The School Thread

Am I crazy about considering a double major? Right now I"m planning on doing Economics with an honors track, but I'm starting to think I can fit Mathematics with an honors track in there as well....

I knew a guy who triple majored. Myself, I stuck with the one major and didn't even pick up a minor. Doesn't seem to have mattered.

I double-majored (B.A.) in Biology and Information Computer Science in college. It has had zero benefit for my life since then, and wouldn't have been possible at a college where it took a lot of credits to complete a major. If I was sent back in time to do college over again I would change a lot of things. One of them would be to pick a single major, and spend the extra credits taking classes that looked interesting or taught important skills.

I considered double-majoring but like everyone else I decided it wouldn't have mattered that much, and it would add opportunity cost and cash cost to my degree. You have to look at what the actual benefits are. Do you think a potential firm hiring you will care that you have two degrees when what they really care about is extracurriculars and professional experience demonstrating leadership and/or ability to work effectively as part of a team?*** In my opinion the answer is hell no, but I could be wrong. Do you want to keep your options open with respect to doing a masters in either pure math or economics? This is a valid reason for double majoring. Do you want to do it just because you think it would be cool? This is a bad reason. Get your degree, get a job, and read about math on your own if you find it interesting/relevant to your work.

***In my opinion this is pretty important. If you are going to cram the math courses in around your regular degree courses, this is going to leave you with absolutely no time for anything but school work. Generally if you have free time on your hands and want to pad your resume with something, you're going to get way more bang for your buck by joining some sort of organization or club on your campus and sticking with it for 2-3 years. Demonstrates loyalty, team-working, and if you are good at it/enjoy it and move into executive/managing positions it can demonstrate leadership potential. If you just cram your schedule to the brim with courses you better pull a 4.0 otherwise you haven't really proved anything other than you don't manage your time well, and even if you do pull a 3.7-4.0, all you demonstrated is that you work very well independently and are really smart, which is not the biggest concern for most companies.

The math stuff would crowd out other subjects, but wouldn't turn into extra classes. And I am actually interested in math, it's not just something that I'm doing to look good. Though it might potentially look good to grad schools!

I don't know very much about economics, except that it's one of the few fields where going to graduate school isn't a horrible mistake. Having completed grad school in biology, I can tell you no one cared about my double major. What they did care about during interviews was the fact that I had worked on a research project during my last year of college. It also helped that I looked up the faculty, and knew exactly who I wanted to work with and what they did.

Graduate school is fundamentally about specialization. Proving you're a competent generalist won't hurt, but it probably won't help either.

For ec PHD programs a strong math background is a plus. I'm already covering the research base in ec, thinking about the math double major is mostly a matter of seeing if it helps me make a grab for various merit based grants and whatnot. I don't want to pay for grad school. :)

I'm already a math minor, the delta between the two is five classes. Mostly it's be three credit proof style classes (numerical/algebraic analysis), which are apparently paradoxically less intense than your computationally heavy low level stuff (calc, diff eq, linear algebra). That's not to say they're easy, just less grinding out probla and more mastering proofs.

I was so happy yesterday because I thought I had turned in my last problem set in C.

But this week's problem set is also in C. I want to cry :(

So I've already posted about distance students being at a disadvantage for this class because of the stupid, stupid schedule they have for homework and how it's due in the middle of the day Thursday, so that means we have to get it in Wednesday night. Well usually by Tuesday we have the class video up to watch and then by Wednesday (they SAY Tuesday but it's never Tuesday) we have the video of section where they walk through some practice problems to help you understand concepts--absolutely integral to people like me who are not getting it.

Well, class was cancelled yesterday, and they usually film the section that afternoon too. So there's no section video for this week, but there's also no extension on the problem set. So I have tonight and tomorrow night to figure this shit out.

God, I hate this class.

This is what we do in a college Medieval Lit class. Our costume and makeup budget is real high.

(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)

I started a tenure-track job at a community college this semester, and they're more into community service than I'm used to. So I signed up to speak about biology-stuff at a local middle school a few weeks ago. The thing is, I hated middle school, I don't like children, and I think the community service requirements for my job are fucking retarded, so I'm decidedly not the guy who should be doing this.

That said, if other people are spending valuable minutes of their life listening to you talk, they deserve your best effort regardless of the circumstances or their age. It was important to me to do this well. So I thought my way back to middle school, and tried to remember what I hated about it. One big issue was that it was so artificial; kids never get to hear about real shit and middle school is where they start to realize it. Or as Paul Graham once put it:

Parents move to suburbs to raise their kids in a safe environment, but suburbs are so dull and artificial that by the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced the whole world is boring.

