Academia, etc.

Those of you more familiar with my schedule may recall that classes at DTU began on February 2nd. It’s now February 10th, and I’m posting my “Hay lookit I’m taking classes while studying abroad!!1” entry now. Blame can be placed on a number of different factors, my laziness outside of class probably chief among them, but lately that laziness has only been exacerbated by the fact that the classes are incredibly hard. (I’ll try to stick with prose this time.)

First off, scheduling here is a bit unconventional by American standards. I’m accustomed to two-hour long courses offered at 8 am, 10 am, noon, 2 pm, whatever. Here, it’s a lot easier to remember when your classes start, because there are only morning classes and afternoon classes. Therefore I have eight hours of class on Monday, mornings only on Tuesday and Wednesday, and an afternoon class on Thursday. Awesomely enough, Fridays are wide-open.

Secondly, virtually everything here is project-based. I have zero exams to take this semester. Zero. I do have a number of final group projects to do, along with a handful of individual projects along the way, but otherwise, that’s it. This doesn’t mean that the classes are any easier – far from it. But considering that my academic downfall has consistently been exam performance, it’s a very welcome change.

As fantastic as this looks on paper, the perks are outweighed by the sheer difficulty of it all.

My ten-credit super-class, Design of Lean Production and Service Systems, is actually failing to live up to its intimidating-sounding title (although the eight hours a week it meets for may do it for some people) and is in fact surprisingly enjoyable. I’m in an awesome group, we have an interesting project, the course material seems relevant to my interests, the whole package. I’m pretty glad that this is the moneymaker for the credit load I’m transferring back home. It’s also my first and last class of the week, so it’s a nice buffer for everything else.

My Monday afternoon class, on the other hand, could not be any more of a nightmare. Advanced Data Analysis and Statistical Modeling. Compared to everything else, the course didn’t sound bad, and this is coming back to RPI to fulfill my Statistical Analysis requirement, a relatively innocuous core class for my major. This course spelled disaster from day one, though.

For starters, everybody else in the course, with the exception of a few other international students on the other side of the room, was an Informatics and Mathematical Modeling Master’s student. Next, I discovered that programming was involved. Despite my troubled history with computers, though, I figured it could be worse. I did well enough in Beginning C last semester, after all. Small consolation – we’re using R. Upon posting this on Twitter, all my Comp Sci major friends replied with “R? You need to know R? God, even I can’t handle R. Good luck.” At least I sort of understood the logic behind what I was supposed to be programming. Until yesterday, anyway, when it just completely kicked into another dimension. (I have the course notes uploaded; I can pass them along in case anybody’s looking to have nightmares about stats.) I can only hope that I make it through this alive, although the professor and TAs are very enthusiastic and more than willing to hold my hand the whole way.

Transport Network Optimization is a mixed bag. The course material is interesting – I did have to beg my advisor to let it transfer over, after all – but again, more programming is involved. The OPL Studio interface is wonderful to work with, especially in comparison to the R interfaces I’ve been working with, but picking up on the syntax is still pretty rough, and the math behind it all makes me wish I paid just a little more attention back in OR Methods. I should be able to figure it all out sooner or later, though, which is far more than I can say for ADA/SM. (I knew there was a reason I wasn't using acronyms here...)

Strategic Simulation of Dynamic Systems is still up in the air. I’ve only had one class so far, but it’s shaping up to be manageable enough. I’ll have to figure out ProModel, which is the last thing I need after all the programming I’ve been doing, but it’s something I’m almost guaranteed to need to know in the future, so that’s a plus.

In conclusion, or for those that have elected to skip through the whining, there’s still a lot on my plate (even after dropping the Ph.D.-level course I accidentally signed up for… Whoops) but it’s worth it so far.

--

Outside of the academic world, things are still going pretty well. There’s not much to do outside of classes since there’s not much campus life during the week (think office park) but the weekends have been making up for it rather nicely. The guys in my dorm are committed to keeping things interesting around here, and my orientation group is still getting together pretty often, which, as geeky as that sounds, really isn’t. Awesome bunch of people, all around.

Also on the upside, I finally have a working phone (like anybody’s going to call me) and a bike. Only problem with the latter is that I found out it has a built-in lock the hard way. I’m hoping to get that sorted out (probably using a saw) with the campus support staff tomorrow afternoon, assuming they don’t have me arrested for it.

Oh, and I get to see a New Jersey band next week. In Europe. About a year and a half after they started playing basement shows. That should be pretty awesome.

I put some more pictures up here, so you can peruse those until I figure out what to post next. Probably something about food.