The Scheming senior

Life has been busy once more, since school started. For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to take three CS classes (software engineering, programming languages, and cryptography) as well as music theory. Music theory appears to have homework due every class, which sucks, even though it's pretty easy so far. In addition, being a senior now, I have to start worrying about what direction I want my life to go in next year. Of course, being me, I'm still rather indecisive over graduate school versus industry.

Research, to be honest, is so far basically what I made it out to be—boring. It didn't help that I picked a topic that I wasn't particularly interested in, but I'm doing my best to stay interested. Professor Mathur seems to be very passionate about what he does, which helps my motivation a bit. Even though it's not that exciting (calling it flat out boring is also an exaggeration), I guess this is a good experience for me to actually have a mentor that's been in the field for years. Hopefully I can get the motivation to finish this research project and publish a paper at the end of the semester, which would look nice on a resume for grad school. Weekly meetings should boost my motivation, at least a little bit.

Classes are kind of "meh" right now. Software engineering is definitely a lot less exciting than I thought it would be, and kind of wish I had taken something else instead. The project is some sort of grunt work from HP that has to do with finance. It definitely sucks compared to the project binder that we saw, which was a game of some sorts. From what the programming languages book is saying, the class will get more interesting as time goes on, but the current chapters are boring. Cryptography is pretty interesting; it's probably the most interesting thing right now. Music theory hasn't gotten past playing scales, so it's not very exciting. Playing on the keyboards on Friday is kind of fun despite the simplicity, since I haven't played piano in about seven years now.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that has happened lately (at least to me) is the arrival of my latest shipment from Amazon, consisting of:

• The Little Schemer, 4th ed.
• Serenity, Collectors Edition
• The Design of Sites

The Design of Sites is more to get some inspiration for web design, since I clearly suck at it. I guess this is necessary, since the web is the wave of the future. Or whatever. It seems to be very illustrated, but I haven't really looked too carefully at it, yet.

Serenity came out recently, which I couldn't resist buying, even though I already own the original edition. Firefly is one of my favorite series, and extended scenes and more bonus features makes an already awesome science fiction universe even more legen—wait for it—

Last, but certainly not least, I've already gone through two chapters of The Little Schemer. The book takes on a very peculiar format, based purely (at least so far) in Q&A format. They ask questions that you can hopefully answer and give explanations for each answer. For a fairly advanced programmer like me, this is amusing at first, but tiring in some spots. I was hoping for a book that I could read cover to cover, but this doesn't seem to be the book. Not that I'm disappointed with it at all, I just don't feel like reading through levels of recursion that are obvious to me.

This brings about an interesting pedagogical method; Friedman and Felleisen take an approach that depends on the human ability to recognize patterns. It seems like if you ask enough questions, the reader should be able to figure out what a certain function does. I had kind of an advantage of already knowing what some of them did, so playing a game of 20 questions was a bit overkill, but I wonder how this teaching method would apply to a more inexperienced student.

Actually, I already use this method somewhat with students. Whenever a student asks me a question that I deem should be obvious or already known from previous labs/lectures, I bombard them with questions until they figure it out. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work, possible due to a few reasons:

• The student is lazy. This might be a mean thing to say, but I think it's true. Graduate TAs that run consulting hours complain about students being unable to debug on their own, which I believe should be fairly intuitive. I've even had someone cry, possibly to get me to write the project instead.
• The student doesn't really understand the language. Compared the Scheme, Java is pretty complex, and some students never really properly learn some language constructs (e.g. the static keyword). This presents a huge problem when you get errors like, "non-static variable referenced in a static context." This is more of a lack of knowledge than reasoning ability, so this is where I throw my hands in the air and tell them to read the textbook.
• I'm not asking enough questions or I'm asking the wrong questions. This is quite possible; unlike the concepts presented so far in this book, so it's not always possible to ask an exhaustive list of questions to make the student reason through exactly what mess he/she has just made.

Regardless of the potential for failure, I think this could be applied to some specific topics for students to look like. The static keyword is probably a good target to start with. It is not as difficult to make an exhaustive list of questions for the students to "pattern match" through for one single concept, but I guess it's too late to use this kind of method when they're working on projects midway through the semester. Hopefully I can get some spare time to concoct an article for using the static keyword, and get some response from students on how beneficial it was.

Anyway, this has been a very random grouping of topics and I think I've poured out my heart and soul enough for tonight.

Dary.

The not-as-exciting Austin post

Not to insult Austin or anything, but I'm lazy, and most of the work was done for me already. James posted a fairly comprehensive summary of what went down in Austin.

The only thing I have to mention is that I'm noticing a trend when comparing Purdue's campus to others (such as MIT and UTA). I wonder if it's really just because I've seen Purdue for three years.

The super-exciting Boston post

Yeah, so this post took about 5 days more than it should have. Oh well.

All was quiet from my end of the Internet this past weekend, since I was at MIT visiting my so-very-dear friend, Julia. Of course, like the rest of this year, my airport experience was highly unpleasant at best. I decided to fly US Airways since it was cheap; apparently they were cheap enough that they canceled my flight out on Friday evening without citing a reason, forcing me to fly out at 6:20am on Saturday to be able to spend any significant amount of time in Boston. My flights were delayed a little bit anyway, and filled with crying babies, further adding to the flight fun.

