End of Semester Review

End of Semester Review

So it’s been a while. Sorry about that, I’ve been kind of… busy. And not the making-cool-stuff sort of busy, more of the oh-my-god-finals-are-coming-AHHHH-THEY’RE-ALREADY-HERE sort of busy. But now it’s over, and I’m essentially guaranteed all A’s and A minuses in the reported-to-the-registrar sort of way. That was somewhat surprising because I didn’t always get straight A’s at UPS, where the classes weren’t always trying to kill you; but at the same time it’s not surprising at all, because around 80% of the material was old hat to me.

So now that I have some time to actually think back and reflect on my time in New York, the foremost question is how everything panned out, versus how I thought it would pan out at the beginning of the year. But before that, perhaps a comparison and contrast:

• I went from living in a basement to living 7 stories above the street. There was a bit more light reaching my window (curse you, tall buildings that I am not in!) but the size of the window more than made this move a huge gain in the not-being-gollum sector.
• I went from living in a suburb-ish sort of area to a decidely urban area. UPS being in a suburban area really closes off the school and isolates it into its own sort of ecosystem, whereas Columbia being uptown of a huge urban center really… I’d say it doesn’t open up the campus, but boy is the ecosystem definitely more of a niche.
• I went from being a junior to being a junior. This is weird because you’re taking lower lever classes, but you’re *old*. You end up talking to freshmen, because they’re the only ones without established groups, and it’s striking how they seem so naive and young. Ahh, youth…
• I went from being on a first-name basis with several professors to “oh hello, do you remember my from that one class? I don’t have time to do research with you right now, and I’m going to be gone in a year. Opps, year gone, goodbye!” (I really, really hope this sort of thing doesn’t happen)
• I went from being a pasty recluse to being a pasty recluse.

Oh, well, I guess I’m out of easy things to snipe.

So how was I expecting New York to pan out? I was expecting… I’m not sure, anymore. A geek mecca? (Except that would have been obviously not probable, given the relative placements of MIT and Columbia) Now that I think about it, I just went without an agenda and decided to take whatever life threw at me. I didn’t know what New York was like; I based my 3/2 decision on who gave me more financial aid, not on which school would give me the better opportunities or whatever. I had no idea what I was getting myself into; I only was vaguely expecting something big.

So I wasn’t expecting too much, but I had some ideas about the ‘geek mecca’ that I was looking for, and to an extent Columbia has delivered. I will note that the geeks at Columbia are more inclusive of the business side of things, which kind of threw me off: hell, we didn’t have enough geeks at UPS to even talk about doing startups.

It might be because I got involved with the geekiest-sounding group I could find on campus, and while some of the ADI goals are aligned with my own (CODE CODE CODE) some of the others are somewhat different (encourage entrepreneurship!) and the main goal of the ADI (geek herding!) is a nobel one that has to be done to do great things, but it’s… still grunt work (unlike CODE CODE CODE). So what I was trying to say is that since I’m involved with the ADI, I have no idea if my conclusion that Columbia geeks are more business oriented than geeks elsewhere is true or fallen prey to selection effects or not, which reminds me I need to actually do things with the IEEE group on campus, since I managed to miss almost every single meeting/event thrown by IEEE, and there are probably some hardware hackers lurking with them.

Like always, some professors are cool, and some other professors just don’t give a shit. I suppose this is standard for large research institutions, but it’s a definite paradigm shift from UPS, where most of the professors did give a shit about the students. I suppose that the one class where the professor was less than engaging could be explained by the fact it was held in the early evening, and covered some of the mind-numbing basics of the field [FOURIER TRANSFORMS AGAIN??? I MEAN WHEEE], but that’s no excuse for being inaccessible and having the difficulty of the midterms jump all over the place.

I realized (finally) that classes are somewhat of a waste of time: all the material covered, at least in these lower level courses, can be found in the book. However, I need motivation to do the studying, and there’s nothing like locking me in a room for an hour to raise motivation for studying. Also, I’m paying for something, and by golly I’ll be getting something out of it.

Being relatively far away from campus sucks. I used to be able to roll out of bed and get to class in 2 minutes, and now I have to actually plan out my mornings. Well, having structure isn’t a bad thing, but gosh darn it if convenience isn’t swell.

It’s depressing: I sat down and tried to play some piano on the last day of classes, and it’s all gone. My violin is going, too. Have to do something about that…

Out of steam, I’ll do a end-of-year post on New Years Eve or something.

Merry Newtonmas!