10 – Semester in Review

This semester is the first time I felt really panicked about my academics. Well, maybe there was that one time I actually failed a class back in high school, but it was over by the time I realized it, so there wasn’t much to be panicked about.

The reason? I tried to not care as much about my grade, since grades aren’t what drive either what I end up doing in life, and because optimizing for grades usually excludes optimizing for happiness. Overall, I think this is a good strategy, but I didn’t know how to control it my first time out, and as a result my grades suffered much more than I intended, meaning my stellar GPA is more mediocre now. I can try not to care, but I’ve been optimizing for it for so long that it still stings.

An retrospective of my classes:

• AI – pretty much worthless on the subject of AI. I learned much, much more about the philosophical side of AI from Less Wrong, and the coding material wasn’t very dense. Lisp would have been interesting to learn, if I didn’t already study it in high school.
• Robotics – Mediocre topics (lots of low-level, entry-level robotics routines) and the class used a mediocre platform. It turns out (surprise!) that hardware is hard, especially when you’re using a bluetooth link. I think we should have had on board Arduino boards to do the logic, which would have bypassed the bluetooth latency and probably made much more responsive robots. And, oh god Matlab: it’s really too bad me and my partner never got the Python package for the iRobot Create off the ground.
• OS – Oh god why, that was pretty painful. But now I’ve hacked on the linux kernel!
• Logic Design – It turns out I just don’t care about really low-level hardware that much, although doing FPGAs could prove helpful in my later endeavors. It could have really used a lab where we could use FPGAs hands on. This class was also a source of great discomfort through finals, since I thought I was going to fail this one. Yup.
• Vision – Great professor, interesting topics: first half of the course went somewhat slowly while building up the requisite background. The second half of the course that blasted through various 3d depth recovery techniques more than made up for it, though.

Outside of classes, I did Maker Faire and attended an Ignite event. However, that’s all I did: once I started dying in Logic Design (and OS), I stopped doing things outside of class. For instance, there was the Biotechnology Crash Course at Genspace which I think is just awesome in theory but I couldn’t do because I was freaking out about academics. Also, I didn’t make it over to NYC Resistor or A1L all semester, which is not cool.

Overall, it was a good semester: I’m still learning how to make time for other things, and not care quite so much about grades. And, I didn’t fail any of my classes (can’t forget about that)!