First Week of Senior Year!

2010.09.05 in school

The first week of my senior year at RPI is now quite over! I have to say that while I do miss San Diego a bit, it is really nice to be back in the Troy swing of things...

Next week is Amy's first week of college, at MCPHS; she's still a bit nervous, but I'm quite sure she's going to have a great time! Apparently last night she was out and about Boston on a school-run scavenger hunt, which included a trip near a totally-packed Fenway Park. FUN! (not, apparently...)

My schedule has been under a great deal of flux over the course of the week, as it always is; since I got here, I added Rhetoric and Writing, then dropped it, added Computational Vision in its place, and dropped Processes, all for various reasons (mostly trying to balance the things that will make me crazy during the semester with the things that I'll enjoy). Initial impressions:

Computational Vision — While the professor didn't show up for the first class (instead sending recordings of himself for the TA to play for us), it seems like this is going to be a great class (I finished the first homework almost a week early, if that's any indication of enjoyment). Lots of image processing and fun stuff like that (the professor actually founded a company that makes panorama-stitching and medical-image-registration software, so it should be good).

Bio — Ha! I really can't stand the fact that I have to take this... but I've gotten around that problem this time (so far) by making friends with awesome people in my class! (I don't normally manage to do that). I do need it to graduate, though, and I've started taking it two or three semesters in the past only to drop it during the first week. Should be good this time...

Open Source Software — It's a class with Moorthy (and a few people from Kitware), so of course it's going to be great! Should be a relatively relaxing class, I think... we'll see!

Computational Finance — Malik (who I previously had for Machine Learning, which was probably the hardest/most-stressful/greatest-payoff class I've taken here so far) spent something like twenty minutes during the first class explaining how we should probably leave if we don't have calculus, multivar, linear algebra, and statistics down pat. I haven't taken any but calc... we'll see how it goes (I vaguely remember the same warning before Machine Learning). I learned more about economics in the first day than was taught in an entire semester of Econ 101 last year, so I guess that's good!