I may or may not know what I'm doing.
2021-05-01
Note: Course ordering, how courses are run in general, course experiences
This is part of a 4-part series on the first year experience at the University of Waterloo.
Today’s topic will be on 1A. I will talk about 1A courses, a more in-depth detail about how courses are run, and each individual course’s experience.
1A is designed to ease you into the university workload. Of the six courses you take, only four of them have exams. First year is also managed by the first year engineering office rather than the ECE department.
I struggled hard in 1A. I am glad I chose residence as that means I did not have to spend additional time and energy on infrastructure (e.g. bad landlords, grocery shopping, cooking, dishes, cleaning outside the room).
A typical engineering course has lectures and tutorials, and some also include labs. Professors also have office hours, and WEEF TAs in E2 are open for help. Remember to check your course outline often!
Every term has THE course. THE course is cursed. It will make you cry.
I believe it is worth it to attend lectures and tutorials, even though it may seem like a waste of time. The professor/TA will go over problems that may be word-for-word exact on an assessment. There may also be important administrative information. At the very least, you can do something else while the professor/TA is talking.
In ECE, lectures are often held in lecture halls as each section has ~150 students. Before a lecture, students will collect near the lecture hall doors, and the moment the previous lecture is done, they will swarm in, desperate to get good seats for themselves and their friends before the students still inside even start packing up (I remember bringing a lawn chair to class for the front row but then I stopped because it was annoying to bring to class every day and it was short so it made notetaking uncomfortable). Once seat claims have been made, there are several options while waiting the remaining few minutes before the professor arrives:
None of these options are mutually exclusive.
Once the professor arrives, the class generally settles down (as it’s polite, and you are paying $8.5K (more if you’re an international student) to be here after all). In a typical lecture, the professor goes over what was covered previously (e.g. “Last time, we …”) with or without writing down the relevant information, and then proceeds to the content. The professor states a theorem or concept, explains it, and then does some examples. Repeat.
At the end of a lecture, a fresh swarm of students enters the lecture hall and you have to fight to make your way out. If you’re smart, you can try leaving through alternate exits instead of the typical lecture hall entrance (for some reason, the automatic emergency exit alarms have been disabled for those doors, but use at your own risk).
ECE students typically spend 3-4 hours in the same room (again, please take showers).
Courses often have more than one section for a course, and nothing is stopping you from attending a different section (with a different professor). Just remember that your own section’s professor may have administrative information that you need to keep up with.
Tutorials are normally run by TAs, who are graduate students employed by the university through professors. In first year, tutorials are typically used for hosting quiz times (which are worth marks) and for going over more examples of material covered in lectures. There are also more tutorial sections than lecture sections, which means smaller class sizes and that you may have a different section than your friend.
Going to a different tutorial section for quizzes is not allowed by the TAs and professors. Otherwise for non-quiz tutorials it’s fine, just like lectures.
Labs are run by lab instructors, and the quality and relevancy of the lab can vary. In first year, labs are generally held in E2 and are a few hours long. In that time, you have to get all of the steps and data for the lab completed in time before submitting and leaving. There may be pre-lab components that you have to complete before the lab, and post-lab components to submit after.
Much like tutorials, labs also have more sections, and it’s impossible to go to a different lab section. If you want to switch sections, you have to find someone willing to swap with you, and you might need to figure out scheduling conflicts (which is your responsibility!).
At some point when you take a circuits course you will receive a travel box of circuit components. You only get one, which means you need to make it last throughout your undergrad (although you can always buy more from RidgidWare or elsewhere). Otherwise all of the equipment are in the university labs for your academic use during the scheduled times, since oscilloscopes and development boards and software licences are extremely expensive and you often can’t even get them let alone afford them.
Some labs are basically projects you work on your own time, and the lab times are office hours where the lab TAs and lab instructor are available to help. However, this means that the labs can be very open-ended because there’s no contention of lab space and the time upper bound for lab work disappears. Talking to peers about code while everyone’s in the lab is a huge time-saving multipler though (albeit not available when online).
Professors host office hours at certain times of the week. If you’re having difficulty with the content, go to office hours! Professors are pretty nice (at least, professional). Office hours are one-on-one and there may be a lineup outside the door.
There may also be other office hours hosted by the lab instructor and possibly course TAs, which you can go to as well.
Office hour traffic increases exponentially close to a major assessment (midterm, final, etc.).
Although not course-specific, WEEF maintains the WEEF lab and WEEF TAs. Like professor office hours, WEEF office hours are also there to help. I highly recommend supporting WEEF when you pay tuition.
