The Scoop on Classes

I have finished three weeks of classes at The Beach. I have a better idea what they are like.

Technical Communication
The professor works as a technical writer and wants to teach us useful things. Our first big assignment is writing a resume and cover letter for a real job posting. I am enjoying hearing and thinking about applying for jobs in a new way. What I was doing before in my job search was a clear failure. The professor is telling everyone they should get LinkedIn profiles. In this way I am ahead; I have a profile with 126 connections. The best part is one of my friends from Beach Newman is also in the class.

Our textbook is interesting; it was published in 1998. There are comments about this new thing called email and how search engines work. Did you know: If you search "basking shark" in AltaVista it returns 403 sites, while Yahoo only returns 2? If you search Google today, it has about 479,000 results. However, the book backs up almost every comment about what to do and not do in a resume or cover letter with results from surveys and research.

Very Large Scale Integration
This class is focused on programming for a FPGA circuit board. It is entirely hands on. There is no required textbook, only lab projects that need to be done and a final. However, the professor is not good at organizing the information he wants to present or providing help to get everyone started. He does not even have a syllabus. Getting the software running, the computer communicating with the board, and all the settings correct for a basic program is difficult. However, somehow I became friends with the one person in the class who has worked with this stuff before and he helped me get everything set up.

Advanced Math for Electrical Engineers
My friends warned me that the professor for this class was difficult. After the first day, I realized he was an old school type of teacher. He thinks students should learn a lot of little things and theoretical background to stuff, at the expense of doing simple calculations. While all the details are important, if they cannot be applied to basic situations, the knowledge is worthless. I have had many professors like this before, so I know how to handle things. However, I am in the minority. On the first day of class, there were around 25 students there. Two weeks later (after the drop deadline), I was one of five.

This brings up a tangent on my great teaching idea.

Everything needs a conceptual and practical component developed separately. I would spend the first part of my time explaining how stuff worked. There would be a select few equations; the goal is teaching everyone to visualize how things work. Then, I would work a few simple examples with real numbers. Next, I would cover stuff in mathematical detail. I would demonstrate key parts of important concepts. I would provide some general and specific examples. If things were in multiple dimensions, there would be at least one example of every concept in three dimensions. I get very annoyed when something is in only one dimension in examples and they expect me to figure out how multiple dimensions work. The homework would include simple problems with numbers and some more general ones without real values.

Mixed Signal Integrated Circuit Design
This covers the layout and design of integrated circuits on silicon. I am working with lengths that are on the order of 50 nanometers (around one millionth of a centimeter). For capacitance calculations, I am using the atto prefix, which is 10e-18. For added fun, there are multiple layers of this stuff on top of each other.

The professor has created a bad first impression. He is late to every class. Sometimes 9 or 10 minutes late, but on lab days he can be 30 or even 50 minutes late. He had not expressed any concern or worry; he thinks it is perfectly acceptable. He assigns homework that has very little to do with his lectures. Fortunately, the textbook is very good. I am learning a lot by reading it. Another good thing, the professor has mentioned we will be following the standards set at advanced places like the Lincoln Lab, UC Berkeley, and MOSIS.

The incompetence of tenured professors notwithstanding, I am very happy with my classes. Programming for a FPGA and laying out an integrated circuit on the transistor level seem like fun. Last week as I was reading about resistor layout on silicon wafers, I thought this is some good stuff and I am glad to be learning about it.

With all these classes and Beach Newman Week of Welcome events, things have been very busy. There is a lot of stuff I should be reading, working on, and doing. Since I have limited time (or questionable time management) I am following the motto "If it is not due, it is not getting done." As long as I get good at multivariable calculus theorems by the first midterm I will be OK. However, I am not trying to be OK, I am trying to be great.