Adventures in Graduate School

Since I am finishing my first semester of graduate school, I have some things to share. Before I started as a masters student, my thoughts of graduate school were colored by what I heard at top tier research schools. However, when I started at a modest state school, I discovered graduate school was not what I had expected.

At the school where I am, the masters program seems like a simple extension of their undergraduate program. Compared to their bachelors classes, the only differences are the teachers teach less and most of my classmates are from India. I was taking a survey the other day and I realized something. While I am happy I am in school working toward an electrical engineering degree, I am displeased with the quality of my classes, professors, and the education overall. If I could have gotten into a better graduate school, I would have gone there instead.

I have experienced some interesting moments in graduate school. Since these gems of higher learning will not be experienced by a lot of people, I want to share them with you.

Impediment to learning
In one of my classes we were filling out instructor evaluations. For the question of "Were there any impediments to your learning?" someone wrote "the professor." He was right.

The value of timely work
I put off doing a lab for one of my classes. I had to simulate a circuit and then layout another circuit on silicon as if it was being constructed on an integrated circuit. When I told one of my friends I did not have the lab working, he emailed me the files. With a couple of quick changes, I demonstrated the working lab to the professor and received full credit for the demonstration. Sometimes it pays to procrastinate.

Understanding an important algorithm
I had a lab due for my VLSI class. It was supposed to be a Viterbi encoder/decoder. However, neither the professor nor anyone in class could explain how the complete algorithm worked. The people I knew just took an example in the textbook and made some changes to it. I built a glorified shift register. It takes the inputs, stores them, then displays them two cycles later so it looks like it does the processing it needs. It completely side-stepped the XOR gates and PSK transmitting I was supposed to do. Since there was no noise in our simulation, any other stuff I added would be unnecessary and optimized out by the IDE. However, the professor was happy when I showed him a working program. I wrote up the report and included a figure and table from the textbook on the part I did not do.

Getting your work back
With a week left in the semester, one of my professors decided it was a good time to give us back our graded work from the semester. He handed back seven homework assignments. However, he did not grade them; he just put a check mark on the front. There was a problem where I just wrote the question and left a big blank space below it. The professor did not read it, he just put a big check mark directly over it. After I got the homework back, I knew I should not work too hard on the last two assignments. I wrote some equations and copied circuits from the textbook and that was it. If only my paper for the class could be so easy . . . or is it?

If you do end up going to graduate school, make some friends in your program right away. You will probably learn more from them than your professors.