Feel like quitting

The term tests forced that temptation to quit school to surface again. The uncertainty on the modules that had proven to be very fatal. The gene and society paper was the first time in my tertiary education that I had to answer 90% of the questions based on gut feelings alone. Not knowing how to do the gene and society paper is still quite acceptable especially when I had no idea of what the lecturer is talking about for the first four weeks or so.

What I can't accept is that I left 60 marks open for deduction in the 1102. 1102 had been my most interested subject and I have been very consistent in my learning. I dunno why I can't perform, I dunno why my brain suddenly shut off and why I could still be so calm after the test. I think I had lost my foothold in having to study for three subjects at the same time. And before I can recover from this toil. assignment six of CS2100 is out. Things just keep coming and I can't catch my breath, perhaps quitting school is a much healthier choice. Fortunately mum has always been encouraging; she never expects me to do well. she just wants me to complete my degree. Haiz, I shall see how my results turn out this semester before making a decision..

Mathematics is so difficult

It has come to a point where I can't understand a bit of the mathematics lecture. Probably it was the Mathematics class test that toiled me or perhaps I am not in a good condition to learn today. The mathematics class test experience is certainly not a pleasant one. Although the questions looked similar to the tutorial questions, there were still a number of significant differences.

First, there were no answers underneath the questions. Yeah, tutorial questions always contain answers at the end of it, and most of the time, the solution can be easily backward engineered from the answers. Guess that I have become too dependent on answers; without answers to refer to, the test questions kind of impaired me mentally.

Second, I am not accustomed to doing 15 questions in 50 minutes. Normally, I will always take more than 3 hours, on and off, to complete my tutorial questions. I tried to treat doing mathematics as a leisure, taking my own sweet time to complete the questions.

Third, my wonderful tutor is not with me. Without Sen, my confidence level dropped quite a bit. For the past few tutorials, whenever I encounter any problem, I can be sure that Sen can help me solve. With a brother who is good at mathematics, I don't fear any mathematics homework. His proficiency level with mathematics is like mine with Java programming. Why can't mathematics be like programming? Why must we remember so many formula? They should give us the formula list just like giving us the API for programming lab test.

And finally, my condition for the day is not optimal. I had lessons from 9am and just an hour break before the English lesson. I felt nauseous around 1pm, and don't feel good in doing anything. Anxiety got the better of me, and I was feeling very stressed up. It was the first time I ever got so uptight with a test. It was perhaps unpreparedness and the lack of mathematics that caused this phenomenon.

Mathematics is just not my cup of tea, or is it that I haven got it into my blood? Or perhaps is the thought that things taught in mathematics is useless in daily life that is putting me off. Think I got to fix my attitude a bit, if not I will sunk deeper in for the future mathematics modules to come. Hope mathematics can be part of me, not for the usefulness, but for survival in NUS.

CourseMarker is dangerously "precise"

Yup, managed to get the CourseMarker software to run on both my laptops. Yeah, one running Vista and the other running XP. Vista is so wasteful, 1GB of ram is definitely not enough if you want to enjoy those apple-like aesthetics. I had to changed my display settings to the rectro windows look in order to do things at a reasonable speed.

After spending around two days installing and uninstalling soc vpn software for vista, I had finally get the program running correctly. I read the two exercises for lab 0 and attempted the questions for lab 0, and two hours to get the "awesomely excellent" feedback. Those two questions are not hard, in fact they are rather straightforward; In fact I spend half the time to create the program that fulfil the test cases given. The other one hour was spent on making the CourseMarker "happy". Yeah this blardy bugger is so inflexible, the output must be exactly the same. The word exactly doesn't mean exactly to my naked eyes, but to the eyes of the computer. A \n (newline character), which is not visible to the human eye, can just spoil your performance. Yeah and I spend one blardy hour, through trial and error, that I have to output a \n at the end to get "awesomely excellent".

I thought the course on data structures and algorthim test my ability to program in an efficient way. No, I was wrong, on top of having to deal with the CourseMarker program, I have to use the ssh shell program to tunnel in to that sunfire server, copy the skeleton file to it, and using vim to write the program. If you dunno what is vim, it is an editor that runs in linux version of "Dos Prompt" or "Command Prompt". Why must we use the inefficient editor when we have GUI ones? I like the lecturer, so I guess I just have to stick to his beliefs and try to level up my computing skills. Is there any hacks on that CourseMarker program? I want to know what are the test data that it will use to test my program, so that I can save more time. I need all the time I need for my other subjects which required more attention.

