Ferby's Blog
These are just some random ramblings, because I have nothing better to do with my time.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Classes

By John, Annie, Lucy and the Woof-Woofs at 3:29 PM

I figured that since I've been too busy with school to post anything here I'll just bore you all to death talking about those classes. Because being my last semester I have all interesting classes(yeah right!). So here they are.

  • GEP 397 - Capstone Course for General Education classes.
  • PHY 391 - Advanced Mathematics for Engineers.
  • CSC 482 - Senior Seminar for Computer Science Majors.
  • CSC 440 - Intro to Artificial Intelligence.
  • MTH 345 - Statistics for Scientists and Engineers.

GEP 397 is basically a special topics class that you are forced to take so that they can say you are more well rounded, but really we all know the real reason is to suck some more money out of us. The section I'm taking is taught by advisor so it computer science related. It is called "The Digital Inquisition" and covers things like ethics in computing, security, encryption, digital rights management, etc. Overall it seems like it will be one of the more interesting classes I have this semester.

PHY 391 is a math course that picks up sometime after calc 3. It is for engineering and physics engineers. I'm taking it because it will cover my other 2 hours that I need to my physics minor. I'd really like to not have to work this much in a class that is outside my major, but this one is better than thermal dynamics.

CSC 482 is my senior seminar. It is 2 hours long, only on Mondays, and is a block class. So by the time midterms roll around I'll be done with it. It covers a lot of the same things that are covered in my GEP class. Although it focus more on the ethics/privacy.

CSC 440 is my last real computer science course. I started out with high hopes of this course when I first read about it in out course catalog. Then I had a class with the teacher who always teaches AI about 2 years ago and I realized that I didn't think much of him. I didn't agree with his teaching style (which was too lax). Then going through the catalog again a few months ago I was trying to figure out what elective to take and this was the most interesting of the bunch. I figured that since this was going to be my only programming class of the semester I might as well make it something I'd actually be interested in. So after the first week of class I was starting to regret my choice of AI. Same teaching style, but this time with 40 people instead of the 8 I had in his first class. So when he asked the class how we wanted our game to play out I just thought "Oh shit." Of course everybody had different ideas and we didn't get anywhere. That was Tuesday. Today we come in and he actually has a decently rigid design done with really the only thing we have to figure out now is the AI (instead of the whole game like it seemed on Tuesday). So now I think it is a toss up on whether or not this class will be good. It is looking better but only time will tell.

MTH 345 is my statistics class. What can I say about stats that won't bore you to death? Its one of those classes that I can see being kind of useful, but I'd still rather not take it.

 

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