So I set out to create the most real presentation I could. My topic was prions and brain disorders. I would spend a few minutes talking about the brain and how it works, followed by how brain damage can totally fucking ruin your ability to do basic tasks we take for granted. Among other things I would cover the classic example of Phineas Gage, and I had a video of a stroke survivor who lost the ability to speak due to Broca's Aphasia.

Then I had sheep brains for the students to dissect. After that, I had videos of children dying from Kuru, and talked about how it was transmitted by ritual cannibalism. That segued nicely into footage of scrapie and mad cow disease, and a discussion of how hamburgers basically killed people in England.

So I'm sitting in this math classroom, with six sheep brains and a PowerPoint presentation consisting of blood and sorrow. The first person to walk in is a girl with a white blouse and a plaid jumper. Immediately, my brain goes, "Holy shit, people dress their children like that in the twenty-first century?" Then it realizes, "That kid is half the age of the average student I was expecting." That's cool, maybe she just skipped seven grades, let's wait for the next kid. He's the same age. The students trickle in and none of them have reached a double-digit life span. Oh fuck, the event is held in a middle school, but it's for early grade school children.

So I went with it. I mean, I wasn't going to come up with a new presentation in two minutes, so there wasn't much else I could do. They experienced it all: aphasia, sheep brains,cannibalism, and Kuru. Every moment was awkward. My pokemon joke about the guy with Broca's aphasia didn't connect, because these kids were too young to get pokemon references. During the Kuru discussion, I explained the ritual cannibalism in the Fore Tribe as, "If Grandmom died, you'd all get together and eat her." In between all of this I was thinking about how not fucked up it would have been if I had just volunteered to shelve books at the local library.

Oddly enough it kind of worked. The kids were reluctant about it; especially the sheep brain dissection. But their parents were in the room, and they loved everything I was doing for some reason I can't begin to grasp.

So everything worked out for reasons beyond my comprehension. Next year I may add the history of frontal lobotomies (with video) to my list of horrors.

The midterm exam for my film studies course was to write an essay based on one of two assigned topics. I ended up writing an essay describing Nightmare Before Christmas as Jack's mid-life existential crisis and subsequent slow spiral into insanity as his world crumbles around him. By the end of it I wasn't sure if I was talking about a Tim Burton/Disney film or Fight Club.

A student just emailed me to ask if she took the last exam. I don't know how to respond to her, even though the answer is yes. I remember her running in ten minutes late and not doing particularly well, but apparently none of this was noteworthy enough to trigger a lasting memory after she experienced it first-hand.

I honestly don't know how to reply to her email. Maybe I'm just not cut out to teach community college.

That's the kind of presentation that makes a kid think "woah, science is awesome! You get to cut open brains and talk about cannibalism! Why don't they teach us that in school?" Your dislike of kids may have been just the thing to make such a perfect presentation.

My instructor went over our financial accounting theory midterm last night. There was a question on the exam regarding insider trading, basically asking the circumstances when it would be okay to do (the correct answer, for four marks was simply: never!). Apparently one person in our class answered that it is okay (given the situation as explained in the question) to break the law. I hope that question was an auto fail if you got it wrong (or that the teacher was trying to make a joke)...

I'm working on my last problem set for this fucking coding class now. It's PHP and mySQL and I LOVE IT. LOVE! I've got it almost all figured out except for one problem loop. Once I fix that, all I need to do is make it nice and pretty (CSS ftw) and then DONE WITH PROBLEM SETS!

I mean, I've still got a final project and I'm totally going to fail the quiz next week, BUT I'M STILL HAPPY!

I've got a group project for macro: 10 minute presentation on tax policy. Six person group. I hate group projects. Inevitably a couple of members of the group will be lazy slackers and I'll end up doing all the work because I'm stupidly competitive about my grades and I GOTTA CATCH ALL THE A's. I sent out an email on Tuesday asking people when was good to meet up; as of today I've gotten four of five responses. Which is not bad, except that one of those responses just arrived a minute ago and one of the others was basically "wah my schedule sucks I can't meet up at any time that's convenient for anyone else." FRUSTRATING.

I'm currently waiting on the results of my MSc (Science) which are due in December. Then I can be Master of Science mwahaha.
So I've started doing a BA in History which is pretty cool. I've just handed in my first assignment which had questions on Cleopatra and Cezanne and was completely out of my comfort zone! This is all by distance learning whilst I continue with my full time teaching job and I've not been able to make a single tutorial so far so I've just got to keep my fingers crossed that I'm on the right lines.

Ahh, group project time. As with all projects, you get varying degrees of participation. Including at least one person who does nothing. This time we have two such persons:

- One has insisted she wants to participate, but always has a reason she can't make it when the rest of the group meets up. To oblige her we created a Google Document to reflect what we were doing, she committed to contributing to it on her own. Naturally she hasn't.
- One has been totally incommunicado.