I do salute the people who created the CourseMarker for their programming capability. This software sure had saved lecturers a lot of time on marking students' assignments, but did these people ever think of how much time students have to spend on dealing with those newly created problems? Those people were students once, weren't they?

Escalating Uncertainties

I thought I will have an easier time this semester after dropping one module which I had absolutely no background on; I was wrong. I dunno if I should blame myself for being stupid or unlucky to have lecturers suck at teaching. They should be locked away in labs to do research, that's the area where they can excel.

Genes and Society is becoming more and more greek to me, especially when I have a lecturer who sprouts terms that only students with biology background could understand. To make things worse, this lecturer had some problems in articulation of those big words. I tried to be diligent; sent him an email asking where in the textbook can I find more details on the previous lectures, as I could not figure out what was topics had he covered.

I wrote:

"Dear Prof Leung,

I am a student with no biology background, but I want to do well for this subject. I had been feeling lost on the previous lectures as I am not familiar with the terms used. I bought the textbook, and I wish to know where does the previous 4 lectures map to in the textbook, so that my diligence can set in to make up for the lack of experience in biology. I checked up the syllabus section in IVLE, but still could not link the previous lectures to the chapters in the book, as I don't understand which areas in the book are the lectures sessions covering.

Also, I realised that there are some missing points in the printouts that is included in the powerpoint slides that you showed in lectures. I know the intention of you doing so is to encourage people to come for lectures, but for people like me, I found it even harder to understand the lecture when I have to copy the missing points while you speak. Sorry for being so troublesome, I am not intelligent in the area of biology. However, on my part, I am willing to put in extra effort in order to complete this module with a good understanding of Biotechnology. Thanks for reading my email."

And he replied:

"It is very difficult to have a text book that match 100% with our lectures. You can find some of the topics in C 1 & 2. This text book is by far the best text book that I know which match our syllabus. For some terminology, you also can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page for a short explanation. You are welcome to ask me questions after class or come to my office. If I am going too fast on some slides, you can raise up your hand and I will stop so that you have time to copy down the extra notes."

He is not answering my questions. I need some directions, but he just won't show me the directions. Of course I know that the textbook cannot 100% match the lectures, but can't he just tell me how I can make myself understand his lectures better? How can I shoot him questions if I dun even know what the heck is going on? I did not criticize on his delivery speed, I am just asking him to give the full details of the lecture notes, is it very hard to do so?

Perhaps it is my fault after all, I should never have chosen this module in the first place. But hey, it is a general education module, shouldn't the lecturer teach in a way that non biology students can understand? He said so in his first lectures, but his words can only be deciphered for those who had biology background.

There are more. The lecturer for CS2100 is another terrible teacher. He kept asking questions that nobody can understand, except for one guy whom I suspect already had strong background on computer hardware. He kept introducing new terms without explaining what it mean, same as that Prof Leung. And the further he went into his teaching, the more uncertain I feel about this subject.

MA1301 is another killer. This time round, I can still understand the lecturer. Although the lecturer's teaching sucks initially, but I can see that he had improved a bit. That had resulted in me not being clear about 3 chapters. Once again, I tried to be diligent. To my horror, there are errors in the textbook, and I took quite a while to realize that. What is even more exciting is that there are no examples covered in lectures to deal with the tutorial questions that he posed. 7 questions - 1 which I can confidently do, 2 which I can get the answers but not dunno how I get them and 4 which I had no idea how to solve.

Even my most favourite Java subject is delivered using Mathematics. Why can't the lecturer just use real world examples to teach the programming techniques? Why must he use complex numbers and make everything so complicated? What make it worse is that we are expected to know those useless mathematics. Why must NUS do things the complicated way when there are simpler way to do the same task?

Am I stupid? Am I not focused enough? Am I not hardworking enough? Why are there so many modules that I can't understand? Urghh, I miss my poly days; helpful lecturers, straight-forward way of teaching, powerful time table system, responsible administrative staff. Is being in a "world-class" University something to be happy about? No I dun thing so.

I am not coughing

Yeah Melvin, thank god, I did not catch the cough virus from eating that cake. Anyway, I cannot believe that the cake was bought from Starbucks; it was really good. Hope that Kenneth enjoyed our company, although it was very unexpected.

