A new term
This was an excellent winter break! I got to spend a week in Sunriver with C and his son, which was a lot of fun! After a lovely few weeks of no class, the term has started again. It will be tough for this term to beat last term – I think I learned more last term than I have any other term of school, and all of the classes were fun and had good professors.
This term I’m taking Programming Languages, Computer Graphics, and Counting, Probability and Computing. (That last one is one class: Counting, Probability and Computing.) It looks like it will be a mathier term than usual, which I’m looking forward to.
Programming Languages is one of the 3 required courses for CS grad students, and it looks like it will be a good class with a good professor, but I’m not anticipating it being earth-shaking. We’ll be using Scheme, which I’ve never used before, so that’s good.
Counting, Probability and Computing is already my favorite class ever, although I suppose that could change as the term goes on. It was learning some of this basic stuff that made me decide to minor in math as an undergrad, and I’m really looking forward to going more in-depth. Today we did counting problems, and I had so much fun! How many different ways can you order a total of 6 donuts when there are 3 possible types of donuts? How many different ways can you arrange the letters of the word MATHEMATICS so that every consonant is adjacent to at least one vowel? I know this is super-nerd coming out here, but I can’t wait to do the homework! Squee!
Computer Graphics will probably be the most challenging class. It wasn’t one of the classes I originally registered for. But I discovered earlier this week that the professor who was teaching the other class I originally registered for has no web page and doesn’t respond to e-mails. I might be willing to accept this from, say, a history professor. I would probably be willing to accept one or the other from a CS professor. But both? Since it wasn’t a class I was dying to take, I dropped it and added Computer Graphics instead.
I picked Computer Graphics because it looked the most interesting of the remaining classes I could register for, plus I have absolutely no experience at all in it. I’m using my time in grad school at least partly to try to get a feel for many different areas of CS (while still taking several courses focusing on a couple of specific areas), and this seemed like a good way to broaden my horizons. I had a humbling experience though: I totally bombed the math prerequisite quiz! To be fair, most of it was covering things I haven’t used since I took Linear Algebra in 2003 (maybe 2004?), and some I hadn’t even used since geometry in high school! Determinant of a matrix? Nope. Law of cosines? Nope. Convert from degrees to radians? Nope. I knew all of this before, and was very proficient at it, but 6-10 years of no use tends to make one forget. I’ve been reviewing like crazy and I’m sure I’ll be fine, but it will be challenging!
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