Joyous day.
I am released from the horrendous prison that was the University of Waterloo, and I am now free to enjoy a paltry two weeks of simple pleasures before IÂ start working…back at the University of Waterloo. My co-op job is with the Math Undergrad Office, and I’m really looking forward to working there.
Exams wrapped up uneventfully, I suppose.
My zeroth exam was Studies in Children’s Literature. I wrote to the best of my abilities for the in-class final essay, but I’m sure I got another sixty. I couldn’t develop any satisfactory reasoning in my mid-term essay, and since the final essay was written in the same time period as the mid-term essay, but with more questions, I figured I got about the same or worse. I can only hope my term paper was enough to salvage my mark.
My first exam written was Linear Algebra, which I am extremely concerned about. It is quite possible that I failed that class. There was only a single midterm, the assignments, and a final which was worth a hefty amount of marks. While I felt I knew the material really well (it mostly seemed to boil down to row reducing a matrix to echelon form and checking some things), the exam really destroyed me. There was one question on change-of-coordinate matrices that was gibberish (no one I knew answered it), but we afterwards decided that it must have had something to do with partitioned matrices. The point is, you couldn’t answer the question by reducing the one matrix to the identity matrix, because it was 2 x 4. Frustrating. I hope for the best.
My second exam was Computer Science (CS134), which was a course with surprisingly little programming. I did my best with efficiency and Big O notation. As far as the programs, I think I created an extremely efficient way to answer the problem. The recursive program went extremely well, but I butchered the sorting algorithm (no time). Fortunately, the sorting algorithm was worth an unfathomably small amount of marks.
In fact, most of the marks were from binary tree traversal questions. Since those are self-explanatory (preorder is root, left subtree, right subtree, and in order and post order just move the root along), I aced any related question.
My third exam was Calculus II. My knowledge for most aspects of the course seemed to be reasonable. I even answered a question that the child prodigy in our house didn’t get (he is sixteen and in honours math). So, I was proud of that. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel that I messed up on some of the power series/Taylor polynomial questions. Andrew, if you read this, what is the Taylor polynomial of lnx at x=2? Everyone was confused by the fact that we all calculated its radius of convergence as going to infinity, which makes no sense, since lnx does not exist for any x <= 0.
Anyway, my final exam was Youth and Adolescence (other English). It was a cakewalk. My prof also handed back an assignment I wrote, about the differences between Frankenstein the film and Frankenstein the book, which evolved into a critique of the Hollywoodization of classic literature and the blatant disregard for the meaning of the original text. I was incredibly proud of the assignment. I got 100% on it. And his comments throughout it implied that he was in a state of pure artistic ecstacy as he read the assignment.
All in all, I feel I did fairly well. I am so worried about Linear Algebra, but it is out of my hands. If I have to take it again, so be it. I think my main failing with Algebra was that I focused too much on Calculus (to compensate for a poor Calculus mark first term), and I neglected Algebra. I’ve really got to find a nice balance.
Anyway, I will update when I get my marks, provided they are not too humiliating and also provided that I do not forget.
There will be a flurry of other updates, so be prepared. Sorry that this post is incomprehensible if you aren’t in math. That’s my bad.