My classes

I'd like to talk more about the classes I have taken. Let's go by the terms.
Later, if I'm not lazy, I will write something about the education at union in general.

Fall

AVA 101 - Photography 1 (prof. Benjamin)
This class was fun. We were given film cameras (nikon fm2 - really cool stuff!!) and 10 film roles. There we three projects throughout the term:
Photography of light because light is the fundamental part of photography and good lighting is a necessary part of any good photograph. It was mainly about finding interesting shadows of trees, wall structures or anything else...
Photography of people because -- that's just a cool thing to do :D I photographed on my trips to NYC and then I photographed Sophie in the studio.
Love / Hate final project, to bring a bit of our own ideas into the class. What I did is described here.
I spent a lot of time in the lab, because I had to develop the film and make prints of the pictures I liked, which can take a lot of time. I took about 450 pictures over the term, so just imagine.
Overall I have to say I enjoyed the class. It was my first encounter with photography and I took from it how the camera works (the technology behind it is actually not part of the class, which is sad, but I was curious) and generally speaking, I got interested in the subject. Thanks to that I later bought a used DSLR - Nikon D90. A new model only a couple of months ago (january 2013) was $1000. Until now, I took about 6000 pictures with it. I kept about 3500...

CSC 321 - Data Mining and Machine Learning (prof. Webb)
Sounds cool, right? Nick is among the coolest professors I have ever seen. He has a specific sense of humor. Hard to describe. (Actually, not so hard. But do you really wanna know...? :D). As for the class, it was a lecture-based course with some homework, presentation about a research paper (I presented face recognition) and a final project. There was a strong component of showing problems where DM&ML can be used which was a great motivation. After the presentation there was room for questions. This mind-provoking is something I find good. Being able to ask the right questions (at the right time) is great ability that I lack.
I thought 300 level courses are really hard, but it is not so bad. I expected to work more. I learned how to use some features of Weka and my final project was about detecting spam in SMS messages. I achieved about 97% accuracy, but it wasn't a really big deal.
Overall, I think more homework would make the class better.

GER 200 - German 200
This class fought a long fight with my laziness and lost. There is a lot of work for this class, but just doing homework doesn't help in learning a language. One has to be 100% committed to learning and spend every free minute by practicing.
The class has a problem: The teacher is not there to really introduce a topic, write it down on a blackboard and explain to students. All the grammar is sort of explained on-the-run and student is expected to understand it (which is not happening) or study it at home from the insanely expensive textbook (which happens sometimes). The classes are mainly used to go through homework and correcting it, reading aloud and that kind of stuff. The quizzes are too easy and did not force me to look at the material. For instance the vocab quizzes require to just connect an english word in one column to a corresponding german word in the second column. Too easy! You can guess it!

Winter

Because this is a liberal arts college I wanted to taste the non science/engineering stuff more. It was not a good decision but it made me realize how I like CS.

MBA 551 - Managing people and teams in organizations (prof. Nydegger)
A lot of theories about what people's needs are, what research has been done about job performance and a lot more... The lectures were fine and the professor is a really cool guy and good speaker, but my opinion is that studying management does not provide you with any valuable skill. At least I din't have to spend a lot of time with this crap.

ECO 101 - Intro to Economics (prof. Davis)
This course was exactly about what the name says. Micro and macro economics. Supply, Demand, opportunity cost, GDP... Ok choice. The professor's daughter lives in Prague.

CSC 235 - Modeling and Simulation (prof. Barr)
You may ask why I took a 200 level course if a 300 level was not very challenging. The answers is that 1) I checked the syllabus before and knew there was going to be more work. 2) there were no 300 level courses that I didn't take at home. (the CS dept. here has about 8 professors).
We did Vensim and later on Matlab. However, I'd enjoy the class more if was covering the material more in depth. Especially the topics of the classes later in the term were quite brief (Monte Carlo, High Performance Computing, Random walks). The problem is the students are not all CS majors and even if they are, some of them haven't even taken Data structures class, so most of them are kinda handicapped. (programming, compilation, interpreting, two's complement etc are things the students just don't know).

Spring

To move my studies back to CS, I am taking:

CSC 325 Robotics (prof. Webb)

I talked with the professor beforehand and what I'm gonna do is use kinect camera to take a picture, detect text in the picture (the text is gonna be written on some boxes) and then use robotic arm to grab the box I ask (all based on detecting and recognizing text in image). Pretty cool!! I'm excited about it. update: It took me some time but I managed to do it.

CSC-490 Independent Study (prof. Striegnitz)

Independent study in web programming. I have to do that because it is a requirement of my university. It's good that it is independent study so I don't have to spend time learning what is html.

AVA-380 Physical computing (prof. Orellana)

I thought this is gonna be a chill class but it seems like it's gonna be a lot of work. I'm not sure exactly what it's gonna be yet but I will be building an art robot and use arduino to do so.