I’ve noticed a strange pattern in my blog entries about semester endings. I always said “the most difficult semester I’ve had until now ended”. That doesn’t mean I’m complaining. It’s pure reality. I will have to repeat myself this time though. This was indeed the most difficult semester of all, of all semesters that passed and of all semesters that will come.

Statistics (& history) tell us that the 2nd year (of all 5) is the most difficult one. I one am happy to have finished this one, continuing to hope that in the next years we will learn some computer science, because I’m a bit fed up by subjects with a low usability in the future, according to my dreams/desires. I’ve actually asked some graduates if some difficult subjects are useful. The answer came naturally: no.

Also, statistically, as far as I’ve noticed, in the Computer Science and Automatic Control Faculty (my faculty) people fail exams at the subjects which are not in their specialization - such as the tons of electronics, while, at the same time, students at the Electronics and Telecomunications faculty fail similar electronics exams - their specialization. A bit weird, don’t you think? Not to mention that they have many more electronics subjects in the curricula than we have computer science subjects.

Oh, you might say now that computer science is not informatics. That’s true. We need to learn about how computers work. And I mean computers, not transistors, not bi-polar transistors which are no longer used. We need to know how computer components work, not how each electron moves between resistors, diodes, transistors etc. Well, it seems I’m sliding towards another post of mine. The same ideas seem to come up over and over while thinking of these first two years.

Some subjects to remember from this year:

  • Assembly Programming - everybody says that the circumstances were not favourable in order to study this appriately; to much electrotechnics, electronics and physics eating up nights
  • Numeric Methods - what can I say? lots of Mathematics, Matlab is powerful - very good for number crunching - this is not what I would call great subject, especially because of the tons of formulas I need to remember, but it’s nice to know there’s something specialized in doing Advanced Mathematics for you :)
  • Object Oriented Programming - well, Java all the way (see my comments after the final exam)
  • English - 2 semesters - I liked it because it was speciality-oriented, or at least it tried to be

Not much, isn’t it? Pretty dissapointing, IMO.

I could also add Psychological Education - a subject which is not in our speciality, but I must admit it was the in the needed dose for a computer science faculty; I really like this subject and the way the seminars were held.

As I said above, I hope the next years will bring what we’ve all been waiting for from this faculty. It might not fit exactly our dreams, but it try (I hope) to get close to them.