward and the examples were thorough. I would say that his way of teaching fit my learning style more than Steve's teaching style. I'm not going to comment more. hehe.

cogs 402 - Dr. Khan
I worked on a robot simulation written in Java for Dr.Khan. He's a prof in the mechanical engineering department. I was fortunate enough to be able to work on this project. Dr.Khan was patient when I didn't understand something. One thing I did not like was the fact that he had no idea what was going on with the code. maybe that's the way his research lab works I'm not really sure. One thing for sure, is I had a lot of freedom. It's an interesting project. Cooperative autonomous robots are to push objects to a goal and their behavior was modelled  based on the artificial immune system. I also got the chance to review some of the biology of immune systems while I was writing the paper. Research can be fun if you land on a project that's interesting. That's what I've learned. I also learned that I should be more confident in my abilities instead of just worrying about how incapable I might be. -- Worrying I find is the most time consuming, wasteful behaviour I have ever encountered. Don't get me wrong, worrying is fine, but don't worry to the point that you get depressed over something. When I get depressed over something I lose all ability to focus on a task etc.  I can actually rant more, but that's off topic. One thing's for sure, I'd like to thank Dr.Khan for being patient with me once again. I hope you will realize that I've learned a lot about researching and about myself.

psych 361 - Catharine Winstanley
Motivation. I'm sorry, but I did not feel motivated at all to work hard at this course about motivation. (haha ironic..) I feel that the prof could've made the material a little more interesting. But I'm guessing it's difficult because there's so much information we need to know packed up into 4 months time. The material was dry and boring. After the final, I was doing a bit of browsing on the web and came across an relevant article related to this course on motivation. http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html It was amazing how a lot of the stuff in this article pertained to what I learned in 361. If only the prof made the course as interesting as this article, then I may have been more motivated to study harder for the final and I may have been able to better memorize the material! It was really difficult to memorize those 100s of experiments about mice pressing levers and how each one is different from the others...

cpsc 322 - Frank Hutter
It was Frank's first time teaching 322 I believe. Things started out rocky, I thought he sounded like a robot at first (haha,) but as the course progressed, I found that he was really understanding and concerned about how he was doing and constantly asked us to evaluate him and his lectures. He took our concerns into consideration and was always willing to make his lectures better. I am sure in time, he will become an amazing prof! As for the course itself, I found it extremely interesting. I loved the concepts and the assignments were fun (although sometimes time consuming). For example, we were able to apply concepts we learned with search by implementing a sudoku solver and a time table scheduler. I think I will be taking the parent course cpsc 422 after I come back from Japan. It sounds difficult but I'm sure it will be just as interesting as 322.

Anywayysss Tired. Going to review some C++ or something before I sleep. Then tomorrow will be a new day!

-Bess