I’m about 2 months late...but...
TERM 1 WINTER 2016 COURSE REVIEW
Because despite me being a lazy ass and not actually posting anymore, you guys are still Googling and finding my blog, so here’s another mini review of the courses I took during term 1!
CPSC 313 I’m not a hardware person at all, so I was a little nervous going into this course. It was tough at times, but I felt like I learned a lot, the last part of the course on operating systems was particularly interesting. If I weren’t planning on graduating, I might’ve taken the advanced operating systems course. This course is a very typical UBC CPSC course, except there weren’t any labs, we had tutorials instead.
CPSC 344 This course was really interesting too, I’ve always been interesting in UI/UX and being able to learn about all the science behind the design of the software applications we use today is pretty neat. This course as a lot of work though, we had group projects for this course, and there were milestones we had to hand in every week. I think there was probably only 1 or 2 weeks where I didn’t stay on campus until 8/9 PM working with my group. The requirements for the project weren’t necessarily hard, there was just a lot of stuff to do. We had workshops every week where we’d go over the latest milestone we handed in with the TA and worked on the project a bit. Some people don’t like this course because there isn’t a lot of programming involved, but I think HCI is something to consider for all developers. At the end of the day, you’re developing products for other users and not just for other developers. If you’re not into group work, I wouldn’t recommend this class, I probably spent more time with my group mates than with my friends during the term haha. My group was great though, so I didn’t really mind. #TeamTorbay
PSYC 314 I took this course online to fill an exemption I had. We had 2 papers and a final exam, so the work load wasn’t heavy at all, I was definitely very happy for that. This course is focused on health psychology and I was experiencing a bit of “Medical Student’s Disease” as I was taking it, but I’m a lot more conscious about my life decisions now and try to at least eat healthier and take the stairs...Overall, the course is pretty chill, but there’s quite a bit to memorize and it took me back to the days I took CAPS.
STAT 300 I chose to take this course as part of my bridging module, and I had not taken stats in a very long time. I regretted it a bit during the first few classes because I had forgotten so much, thankfully there was a bit of a review period for the first 2 weeks of class. The concepts weren’t too difficult to grasp and I found it interesting to learn some more advanced statistical analysis techniques. I like looking at data and trying to make decisions based on data analytics, so this course was definitely up my alley. The exams were a bit weird, with the 2-stage thing, but other than that, I found the course pretty useful overall. Since this was an application class, my classmates were from all different types of disciplines, and they made groups for us based on those differences. I was grouped up with someone in Life Sciences and 2 math majors, so it was pretty cool to get their perspective and skills when we were tackling questions.