Normally, the sophomore year is the busiest year of NTUEE, but I’m actually busier this semester.
Last semester is the hardest semester of the first 4 semesters of mine, but I still managed to go to both Taekwondo club and Judo club (and the football team of our department of course). However, in the bottom half of this semester, I only managed to go to a total of 1 time to Taekwondo club and Judo club (still played football week-in-week-out tho).
Before, I could spent all my time not doing coursework related things on extracurricular activities, but this semester, I also had to do what my boss from my internship wanted me to do and some internship preparations, like writing resume, cover letters and leetcoding, and these things took a lot of my time. Actually, during final exam weeks, the subject I’d spent most time on, is leetcode.
About the courses I took, they’re generally much easier and funner than the mandatory courses in the first two years. Therefore, even though I wan’t less busy than before, I’m definitely much happier.
Below I’ll write some thoughts about the courses I took. Note that they are not in any way intended to be helpful. I just write what I want.
Spanish (Ⅱ)(1)
I went to the Spanish (I) with the same teacher in summer, full online due to the pandemic, and I thought taking the course in person would be after months of quarantine would be awkward to me, but actually, not at all.
Taking this course in person is actually better than via google meet, because in google meet, the teacher would randomly separated us into groups when there was a practice session, but irl we were stuck to our neighbor, the person next to our seats, so throughout the whole course our practicing partner are all the same. This greatly decrease the awkward moments.
Another thing I worried about was that, I constantly wrote my own notes on Roam Research in the online Spanish (I), and I might not be able to do that when taking the course in person. Fortunately, the teacher did not care about whether you use your devices or not, so I could still use my laptop during the class.
As of the effectiveness of the actual course, online v.s normal, ……. I’m not so sure. The differences are not significant. In google meet, I constantly did other things during the class, which was the main cause of information lost, and in the actual classroom, ….. nothing changed.
General Psychology
I always want to took this course, but the class I was in is a little bit different. The professor is not that conventional. He opened this class for everyone to enroll, because he expected Covid to become serious again and then every course would be forced to go full online anyway (spoilers: it did not). He offered 2 options for grading, first is class participation + wikibook edits, second is a final exam.
The wikibook edits option is really easy. Each submission would earn you 0/5/10 points, so you’ll just have to submit 9 times (if it gets full score) to have A+. The target of edit is the wikibook project the professor had done in his previous version of classes. It’s a compilation of many wikibook articles written by his students, called Super General Psychology . All the contents have already been written, so what we have to do is to edit them to achieve better quality, either in terms of contents or visual.
At first glance, it is a pretty cool and meaningful thing, but actually, the wikibook articles written by his students, are very very bad. They are all extremely verbose, repetitive, and contains many unreliable sources. It is the result of the previous version of grading. In his previous version of classes, the score you get on each edit is solely determined by the insertion count. Therefore, the more text you copy paste from trash resources, the higher grade you got. The professor noticed it, so he change the scoring method from quantitative to qualitative. The score you got for each submission was now decided by the TAs. And they encourage you to not insert new text, but edit previous contents and visuals. Unfortunately, that wan’t nearly enough to save it. There is just too much garbage in each wikibook article. I doubt anyone can really get useful information from reading the wikibook.
The score is super easy to get tho. I spent like 1 hour on each submission, and I overachieved on all of them. The full mark in 10 points, but I feel like each of my submission worth 20 points. I never actually read the contents, I only focus on the UI UX part, like adding links, formatting tables, changing punctuation marks form half-width to full-width, inserting the space of pangu etc.
As of the actual course, it’s pretty fun. The professor was a math graduate, so he won’t talk about those retard part of psychology, but the more scientific portion. Actually, psychology is more like the physiology of brain. The professor is a pretty good lecturer, and I did learn something. Unfortunately, I was just too busy on other things toward the end of the semester, so I only watched like 2/3 of less of his lecture videos. I mean, I could actually not watch any of the course video and still get A+ by editing wikibook, so …….
