Originally posted by: eLiu
Originally posted by: hypn0tik
Originally posted by: eLiu
Oh I haven't graduated yet...indeed I'm starting my sophomore yr in September. I'm at MIT.
edit: if you're interested, I'm double majoring in Aero/Astro engineering & math. I want to get a job out of the former...and I enjoy the latter, hehe.
Haha. I was JUST about to ask you what you were taking there. A buddy of mine from high school goes to MIT. He was in Aero but I heard that he switched into something else because he didn't like it.
I was actually surprised that you took complex analysis already but I guess the double major would help explain it.
How do you like it there anyways? Is your schedule as ugly (if not uglier) than mine? How difficult is the material?
My schedule isn't quite as a bad as yours. I get to pick my own courses & I try to spread out the ones that have recitations and/or labs attached.
I definitely enjoy it here...well I mean no one loves to be doing hmwk all the d*mn time, but the environment is great and the other students & profs are awesome.
That's always a good thing. All work and no play makes eLiu a dull boy.
I came in to MIT w/a good deal of advanced standing credit in math so I took a lot of math classes in my freshman yr. The aero/astro program is set up kind of funny and while I could've started it (I had all the prereqs), people advised me to wait till my sophomore year & start it w/everyone else in my class (2008). So I spent my time doing math courses & knocking down the institute writing requirements, chemistry, and biology.
My high school was hardcore about math. We had this one crazy teacher (he was the department head) and he made all the 'good' students write every math contest possible. Yeah, I've written the AMC 10, AMC 12, but on the day of the AIME, I was sick. I even got to go to ARML for this math competition. Yeah, I'm a nerdy 'mathlete'.
I've taken real analysis (rigorous, hard, spent an ungodly # of hours in this class to get my B-), complex analysis (not as rigorous, but not easy still...this prof is famous here for loading tests up w/trick questions & other crazy crap; they felt like taking the AIME again), numerical analysis (loved this class...not tons of work, but every problem set had at least 2 questions that were designed to stump you for a good long time), and principles of applied math II (basically an intro to nonlinear PDEs...so cool that I want to take the grad levels).
Wow. Some of those courses sound painful. Non-linear PDEs? Are they as bad as they sound? I'm pretty confident that I can handle complex without too much difficulty but I'm worried about the rigorous part. Our ODE class last year had some rigorous BS about Cauchy so I just ended up memorizing it, lol. Fortunately, it didn't show up on the final so I guess I got lucky there.
I came in w/credit for calc1 (single var), calc2 (multivar), difeq, linalg, physics1 (mechanics), physics2 (E&M), and some odds & ends "general" (read: useless) credits from APs.
The requirements for getting into my program are pretty similar. I needed Phys, Chem, Calc, Lin. Alg., and English to get in.
I also took a class in EE on programming (in Scheme)...not too hard, a TON of work, and then I got f-ed in the arse on the final...haha and I thought it was gonna be my easiest final
Then there was intro chemistry/bio which weren't too bad, and psychology/east asian history to cover the writing requirement (no more freaking essays, YAY.)
EE prof's are the worst. I had this course last year that dealt with digital logic and computer architecture. The midterm was pretty simple. Ended up with a 90 on it. The final however, raped a good deal of us. My mark dropped 15% in that course. The assembly part of it wasn't too shabby but the actual architecture part (basically the intrinsic properties of RAM and such) owned me. We studied in great detail about the Motorola 68k processor (I think that's what it was) and our prof asked us all these obscure questions on it. Needless to say, it was ugly.
But uh as for difficulty/amt of work, it really varies a lot by class & by person. I mean I had some students in my real analysis class that attended the IMO...suffice to say that they didn't spend nearly as much time on that material as I did. Alternatively I breezed through chem/bio but there were definitely kids who thought those classes weren't easy.
I'm finding the difficulty to be around a 7/10 but the amount of work required is insane. For some reason they find the need to unload as much information as they can on you in the shortest amount of time possible.
Bio killed me though. I had no idea as to what the hell was going on in that course. I didn't take bio in high school (mistake) and I struggled with that stuff. A whole bunch of randomness if you ask me. I barely passed the midterm (30.5/60) but somehow ended up with a B in the course. I don't think I killed the final so I guess I was in the right spot on the bell. w00t!
Then different professors have different 'philosophies' on work/difficulty. The numerical class gave out assignments every 2 or 3 weeks, 5ish problems each. 1 was a giveaway. 1-2 more were challenging, but not too hard. The last 1 or 2 were hard...you really had to understand what was going on to solve those. No amount of reading the textbook or searching the internet was going to help you. Only 1 test though...long & designed to make you die :/ But the teacher was great...smart as hell & sounds kind of like Mr. Mackey (sp) from Southpark
Yeah, profs are not in the least bit consistent. Our math courses didn't have problem sets as such but we had quizzes every so often. The midterms and the finals were worth a lot though. In chem and phys however, we had a problem set every week, a midterm and a final. The problem sets weren't too bad. They started off easy and then got pretty rough. Still doable though if you spent enough time and effort on them.
Complex analysis was a test every other week, then a problem set every 4th week (so it was pset, test, pset, test, pest, test--3 of each). Hmwks had 4 problems...1 giveaway, 2 medium, 1 very hard. Giveaway meaning if you read the book or went to class, you'd get it. Medium took some thought & hooking some concepts together, but you'd prevail if you really put forth some effort. Hard meaning there was some trick buried deep in a pile of computation & if you didn't see it, you lose. I already explained about the tests...
The PDEs course gave hmwk every 2nd or 3rd week, 10-15 problems. Most were book problems to get you to learn material we didn't have time to cover in class. Then there were some nutsy problems the professor wrote up...these things sucked. The solutions spanned a few pages at least. The last & hardest problem of the year had like a 6 page solution handed back to us (wtf) for that one problem.
(Note that in every class there were ppl that found it easier than me, and people who found it a lot harder than me. Like I thought the real analysis class was hard, but I stuck it through...others didn't. We dropped from 60some to 15 after the first exam--avg: 25/100. I didn't think the PDEs course or the numerical course were horribly hard (esp after real analysis), but there were others who really struggled, some who struggled & still failed...and there were guys like this one kid in the PDEs course who did so well on the midterm that the prof awarded him extra credit for just being awesome.)
That said, professors are all very willing to help you out of class--whether you don't understand a concept or can't figure out a HW problem, they're always willing to help. Some will even help you solve out most of the problem as long as you don't wait till the last minute & demonstrate that you have tried to solve it. (And for the most part, they aren't out to fail you. They'll even bump your grade up a little bit if you show that you're trying).
And the students often form study/hmwk groups to get assignments done (this is usually encouraged, as long as you don't copy...which sadly still happens). I did this a lot...it was helpful to everybody & you get to meet a lot of new people...and realize how smart "smart" people really are. Though it's cool working w/people like that b/c they can expand the way you think...intellectual osmosis...haha
How does your friend like it here? And where are you attending school? It must suck not being able to pick your schedule...geez.
I haven't talked to my friend in a while. He liked it at first but I think partying got the better of him. Maybe you might know him considering you were both in Aero. Does the name Hyon sound familiar?
I go to the University of Toronto, St. George Campus. I'm in a program called Engineering Science and they don't let us pick our own schedules. We get to pick from the hard comp sci and the harder comp sci. Course requirements mandate that we have a HSS (humanities and social science) credit in order to graduate so I ended up having to take some BS course (read: Anthropology). It sucked royally. Pure memorization and the biggest waste of my time.
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