After arriving in Boston, we went to a Vietnamese restaurant around Harvard where I had phở for the first time, along with some sort of beverage made of jackfruit. Phở is basically a beef noodle soup, though there were some ingredients within that I couldn't identify (and thinking back, would probably rather not); it was pretty good, especially since I hadn't had breakfast, despite being awake since 4am.

After lunch, it was pouring extremely hard, so we spent rest of the remainder of the day in the comfort of a dorm room. The dorm is a graduate dorm, and it provides a better environment than any dorm at Purdue ever has (or will); the dorm is replete with computing facilities, conference rooms, as well as apartment-like suites that include kitchens as well as bathrooms, never mind the fact that each room was bigger than a shared double in Hillenbrand. For dinner, I stood by idly and watched Julia cook we cooked chicken parmigiana, and since I'm alive, clearly it wasn't toxic. Too toxic, anyway.

After waking up at noon on Sunday, we had pancakes, eggs, and sausage (read: fat) for...for lunch, I guess. We took a mini-tour around MIT's campus, which was interesting; it's pretty different from Purdue's campus, which I would call boring at best (and smelly during select seasons). To begin, Purdue's campus is fairly confined to a smaller area, unlike MIT (and IU, for that matter); smaller areas aren't very exciting, but I guess it's nicer for walking to class. MIT's campus is a little more widespread and more "scenic," being that it doesn't reside in a town as tiny as West Lafayette. MIT also has some fairly interesting architecture, such as their CS building, which is probably the wackiest building I've ever seen in my life (photo shown below; not mine). More to the point, most of Purdue's buildings are pretty boring (new CS building, anyone?); maybe the architecture is just a novelty that would wear off on me if I saw it every day for four years, though.

MIT seems to have a more interesting history than Purdue does, as well. Maybe it's because of MIT's incredible nerdism that makes them measure bridges in terms of people, but as far as I know, Purdue feels pretty bland in comparison. Not that we don't have our own share of of urban legend to spice up our history, but it seems like our student population is confined typical college activities of partying and tipping cows studying hard. Of course, it's also quite likely that I'm left out of the loop, since I never leave my room.

MIT hacks are also a very interesting part of MIT culture. Putting fire trucks on top of buildings and putting blown up versions of a class ring on a stolen cannon seem to be above things that Purdue students (or administrators) could ever manage. Of course, I'm not exactly an expert of Purdue culture either, so I can't really make too many comparisons, but I think it's safe to say that Purdue is relatively normal; after all, we appear to be a relatively conservative campus.

Of course MIT has its downsides too, such as living through X years of torture, paying more money for one year than I pay for four years at Purdue, and so on. Paying so much more might entitle you to better living quarters among other things (being around generally smarter people, getting a job automatically, you know), but the the painted picture of the academic workload seems...well, crazy.

We walked around Boston for awhile; the weather was much nicer than it is in West Lafayette now. Even though it was overcast, it wasn't raining, and there was a nice breeze to keep the temperature nice. In West Lafayette, it's blistering hot, and I start sweating just walking back to my apartment from work. Lucky for me, I'm not playing tennis anymore, unlike two members of my family, or I'd probably be dead by now. Anyway, Boston was a pretty nice area; I certainly like it much more than I liked New York City when we visited for spring break (possibly because it was snowing and very wet). Boston didn't feel as congested as NYC always did (given that it was a Sunday), and I guess it just felt different (in a good sort of way?) walking around Boston; maybe I felt like I had a smaller chance of getting mugged.

It was kind of weird to see some university residences (MIT Greeks, BU dorms) sitting in the middle of a city, kind of like how Soochow University in Taiwan was right in the middle of a city. The buildings there were also unlike anything you'd ever see around Purdue, partly because some of them are very old compared to anything you would see in all of Indiana. I guess someone decided it would be fun to build housing vertically instead of horizontally to prevent people in Boston from getting fat; maybe I should move into one of those houses.

We ate at a Thai restaurant for dinner (I don't remember any names, I suppose I'm a bad tourist) and I had a yellow curry. I didn't realize they would just give you "extra" bowls of rice if you needed it, and there was an awful lot of curry sauce for just one bowl of rice, but it was still good. The rest of the night was spent watching South Park and failed attempts to get me to follow along with Japanese women doing aerobics and saying really odd things like, "I was robbed by two men" and, "take anything you want." I think their smiling faces indicated that they didn't know what they were saying.

We left for the airport basically right after waking up. My flight back was also delayed at each leg, and I ended up getting back home about two hours later than I should have. I don't know if I just pick terrible times to fly or what, since I don't think I've ever encountered this kind of luck before. At least I wasn't flying Northwest, who appears to be canceling flights like nobody's business, or I'd probably still be in Boston. Alone.

So all of this took way too long to think up and write, and I leave for Austin in a few days to visit James, a lazy bum who hasn't posted on his blog in awhile, all the while thinking he can bug me about my blogging!