Honestly four for six is pretty good! My experience is usually if you get 50% participation you're lucky. Does anyone have any thoughts on how you deal with the moochers? Just accept that they're going to get a free ride? Rat 'em out to the prof?

As a prof, I love when a group rats out the dead wood. I hate the moochers, and love to punish them then when they come asking why they got a bad grade even though the project was good, I ask them to write three pages describing their contributions to the project. Then I rip that apart by casually asking the other group members (privately), "So do you remember who exactly did the writeup for blah?"

I had an artist once who said he "designed" the facebook page for one of the fictional characters. He actually tried to take credit for facebook's layout! When I started asking questions, he tried to tell me that posting a profile pic and some photo albums was "design."

On the other hand, I do feel legitimately petty even thinking about ratting out the deadwood.

Many of the classes Ive taken have allowed you to fire. Non-performing group members, with. Varying levels of punishment. Some instructors will only let you fire someone if they can find a new group, but will get a reduced grade, other instructors will just give that person zero for the assignment.

Unfortunately, many instructors just don't/can't deal with it, and have the policy of "suck it up".

Thank God my days of group projects are behind me. Even when other members contributed, I hated them. My idea of a good collaboration is "you tell me what part of this I'm responsible for, and I'll go do it and give it to you when I'm done". Collaborative meetings just suck for me.

Heh, I'm OK with collaborative work. Generally I take the leadership position in such things (makes sense, I'm much older than most people and have professional experience) but I'm open to the idea that other group members will contribute and provide insights / thoughts / etc that I'm missing. I just find it frustrating that there are slackers that know they can just fuck off and still get the grade. On the other hand, I hate being a rat!

A good professor includes confidential peer assessment in every group project with a multiplier for their mark based on their evaluation.

This assignment is sufficiently minor (equivalent of a single quiz grade) that I doubt she'll bother.

So that Writing instructor I mentioned? The one who didn't get us any feedback, etc? She's gone.

In my own news, I am many weeks behind on my thesis project and I haven't talked to my advisor in like ten days because I was very busy with some extracurricular activities and a few midterms and haven't made much progress since we last spoke. Now I have to book a time for a presentation/progress report to the committee and I have to email my advisor to find a time that works for him to come... but I don't want to initiate contact because I have no work to show for the last little while. I need to just pull 2-3 days of 12-hour a day marathon research and design sessions and hope I get a respectable enough amount done that it looks like I just forgot to give him weekly updates recently.

Slowly chipping away at my high school physics and chemistry classes. Having to do chem labs at home is probably the most annoying thing so far. I need a piece of wool yarn for my next one. I have no yarn. I know no knitters within a 200 km radius. I'll probably have to ask my grandma to freaking mail me some, or I'll end up with a ball I'll never use again.

Damn, dude, if we were in the same country I'd send you some via priority mail (2-3 day delivery). But I doubt yarn could get from the US to Sweden in time for your project. Well, not without paying a zillion dollars in international shipping, anyway...

Nah, it's cool. I can get it, I'm just annoyed at not having everything I need on hand. Thanks for offering though.

Buy the ball of yarn and take up knitting. It's relatively cheap to get started and it's really quite relaxing and WHY THE FUCK DID YOU JUST, FUCKING HELL I HAVE TO START A-FUCKING-GAIN, MOTHERFUCKING STAY IN THE FUCKING RIGHT JESUS, FUCK!

I've got my second and last quiz on Wednesday. I'm going to fail it. It's going to be another one where they ask you to write out some C code on paper, along with other tricky questions. Ugh.

I hate writing code out on paper. It serves no purpose, it's like taking a creative writing class and then having a test be graded on how well you give a speech.

(It's slightly better if they let you pseudo code it, but most school tests, they want to see every little semi-colon)

It's super bad for me because I'm terrible at it just in general. I need to test it on my computer fifty times to figure out the things I'm doing wrong and reference my notes and old programs to figure out how to do simple things. Ask me to write it out on paper and instantly my mind blanks and even if it's something we did before in a problem set, I have no idea what to put down. It sucks.

Why do professors require students to write code out on paper? I can't fathom any possible legitimate (see: non-"I have tenure and I'm crotchety") reason why anyone would do that.

My guess is they are too cheap to set up a lab for taking a test?

Got another physics home exam back, with another A grade. Which would make me feel good if the questions weren't all ones where I could find in the examples in the textbook and just replace the numbers. I mean, seriously, if that gives me an A what the hell would it take to get a C?

I never got that either. Or why there'd be tests on programming without an IDE. It's like, uh, hey guys I have an IDE. It checks the spelling errors because sometimes I yllatnedicca a word and it notices so that I can focus on useful things like HOW IS BABBY FORMED.