Semester is almost done!
This semester has been rough.
I took CMSC 601 Research Skills and CMSC 635 Advanced Computer Graphics on the suggestion of my temporary advisor, Dr. Penny Rheingans. I didn’t really want to take two classes since I have a full time job, but work has been pretty flexible, and gave me some time off for school work and projects, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Still, taking two classes wasn’t easy. The project I did in graphics overlapped a little with my research proposal for 601, but not enough! Writing that final research proposal took so much of my free time, just looking up references and reading the extra papers.
In the end, the Research Skills class was definitely worth it. I never knew you could log into UMBC’s library website to get access to all the journal, conference, and database sites for papers. Previously, I just searched for the papers while at work, or while at school. I also think I became a better writer, since Dr. desJardins gave really thorough feedback on everything.
Dr. Olano seemed to be more interesting when he was teaching a class in his field. I took him for architectures a few years ago, and just remember that class as being boring. Maybe it was just the subject area; how can architectures not be boring? One thing that didn’t really change though was the feedback received. In architectures, we received grades for all the assignments in a reasonable amount of time after the submission of the assignment, but no feedback on anything. All the assignments just had marks for points taken off, with no explanation. This semester, in 635, I have yet to receive a single grade and the final exam is on Tuesday. Granted, there were only two big homework assignments, and one final project, along with some ambiguously graded items like presentations, participation and questions to the assigned papers, it still seems odd that no one has a grade yet. The final exam is worth 20% of the final grade, and it would be nice to know what grade I need to get an A.
So… now I have to study like I need as much of the final exam contribution as possible. It would be awesome if I knew that I only needed a 50% on the final to get an A, but I don’t know that, so I can’t expect that. This weekend and all day Monday, I need to reread 55 papers in 10 topic areas well enough to understand the key concepts and answer some possible questions from them on the final. What fun. 55 siggraph style papers of dense, jam-packed content.
635 was very useful. I’ve applied the final project to something at work, and I have some additional ideas that I want to try at work. I think Advanced Computer Graphics and Data Visualization were the two most useful classes I’ve taken so far, just because I was able to use the concepts at work.
Tuesday evening will feel great! I’ll be done with the semester.