Michael Fogleman

Welp, my Fall 2004 semester has officially come to a close! Can't say I miss it yet. I've already gotten my grades for a couple classes and the other few should be appearing online in the next few days. Should be mostly A's. So now that it's all over, let's go through a quick rundown of the semester, class-by-class...

HI264: Modern Asia History

My first class of the day on MWF, at 9:10am. Once a week we'd have discussions on readings where the professor would call on people. He was a punk like that. The one or two times I actually did the reading, I spoke up without being called on in hopes that he'd never call me out on a question I didn't know. When people didn't know what to say, he'd be like "I wonder why." He was a pretty cool guy, though. Oh man, he really gave us his opinion the day after the election too. You could tell he was pissed that Bush won. And he made anyone in the room who didn't vote feel guilty.

I made pretty crappy grades on almost all of the exams. But I did quite well on the two papers we had. Then, he told us if we made a 75 or higher on the final exam, he'd replace our lowest exam score with our highest. So I put a lot of effort into the final and barely made that requirement with an 80. That was enough to get me a B in the class, and that's all I need to be happy for a class like history.

CSC431: File Structures

Ah, another 400-level computer science course. So this was one of those teachers who had all his notes from like 10 years ago and would just go through them, writing the stuff on the whiteboard. However, he did it in such a way that wasn't terribly boring. He actually knew what he was doing and did a good job of explaining everything along the way. This was also one of those classes where I was like the only one not taking notes. My homework average was a 100. Meanwhile I hear other students in class whining about how they only did half of their program because the rest was too hard.

Somehow, though, the midterm exam caught me off guard and I got a 75 on it because I didn't finish in time! I don't think that's ever happened to me before. But, I did fine on the final exam and I'm sure I'll get an A... so it's all good.

PSY311: Social Psychology

So I took Intro to Psychology my freshman year in college, four years ago. I think that was my favorite class that semester, and this was my favorite this semester. Learning about us humans is just fun. Plus the professor was great. She was good at teaching and wasn't too hard on the eyes either. ;) I guess the most interesting thing to tell about this class was the time I dressed up like a woman. Heh. So we had group projects on various social psychology articles. Ours was on the self-fulfilling nature of social stereotypes. As part of our presentation we did a game show skit to show how giving a male positive preconceptions of a woman could cause him to behave in a way that would evoke positive social behavior from the woman... creating a self-fulling prophecy. Well, for the skit we needed two girls and only had one, so I ended up playing a woman. I admit it!

The tests were fairly easy and we had to write a 6-7 page paper on our articles. I think I did pretty well in the class, probably an A. It's too bad I can't take a lot more classes like this one. However, I am signed up to take Intro to Cognitive Science next semester. That'll probably be my favorite class too.

CSC492: Senior Design

Ugh. This could've been so much better than it turned out to be. I guess it wasn't THAT bad, but for real... our professors hated my group. Get this. One day toward the beginning of the semester me and my group are sitting in lab working on our project when one of the two professors comes in and says "We need to talk." We move to a table and he starts the conversation something like this. "So, I'm sure you guys have figured out that in a lot of classes you can kinda get away with just giving the teacher what they want? Well have you figured out that doesn't work in this class?" I'm like... what the heck is going on here? This guy totally had the wrong idea about us. He seriously thought we were jerks and hadn't gotten anything accomplished. Everyone in my group was just taking this from him but I started to speak up and defend my group. I don't know how much that helped the situation though.

Suffice it to say that tension like that existed between us and the teachers pretty much the whole semester. It slightly changed toward the end, but not a whole lot. Unfortunately things like that affect grades, but we'll see how that goes.

Oh yeah, I guess somewhere in there we actually worked on a project. I'm happy to say that our group was able to create a piece of software that ultimately found a number of bugs in a certain company's software. That was sorta the point of our project, so we were successful. Take that, you opinionated professors.

CSC512: Compiler Construction

I enjoyed this class. Writing my own compiler is one of those things I never thought I'd do, back when I first started programming. But through this class I did just that. The professor was cool... he was really smart but really slack. Can you say, tenured? But, the point of the class was to learn all about creating a compiler and I definitely did. Our grade consisted of basically just two exams and our compiler project. I got like an 88 on the first exam and a 100 on the second one. When I got that second one back I wondered if the professor even looked at it, knowing how slack he can be. But, no one sitting around me had a 100 so I guess I did something right!

I spent many hours at home working on my compiler. It was lots of fun too! I'm not sure how far along all the other students got on their projects, but my compiler successfully compiled all the test cases, which is pretty awesome. I've already gotten my grade for the class... A+!

Conclusion

In conclusion, this blog post is so long that it actually needs a conclusion. Seriously, this semester was rather busy since I was also working part-time at IBM, but it wasn't so bad. I am glad it's over though. Heck, if it wasn't over yet you know I wouldn't be sitting here updating my blog. I'm not entirely on vacation yet, though. Next week I'm working 40 hours at IBM to try to get our project there completed. Maybe I'll even work some over time to get a little extra cash.

posted by Michael  # 12/11/2004 10:55:00 PM