Winter Recap

Wow, it’s intimidating putting the first post after 6 months of radio silence, but it’s not like I don’t have good excuses or anything.  To (begin to) get everything here back up to date, here’s what’s happened Winter term.

Maybe I’ve just been battle-hardened by the insanity that was Spring 2013, but looking back I think Winter term was actually somewhat uneventful.

I worked a one-month internship, back with the same group I worked for last summer.  It was just before Winter term began-- through most of December-- but it gave me a credit towards Winter term so that I only had to take 2 core classes and no additional seminar.  The internship itself was great—Beth and I got a nice influx of money right when we needed it, there were tons of paid holidays during the month, and I pretty much had the Intel campus to myself.   It was like a ghost town, but I had some really clearly defined projects to work on, and I think I did pretty well.  

Academically, it was a mixed bag.  I’ll cover the low point first:

My professor from Post Silicon validation.

Post-silicon validation ended up being an enraging and nightmarish waste of time and money.  It was taught by a professor whom I had heard decent reviews about, but ended up being unorganized, unclear, and impossible to understand.  Cheating was rampant in the course and though he was aware of it, he did nothing to control or report it.   There was no syllabus for the course whatsoever, which I am almost certain is against PSU policy.  Deciphering his project assignments was simply impossible, and he actually forced me to repeat one of them because I did what was printed on the assignment and not “what he meant”.  His idea of homework (which was meant to prepare us for the tests and projects) was to say “make up some problems and then solve them, that is your homework”.   A lazy, unfair, incomprehensible, disorganized mess of a professor who actually beat out the previous worst experience I had had at PSU, and ruined post-silicon validation for me.  I brought up many of these issues with the department chair, who was upset to hear them yet powerless against the rule of tenure. To make matters worse, this class marred my otherwise perfect transcript.  So yes, I guess I am still upset.

Computer Architecture II, however, balanced things out.  The computer architecture classes are probably the most useful and enjoyable classes I have taken so far at PSU.  A large amount of surprisingly difficult and lengthy work and projects, but I think that every minute/hour/13-hour stretch/entire weekend that I dumped into them couldn’t have been better spent.  I got so much out of those classes, and I only wish that other professors (ahem…) could match their quality.   A nice added bonus was winning a prize for (third) best performing project at the end of the term, narrowly beating out some extremely brilliant engineers.

Another high point to the term was being a tutor at PSU.  The money was hardly noticeable, but I really enjoyed being more involved on campus and talking to students who were just getting started in their education.  I feel like I have a lot of information to offer—especially to postbac students, for whom the path from start to finish can be extremely confusing.  I enjoyed it much more than I anticipated I would, and I look forward to doing it again in the future.

I’ll have to pick up with Spring term in the next post, because there is a lot of ground to cover there…