The Fall semester began on Monday at Berkeley. I did not have my first class until Tuesday however—a side effect of having submitted my soul to the scheduling gods. One would imagine then that I slept in on Monday and relaxed in preparation for what will no doubt be a challenging semester. Far from that, I woke up at six in the morning. Hans, my roommate, did not sell his soul to Schedulopheles and was saddled with an eight o'clock class. I thought I would try to help ease Hans' pain so I woke up early and ate breakfast with him. Hell, I'll take any excuse to eat at Crossroads, our “super dining commons.”
Monday afternoon was spent meeting with the professors who designed Berkeley Madonna. They're interested in developing a unified, cross-platform code-base as well as implementing new features into their mature existing code. Working with them sounds like fun. I credit Matt for informing me of this job opportunity.
Coincidentally, I spent Monday evening with Matt. He and Greg visited and we all slept over at Dae-Ho's. Suffice it to say, we exceeded our allotment of fun. In retrospect, I've been having far too much fun recently. Here are the highlights:
I was hoping my classes would offer me some relief from all this fun, but alas, they did not. Tuesday morning started me off with EE 42. My initial impressions of the professor were positive, but I'll give him a couple more lectures before I develop a strong opinion for or against him.
EE 42 was followed by EE 43, the optional lab compliment to EE 42. It's supervised by a graduate student. He looked like a nice guy, but there's no doubt I could take him.
My day finished off with Geography 164. After reading the course's description, you may wonder why it's offered under the geography department. Professor Hsing explained that geography is becoming more and more broad of a term. Super.
I'm very excited about Geography 164. The professor has two master's degrees and a Ph.D. There are about sixty people in the class, at least fifty of which I'd wager are female. Touchdown 49ers.
To fill up my schedule and for various other uninteresting administrative reasons, I've added CS 61B to schedule. It's co-taught by Dan Garcia and another professor. Professor Garcia spoke at my orientation and I was very impressed with him. He's very enthusiastic and he creates a comfortable learning atmosphere. Indeed, he's received very high ratings from past students.
I'm looking forward to having a great first semester at Berkeley!
I'm surprised you didn't mention our sleeping… conditions. That, I believe, was the funnest part. Also, thanks for letting me sleep in your bed in Palo Alto last night. Appreciate it.
I'm glad to hear that you are having such a good time. I could tell you were really happy when we (Dan Rakove, Eric Lee, Dan Siroker, and I) visited you last weekend. By the way, you didn't mention our visit… you punk. I'll kick your butt at football again any day!
Try not to have too much fun! Being a nerd and actually studying every once in a while might end up being beneficial when final exams start rolling along.
In my opinion, getting involved with “developing a unified, cross-platform code-base” sounds like a good way to spend your free time. One of the most useful lessons I learned from my first year at Stanford is that balancing what I do during my free time is very important. I discovered that something peculiar happens during the quarters in which I spent most of my extracurricular time goofing off (particularly computer and video games)— The “goofing off” time balloons uncontrollably until it eats up my whole schedule. Eventually, I skipped classes and neglected “studying” almost entirely. Having extracurricular activities like “developing a unified, cross-platform code-base” sounds like a good prescription for success.
After a second perusal of your entry, I noticed that you link to Professor Garcia's ratings. Are these ratings supported by Berkeley and open to the student public, or is it an unofficial student site similar to the UCLA professor ratings at Bruinwalk.com?
EE and CS course surveys are collected and maintained by Eta Kappa Nu, the national EE honor society. Here's their index of course surveys. The surveys are distributed during class hours and instructors actually leave to ensure fair and honest evaluation. Beyond that, I don't know how Berkeley feels about them.
Booyah. Go Eric! I found this site and saw you are now at Berkeley. You should come play some more basketball at Stanford.
Also, I seem to remember something about you giving me a google shirt. Either that or I was supposed to give you a google shirt.
If you guys don't write more I'm going to remove this URL from my Link bar.