Pug’s Place

<NOTE>This post is made despite the risk of sounding destructively arrogant</NOTE>
After three years of top-tier university education with computer science courses every semester, I finally feel that I’ve enrolled in courses which will teach me what I’ve come to learn. Take heart, younger true geeks: there are professors who will teach you something you don’t know, but you’ll have to fight your way to grad school before you are allowed to study under them.

I’ve now visited all of my classes once; impressions:
Computer Vision
My “fun” class for the semester, taught by Prof. Baba Vemuri. I had a good feeling about this course as soon as the man came in and spoke in jargon. It’s about damn time! I don’t want to be coddled, and this man isn’t willing to do so: our first meeting was a description of the difference between Computer Vision, Image Processing and Computer Graphics, with the intention of getting ignorant people who had registered under false pretenses to drop the course. I know full well what Computer Vision is, so I grinned as he showed slides of what image processing did and said, “this is NOT what we are going to be studying. This is what we’re going to utilize, but I won’t teach you anything about it.” I’m not sure what it is in me that finds joy in that statement, but I suspect it is that this man is dismissing telling us about a major field in linear algebra despite its relevance because he assumes we know it already. Joy! No worries, folks - I already know quite a bit of image processing… amusingly, Pizza Delivery Jedi taught me a lot, while doing the special effects.
Computer Simulation Concepts
This class is both a graduate and an undergraduate course at the same time, in the same classroom. Grad students are just held to a higher standard, required to answer more questions on the exams, etc. The course is about simulating things, discrete events and time-slicing. The professor already told us “this class is creative in nature. I will teach you the concepts and teach you the techniques, but as most of the grading comes from mostly open-ended projects, this is all about creativity.” I’m not worried about the subject matter: Dr. Fay’s job is to do modeling and simulation, and he has taught me enough that I have no fear of the subject matter. I will learn, I will code and I will simulate. I’ll post my results as time goes on.
Software Engineering
This class was today, taught by a Turkish professor named Tuba Yavuz-Kahveci who not only speaks clear and excellent English, but obviously knows the field of software engineering as I know Resmiranda’s internals. After a brief intro of what we’d be talking about in the course, she explained that 100% of our grade would be team-based. 80% will come from the term project (designing & delivering a web-based Teaching Assistant Registration and Management program, the best of which will replace the one in use by the CISE department) and the other 20% will be based on a group presentation on a recently published peer-reviewed paper on the subject of Software Engineering. Finding a good group appears to be an essential task, one I haven’t done yet. To help us with the process, the last half of the class had us each in turn introduce ourselves, our skill-sets and our software engineering/team work backgrounds to the class. Before class on Tuesday I’m going to approach some folks and see about finding a cadré.

Summary
All of my classes will be coding things, along with my senior project (which is coding things!). It feels like I’ve finally arrived at school. Be happy for me!