Friday, August 19, 2011

Hell, it's about time.

Well everyone, I finally made it. Despite the lack of blog posts in recent months, I somehow survived my final terms as an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo. Its been a long time coming (4 years now), which is why it deserved the Starcraft 2 trailer quote you see. Of course, my undergrad wasn't as long as the gap between SC1 and 2, but still, it feels fitting.

For my most recent winter term (starting back in Jan 2011), I actually ended up doing pretty well. It was my first term in my university career where I actually managed to get an over-80% average. I know for some people that might not be much of an accomplishment, but for me that was a lot of work. It took a long time to make up for the mistakes I made in first/second year. As an added bonus, I finally was able to bring my academic standing up from satisfactory to good. My overall average was pulled down from my earlier mistakes, which took a long time to pull up.

This spring term, I ended up taking 2 courses. The first I mentioned in my last post, Digital Signal Processing (DSP), and the other was Intro to Computational Math (CM). Now, before I mention how much I disliked CM, let me say that DSP was a great time. I had an amazing professor who was extremely enthusiastic about the subject. It was one of the best courses I've taken during my undergrad. Although the final hasn't been marked yet (it took place on Aug 13, which was also my last exam!!!), I feel that I will do fine. I did after all, get a 94% on the midterm.

Now, CM. What a waste of time that was. Now of course, I picked it because I wanted to hopefully learn a little bit while also not working too hard. I went into the course expecting a programming focused course, where our assignments mostly consist of us applying various computational methods to different problems. It wasn't that in the slightest. Our assignments mostly consisted of theoretical work. Any and all programming problems we had our hand held, told step by step what to do. We spent the first 6 weeks on GEPP. In the end, I learned a few useful things, but overall, it was not what I wanted.

On a positive note, I'll be starting graduate school in Sept! Yeah, that doesn't leave me much time to go on post-undergrad vacation and whatnot, but that's not a problem. I'll be a student in Prof Cory's research group. It should be a good time.


Last thing for now, I plan on changing the URL of this blog. I was never really happy with the current URL, so I'm going to just change it tomorrow or so to scasagrande.blogspot.com . If anyone reads this, update your bookmarks!