Macroeconomics (1)
The professor, Ching-Sheng Mao, is of New Classical School, and it’s actually not much different from microeconomics. All the methods of analysis, like budget line, indifference curve, utility function, edgeworth box etc. are same. I thought I would know better about the differentiation between micro & macro-economics after I took macroeconomics, but actually, I do no know what the differences are now. That’s probably natural, given the fact that there is no differentiation between the two in Adam Smith’s Classical world. Rationality & equilibrium, these are the two things to solve everything.
I have friends that goes to the class with a Keynesian professor, and Keynesian economics seems to have many weird formulas coming out of nowhere. Not the case in my class at all. All the formulas taught in this course are derived from simple and easily-understandable concepts.
Mr. Mao is a really fun person. He likes to criticize people or politics in a really funny but sensible way, backed with the analysis he did on the blackboard. He also thinks having exams is a waste of resources, so sometimes he’ll come up with some unexpected changes of grading.
For example, several years ago, on the very day of the final exam, he suddenly announced that there would be no exam. It sounded ridiculous at first, but he only kept the exam to make students study, and since before the actual exam day, every student expect there would be a final exam, they would study, so really having the final exam or not did not matter anymore as the goal (to make student study) had been achieved already.
But of course, just as increasing inflation rate to achieve less unemployment rate, it only works when the change is unexpected, so Mr. Mao never did it again. However, on the day of our final exam, he did the trick again, with some variations. He announced you can opt to use your adjusted midterm exam score * 0.9 as the overall grade, instead of the original midterm + final / 2. Which means that, if your adjusted midterm exam score is over 94 or so, you’re automatically A+ if you took the option and not took the final exam. So, those high-performing students scoring high in midterm, which is of quite a number, really just walked out. Unfortunately, I fucked up in a GDP calculation problem and lost a standard variation of score in that problem in midterm, so I was not one of them. Fuck GDP
Computer Networks
I’ve always admire those who can talks really fast and continuously while not compromising the contents, and the professor of this course, Wanjiun Liao, possesses this special skill. She can literally speak in 1.5x of normal speed, and not stopping for any second in the entire 1hr class, it’s incredible. Unfortunately, although all she said was actual useful course contents, they were just everywhere. She did not taught sub-chapter by sub-chapter, nor did she taught slide-by-slide. She often times just stay on a slide while talking about some completely unrelated things (tho still related to the course).
The quizzes, exams and programming assignments are pretty ordinary, I guess, not too easy, not too hard. But I want to talk about the final project. The topic of final project is not open, all groups need to do a small video streaming player using RTP & RTSP, meaning, it really just another programming assignment, but in groups. Actually, the simpler version of this project is an assignment of CS department’s Computer Networks course. On one hand, not having to decide the topic saves a lot of hassle, on the other hand, it’s super boring. Yes, during this project, I did learn a lot more about socket and packet transporting, but I really have no drive other than getting good grade. So, when there were bugs, it just got really frustrating. You would start questioning what was the point of all this. If we can decide what we want to do ourselves, we might come up with an interesting game or whatever, making the project more interesting and more enjoyable, making it more than just an ordinary assignment.
Algorithms
The loading of this course isn’t nearly as hard as what it’s said to be, because the homework seemed to be only half of the previous years. It isn’t really difficult too. I barely payed attention in class, but when I was doing homework, I can get familiar with the concept and techniques by reading some online articles.
The exams are really easy also, the average score was like 70+, while mandatory courses before like Microelectronics and Electromagnetism have average score of 50 or so.
Programming assignment tho, is hard to say. There are 3 PAs. The first one is merely implementing basic sorting algorithms. The second is a LC medium level dp problem, but it requires some very great optimization, because the largest test case is super large (n=18k while the algo is O(n^2)), and you have to run it in under 10 min. to get credit. And time is not the only problem. Space complexity is also O(n^2), and you’ll have to squeeze it very hard to make it not using all the memory on the workstation. The third is a graph problem, the goal is to make the given graph acyclic by breaking edges with min total weight of edges broke, and for weighted directed graph, it’s NP-hard, so the grading for that case is by what min weight you achieve in efficient time.
Overall, it’s definitely not the hardest nor the heaviest course I’ve ever taken, not even among the courses I took this semester, even though I expected it to be.
