EOT = End of Term.

So today marks the last day of lectures. I simply cannot describe how treacherous this term has been, so in order to speak facts and cut to the chase, I’d like to describe all the bullshit material we’ve covered since the second week of September. I’ve also rated the courses A-F because it’s only fair that I get to rate the courses when they get to rate me.

1. Advanced Calculus. Prof: B.B (Bitchy Bitch)
This course gives a whole new meaning to the word “advanced”. I think the course would be more appropriately titled, “the INFERNO”. Every time I walked into the lecture hall, I felt like I’d missed an entire semester of calculus. Forget the basic differentiation they show us in high school, we did complex stuff around here. And I mean totally complex – complex differentiation, complex integration, complex line integrals; and all that was in the last two lectures only. What we did before is conveniently forgotten which means I have several hours of reviewing to do for this course. I’ve seen the word complex so many times in the past two lectures, my life has gotten exponentially complex-icated. Complex course for complex people and an extremely complicated prof. Rating: F-

2. Numerical Methods. Prof: A. P (Anti-Perfectionist)
I never really understood the point of this course. Every lecture, we learnt a million ways to solve life’s everyday problems – such as evaluating matrices and approximating curves. Every line the prof wrote down, there was an error. We never calculated that error because whatever the prof wrote down could not be expressed numerically. I think I must’ve gone through six million erasers for this course. We also had this exciting project that expected us to simulate a bouncing ball; the project was so useless, I didn’t even bother backing up the damn code and taking a screenshot to post it right here for everyone to appreciate the “ball that bounces after being programmed for 14.5 hours.”

Sadly, the ball does bounce around the “room” and does some pretty crazy things – if I ever made a video game with this concept, it’d be called “Bouncy Pool” and it would feature your favourite pool super-stars on acid and ’shrooms. At least the prof finished the course a week before the last day and he has agreed to provide us with a formula sheet for the exam. Also, random references to bicycles and eBay kept an extra 10% of the class awake. Rating: B+

3. Sensors and Instrumentation. Prof: A. V. (Annoying-Voice)
Right from day one I knew her voice was getting on my nerves – she has this permanent fusion of false enthusiasm and comic book guy voice, it just drove me nuts. How the hell can someone talk about designing filters using six million op-amps enthusiastically? Only her, I tell ya. The course wasn’t too bad, but the LABS were insane. I think I put in an average of 10-15 hours per week doing those labs. They never helped with the course material and they were every-fucking-week. The labs were so exciting, here are the few things our “robot” could do:
a. Flash a LED
b. Count
c. Detect a magnet

Worst part was when she wanted to hold a competition where we pitted our robots to do exciting tasks like, “find the bloody magnets”, “follow the line”, “flash a led”, and my personal favourite, “kamikaze target practice”. The TAs were so incompetent in the labs, they all agreed to a common answer to all of my questions, “Uh… I don’t know… ask that guy!”

That robot is so dumb, I can’t think of ways to recycle it without being unfair to the environment. And to top it off, it looks ugly too. In fact, it looks like it was just pulled out of your calculator.

She thought we were finding this fun. She thought we’re having a blast in the competition. Some profs just don’t get it. Rating: Z-

4. Computer Structures and Real-Time Systems. Prof: P.O. (PowerPoint Only).
When you have a course that has such a long title AND the word “computer” in it – turn around and run as fast as you can. Even if there is a volcano erupting and the lava is flowing your way, just run toward the damn thing and hop over it because nothing feels as painful as this. This course was so bizarre, every lecture involved killing children and their parents, using the round-robin algorithm, and ensure all of this was enclosed in an infinite loop. We learnt that CPUs spend most of their time heating rooms. After this course, I respect Microsoft Windows more than ever. I have realized that no matter how many times it crashes and slows down – it must be due to those stupid scheduling and virtual memory handling algorithms. I finally understand why restarting your computer seems to fix so many things. It’s sad that you have to go through three months of theory to figure that out, but nowadays it’s such common knowledge, even Chimps on the help desk recommend you do that.
We had a project in this course which was to design and implement our very own real-time operating system on top of UNIX. It has a few problems, so technically it’s useless as an operating system. Rating: D+

5. Linear Systems and Signals. Prof. G.I. (Genius Intimidator)
Every once in a while, I come across a course which I feel gives me the chance to truly prove my abilities by learning everything from scratch. This was the course that I thought would judge me on my ability to pick up newly introduced concepts on signal processing and signal filtering. It was the course that had the smartest prof we’ve ever had – also the ONLY prof who assigned realistic amounts of work. This course gave me hope and inspiration – it kept me going. Everyone seemed to struggle with the concepts and I thought I knew it all. I could do the homework questions and I knew this course was it – it was my 85+% for the term. It was the course I would consider doing research in.

That was until the day I got my midterm back. To quote the prof, “I spent more time marking each midterm than you guys must’ve spent studying for this.”

This course is the bloody hardest course in all of humanity. Everything is so abstract (i.e. taught in symbols) that I’m surprised we haven’t moved on to Kwazulu and Swahili since we’ve almost exhausted the entire Greek alphabet. At least, I’ll never forget convolution and those Matlab demos. Rating: A-

Since this term has almost come to an end, I can finally hit the “resume” button. The Earth starts spinning, a guy gets stabbed, cows give milk, and chimps send spam – life back to normal.

That concludes my reflections for 2B. Exams should be lots of fun and I can’t wait to get back next term because getting through torturous hell and never giving up makes us all very special.