Courses:
Difficulty: (Hard) ECE 105 > MATH 115 > MATH 117 > ECE 150 > ECE 190 (Easy)
Interest: (Cool) MATH 117 > ECE 150 > ECE 105 = ECE 190 = GENE 191 = MATH 115 (Tedious)
Disclaimer: The above two scales are relative, not absolute.
1A used to be tough love and then it was made it easy so everyone gets absolutely wrecked by 1B.
Physics is hard.
This is THE course of the term. Hard concepts, with a requirement to almost intuitively know how to solve the problems the moment you lay eyes on the question. Along with some policy 71 shenanigans, this course was a wild ride.
The midterm exam average was ~50% (I got 58%, so proud) and I crawled out of the course with a 75%. This course is the wakeup slap that supposed to make you take university seriously. Unfortunately, it got nerfed, so students get whacked harder in 1B instead.
I remember when everyone came together in residence ground floor study room to crowdsource ECE 105 answers. Nothing brings people together like a common threat (of failing).
Professor Bizheva is a good instructor but the examples provided in the lectures are a bit simple compared to the quizzes and exams. Make sure to grind those problem sets.
ECE 105 labs were waste, basically HS labs but with a lot more structure in the report.
Since the course was unofficially curved, some entreprising students thought it was a great idea to deliberately “bomb” the midterm exam in order to get an easier final exam. Unfortunately, word of this got out to the first year engineering office, who reprimanded the professor for curving and forced them to remove it (as in, all grades were going to be forwarded to the first year engineering office for review before being officially posted on transcripts). Obviously, everyone was now pissed off because the safety net was gone because of this stupidity. But hey, the goal was achieved: the final exam was definitely easier than previous years.
There was a joke going around that students were bombing the midterm without intentionally doing so (i.e. it was so difficult there wouldn’t have been a difference whether they tried to get a bad grade or not).
C++.
The first week will be spent trying to get students to set up an environment. The course suggests Eclipse, I suggest don’t. Personally, I used Code::Blocks and then switched to Visual Studio 2019 (different from Visual Studio Code!). I’ve been told that Visual Studio 2015 is better as it’s more lightweight. The reason I used Visual Studio (non-Code) is because it came with a compiler so I did not have to deal with setting one up.
As an upper year I primarily code in Visual Studio Code and compile in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
Code was submitted through Marmoset.
I think ECE 150 is badly paced. Too slow in some sections and too fast in others as the compromise between students who don’t know anything and students who do know is awkward at best.
TODO: Xierumeng’s Guide to the C++ Development Environment?
There was an incident where a third of a section’s code was found to be the same.
DON’T. Measure Of Software Similarity (MOSS) is really good at detecting plagiarized code. Online code may contain bugs. It’s not worth it.
Read my guide: https://xierumeng.github.io/resources/policy-71-guide
What’s an engineer.
Boring course on what being an engineer entails with some attempt at teaching soft skills (e.g. learning how to learn) and occasional cheesy group projects to make things interesting (e.g. tallest marshmallow from pasta and a single marshmallow, make a single sheet of paper remain airborne for as long as possible). Highlights of lectures were videos of exploding electrical substations.
Basically there are short in-class quizzes on the assigned chapter from the textbook. You can use the older editions or use extra-legal methods of acquiring one without paying any money.
Top Hat is a mandatory paid online attendance/quiz system. Students noticed that the questions were also copied over on their device, so they could answer at home instead of in class like it was intended. At some point, the professor noticed there were ~150 answers and definitely not the same number of the students on the class, got mad, and cancelled the class for the day. After that, we all got a scary email saying that the university would trace IPs to catch all the cheaters and that they should confess to reduce the policy 71 penalty. Nothing much came out of it afterwards.
I was asleep and skipping class when the incident happened.
English without the literary analysis.
Basically what it says on the tin. Technical writing, technical presentations, basically English class but on technical topics rather than Shakespeare. Split among several different professors so you might get a good or a bad one.
This course has been replaced with ARTS 190, ENGL 192, and SPCOMM 192 (all three courses are basically the same).
Thicc vectors.
Started off with complex numbers and then skipped to vectors and operations on vectors, and then to matrices and their operations and properties. There were a lot of equivalency proofs (i.e. prove that left side equals right side), which students struggled with (I found them okay, just not fun to try to solve in an exam).
This course taught me that any course can be learned in under 48 hours. I survived by literally memorizing the definitions off of Wikipedia at 0300 hrs, before the exam at 0930 hrs.
Complex numbers will haunt your entire undergraduate career.
Derivatives and integrals.
Basically what it says on the tin.
Run as a really fast HS course, but had a couple of math proofs (e.g. epsilon-delta for limits). Integrals are hard. Pretty straightforward.
The important information to take away is to know how courses are run and go seek help with course content when you need it. However, 1A courses are not the only part of the first year experience. I will discuss the next topic in the next post.
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