Updates on school.. I thought I will have an easier time this semester after dropping that electrical engineering module, but I maybe wrong. I am starting to have difficulty comprehending the mathematics topic after the revision topics. What makes it worse is that the lecturer and the textbook are no more than ornaments. I think I have to rely on Sen to give me some of his mathematics "aura" in order to get through this one and three more similar doctrines with escalating difficulty. Perhaps optimists may argue that there is nothing that is impossible but I can see no factors to make things a little better.

The English module is quite enjoyable although the lecturer appeared to be rather threatening. She looks like a kind person trying to be wicked, yet you never know where she stands. I am really sincere in leveling up my command of the language, even to the extend of doing some self learning on advanced grammar usage. I totally agree with Wee Hua that this module is the most useful in this semester. I want to be capable of communicating with people with confidence and accuracy. In addition, I hope to be able to stand in front of hundreds of people and be as natural as talking to my buddies. Still waiting for toastmasters club to give me some training on those soft skills.

CS2100 - Computer Organisation Design is more than just computer hardware. I am beginning to fear this one too, as there are points that I just couldn't grasped in lecture. And when I try to read the textbook on that chapter, I found that it is in the companion cd in pdf form; Reading from the computer screen is very tiring. I believe, however, that this module can put me at an advantageous edge when I do the other engineering modules in future. The question is whether I can get the best out of it.

Genes and Society is very biology-based. I think I chose the wrong module, because I felt very disgusted at the various techniques that they will teach us about biotechnology. I can hardly tolerate experiments like harvesting human organs with animals, injecting different bacterias into mices and any other unethical experiments. Urghh, I am still figuring out how I can get myself interested in reading this module.

Data structures and algorithms - a subject that is taught in Java. Yes, finally a module that will expose me to more applications of my favourite programming language. Even though Java can be slower than others, but I still feel that it is very friendly to programmers. This is indeed one good reason for it to be slower than the rest. However, the methodologies that are covered in this module is very geared towards computer scientists, rather than people who just want to use Java for commercial purposes. Hmm, perhaps coding sudoku and all those difficult programs can bring in more traffic for your personal site, which in turn can bring more revenue.

Apart from twitching eyelids, I am relieved that I am not suffering from any other ailments that are more disruptive in nature, like coughing, flu, fever. Hope that this phenomenon is not an indication of something worse. I do feel tired easily these few days even though I am sure I have at least 8 hours of sleep. Hope my condition improve when I am more comfortable with this new way of life.

A bad start

Second day of school, I had to drop a module. This was the first time that I ever dropped a module. My left eyelid hinted that there was going to be some bad news early in the morning. It is not about the lecturer for electrical engineering, the lecturer can teach well. Even though he used the same technology as the lecturer for introductory mathematics, he can articulate his voice better, and I could catch his every single word. However, my extremely low intellect for physics had gotten me into trouble. The only thing that I could understand in that 2 hours lecture was the name of the recommended textbooks and where to get them. Is it that when one gets too deep into a particular discipline, he will find it hard to relate to other disciplines?

I think I had made a wrong choice on getting into Computer Engineering. I love what I can do after going through this 3 year long programme, however, I realized that this course had a lot of Mathematics and Physics subject that are delivered by lecturers who assumed all their students graduate from high school and junior colleges. They used a lot of terms which I found were greek. Maybe schooling is a wrong choice for me, my mind was filled with things other than A-Level oriented teachings. I want to acquire new knowledge that is not "expansion packs" to A-Level studies that I had no prior experiences. The qualifying english test was like this, then mathematics and now electrical engineering..

I am now left with five modules to take for this semester, and that will mean that I will have to overload myself with tougher subjects in the future. I have 2 computer related subjects (which I feel very much at home) and 3 A-Level related subjects. I just hope that I can be more focused this semester. On the bright side, though, I have more free time to do more things. Let's see how things go, if I can build myself a money-making business, most probably I will withdraw from school and focus on making more money. After all, it is the hope of earning more money (directly or indirectly) that landed me in this situation.

School starts today

This is the day I had once anticipated - school starts officially today. Today is going to be my first day for schooling in a University. Somehow, I am feeling lethargic rather than energetic. The first and only lecture for the day is Mathematics which I believe is my Achilles' heel. I don't even know the terms for the various brain-wrecking formulas.

Hope that every subjects will be 1 + 1 = 2 for me. I think I should listen more of Mayday's 咸鱼. Anyway for people who can't understand the chinese characters, it means salted fish. It is a very inspirational song that urge one to pursue their dreams with determination. That's all for now, I have to go to school early to buy all those compulsory textbooks.