Biomedical Engineering Lab
There are 3 labs and a team project in this course. The first and the third lab is very easy, just use the equipment to measure something. The second one, however, is almost as difficult and time-consuming as a full class project. You had to design and implement 2 circuits to filter and enhance EMG & ECG signal, and the you need to transport the signals to computer via Arduino, and visualize the signals in a simple app you made. The most time-consuming part is the circuit. Hardware is just so hard to debug. When a circuit did not perform as what you were expected, it can be the broken wire, the broken resistances, the burned breadboard, or even the noise from the power supply or the table. In the end, after like 24 hours of commitment, we still couldn’t completely filter out the noise. ECG’s shape was barely presented, and the amplitude of EMG was already pretty big even when your arm was stationary. Also. we spent quite a lot of time believing we had successfully implemented the ECG circuit, while later on we discovered that it was actually just the noise (yes it looked super like ECG signal).
As of the team project, our group stuck many sensors on a glove (we called it “infinity gauntlet”) and use Arduino and some python libraries to translate the signals into mouse movements, basically a wireless mouse but in the form of a glove. The advantages it had over ordinary mouse is that you can use it in any surface, your laps, for example, and the disadvantages is obviously the accuracy (it’s pretty hard to control). We also trained a machine learning model to identify what you wrote, so you can also use it to replace your keyboard. But again, the accuracy is super bad, basically unuseable.
Unlike other lab courses, this one ended quite early, 1-2 week before the final exams, while most of the final projects ended in 1-2 weeks after the final exams. So, most of the groups of this course, did not really finish the projects. We all achieved something, but not quite the level of completion to be honest, including our group.
Summing up this lab course, it’s not quite what I expected (I thought it would be super easy with close to no loading), but it’s not bad, I didn’t learn much, but I had some fun doing the team project. And thanks to the early due date of project, it did not contribute to the final projects nightmare week.
Computer Architecture
The course contents are pretty difficult to me, but the quizzes and the midterm is pretty easy. I got pretty good scores in all of the quizzes and exams, but because I kind of failed the final project, my overall grade isn’t too good.
Research
I joined professor Hung-Yu Wei’s game theory group, and honestly, I’m quite disappointed. I spent the summer and the first 2/3 participating in the weekly game theory in wireless networks study group, in which I read several papers and present 2 of them. Nothing else. I found listening to others’ presentations, really served to purpose. The information you got is just too little. Preparing and presenting the 2 papers myself did help me understand the game theory techniques they used better tho.
For the last 1/3 of the semester, I was given a simple problem to solve, and because the problem was to simple, I had to add many layers and elements into it (I don’t even know if the things I added make sense irl), and even then, it was still pretty simple. And because I had quite a lot of things to take care in the last 1/3 of the semester, so I didn’t really spend much time in it either.
The professor also wouldn’t meet with you weekly, not even bi-weekly. I had meet with him with a total of 3 times throughout the semester (including summer & winter vacation), while other students that join other labs were all so busy doing their things.
Varsity Sport-Male Judo
I joined the Judo club at the start of my sophomore year, because I was taking the Beginning Judo (beginner level Judo class) and I wanted to practice more. After I won the Judo Freshmen Cup (among the 3 people in my weight group) at the end of that semester, I decided to continue practicing with them.
I also participated in the National Intercollegiate Athletic Game and won the 7th place in Judo (among the 23 people in my weight group) at the start of this semester, and after that, I decided to practice more because I was so bad in the competition. Even though I won the 7th place, which was not a bad number actually, I only won 1 out of 3 games. And hearing the analysis my performance from the teachers and seniors of the club, I found that I have so much to improve, and was motivated by it.
Unfortunately, I was just so busy at the 2nd-half of the semester that I got no time to go to the practice. The teacher still gave me A+ tho. But I don’t think I would join the school team again, because I don’t think I would be less busy next semester. Don’t think I’ll join the competition again either, even if I do, I most probably won’t win a better place than the previous year.
So sad.
Judo is super tiring tho. I would almost throw up and want to go back home in every practice.