The Crazy Cornellian

I’ve been living in one of the new west campus houses (Becker house) since sophomore year.  I think the new dorms on west (oh wait, I think I’m supposed to call them houses) are the best on campus, but that is not to say that they’re perfect.  The best aspects of the housing on west are that they are very close to central campus (~4 min to get to top of slope), they are new and clean, and they are nice and quiet at night.  This is in striking contrast to my far away, dirty, old and nosy dorm room freshman year.  These are big pluses for west campus, do you really need anything more from your housing?  The rooms are smaller than the old gothics on west campus, but that’s not something very important to me.  (pictured right is Rose house (i.e. house 5) below are the gothics with the new Bethe house behind them)

What is heavily pushed by administration is creating a strong community in each house, but in reality I just don’t think it really works.  People in singles often stay to themselves and suites can be pretty social, but not with the rest of the dorm.  For a lot of people it’s just a place to sleep and keep all of your junk, which it is very convenient for.  I feel that those who want a very social living situation go to a frat or get an apartment with their numerous friends; they don’t usually stay on campus.  What is also pushed is student-faculty interaction and while there are some who do this a lot, the majority of students aren’t involved.

The worst thing about west campus hosing is that everyone is forced to purchase unlimited meals.  I think this is unreasonable as this is very expensive and way more than what most people need.  Also, west campus dinning announced reduction in its service for next year right after everyone signed up for housing.

On west every new house has its own dinning hall.  I suppose this is to foster community in each house and provide variety, but I think I would rather have one big, very good dinning hall instead of 5 mediocre ones.  But then again there is something to be said abut waking up on a cold windy day and just walking downstairs to get food, never needing to brave the outside.  This way I can spend inordinate amounts of time in Becker without ever going outside.  All the dinning halls on west have the same hours and usually the same kind of food.  I’d like to have the option to get a more reasonable meal plan, or to not have one at all, but alas, I suppose this is the price to be paid to live in the new dorms.

I like the idea of naming dorms after really awesome faculty (instead of big donators), but all the houses seem to be a little too obsessed with the person they are named after and put the persons face and name everywhere.  I suppose this is to help develop a unique character for each of the five different houses.  They all look pretty much the same inside and out; sometimes I still get them confused.  The only person I think it is valid to obsess over is Bethe.  Okay, so maybe I’m biased because I’m science obsessed, but he is mentioned in a lot of my classes, not just because he was at Cornell for so long, but because he is the person that first developed what we’re studying; he really did a lot.

In Becker house where I live, there is one quote by Becker that is frequently used, “Freedom with Responsibility.”  The only problem with this is that Becker never actually said this.  It should be “Freedom and Responsibility.”  I’m not usually a stickler for slight mistakes, but with this misquote everywhere, it’s rather embarrassing not to get it right.  You might argue,  “It’s not such a big deal, it’s not like it’s written in stone anywhere,” but it actually is written in stone.  They really need to fix this.

So while overall I like my housing and think that things are usually run smoothly, it doesn’t quite meet its grand envisioned mission.  I like how the university is trying something a little different, but I’m just fine with plain old housing.

Everyone likes complaining, especially over silly things.  What I like to complain about is people complaining too much.  A lot of people here at Cornell like to complain about how the university charges too much for everything.  While some of the complaining is merited, I feel like more attention should be placed on tuition and it’s raising cost.

Printing: When I go to print something on campus it costs 9 cents.  Some people are outraged by this, claiming Cornell is just finding more ways to take our money.  I would hate it if Cornell had free printing, why?  People would abuse the system and print way more than they need.  Then printers would always be busy, and constantly run out of toner and paper, thus depriving me of printing out my one page of homework problems.

Also, printing is expensive.  There are a lot of inherent costs besides paper we don’t think about like, maintenance, toner, and initial capital costs.  I think 9 cents is a good deal.  I do all my printing through Cornell and it only adds up to about $10 a semester, although I don’t have to print anything very long like papers and slides.  Having my own printer would cost me a lot more and it would be a lot less convenient than being able to print anywhere on campus.

Textbooks: yes textbooks cost too much, no, this isn’t Cornell’s doing.  Publishers make textbooks expensive, not schools.  The problem with selling advanced textbooks is that not many people buy them, so in order to turn a profit, publishers make them expensive.  Cornell helps a lot with the cost of books with the semesterly book buyback.  At 50% of the books original value it’s not a bad deal, the major downside is that they usually only buy back the more common textbooks.  So if you are in a small class with a lot of obscure books, don’t expect much.

Student Activity Fee:  Every student at Cornell pays a fee of about $100 a semester that goes towards student clubs and events.  I think this is too much and that the funds are often misappropriated.  If there are students who want to organize an event that costs a lot, they should be willing to pay for it themselves.  But then I compare this cost to the cost of my tuition and then I just don’t care anymore.

So why don’t we seem to complain all that much about tuition?  The cost of these small fees next to the cost of tuition really is negligible.  Even yearly tuition increases are an order of magnitude greater than the student activity fee.  Increasing the price of something while you’re in the middle of it just doesn’t seem right as you’re kinda stuck with it.  People do complain about this too, but not nearly as much as I think they should.  I call for at least a ten-fold increase in complaining about tuition increases.  I find it rather amusing how everyone is happy when the tuition increase is less than projected.  Shouldn’t we complain when they raise tuition?

There has been a ton of stuff that’s happened since my last post long ago in April. Well to sum it up, I survived the semester. I passed all of my classes and did alright on 3 of the 4 (let’s not talk about the 4th….). The end of the semester was fun. There was CornellCon, with anime, video games, and sword fighting in late April and of course Slope Day in early May. Last slope day I was stuck finishing up a lab, but this year I had some free time and actually went. Partying isn’t really my thing, but it was fun just to wander around and check out the scene. I also went through the cool underground tunnel from Olin Library to Uris Library that’s open on slope day. I took some cool pictures of the slope from Uris, too bad McGraw tower was closed (I actually still have never been up there shame on me).

So two years down, two more to go. Sophomore year was a good year, although not without its share of difficulties. Things could have better, things could have been worse, but what’s important is that I avoided disaster and stuck with things. After two years of classes I have narrowed down my interests to Physics (huge range of topics), Astronomy, Computer Science, and possibly Math. The more I learn about them, the more I find out how little I actually know. There is so much cool stuff out there to learn, unfortunately I’m too lazy to learn everything I’d like to : ( But I have two years left and I hope to make the best out of them. I know I’ll have a tremendous amount of work to do, but considering how much I’ve learned from the past two years of mostly intro classes, I’m really excited about continuing my education and hope I can keep with it.

A common question about Cornell is “how is the workload?” The short unhelpful answer is that it depends, duh. Here is the longer answer:

If you really want to graduate with doing hardly any work, it’s possible. Take an “easy” major, just meet the minimum requirements; it isn’t all that hard. But then if you do that, why are you even bothering to go to Cornell, just to get a certificate that says that you’re smart? If you want to get the most out of Cornell, you will take the major you want to take independent of how “easy” or “hard” it is considered to be. Any major will be difficult if you apply yourself to it, but I can’t really talk about anything other than my own major, AEP, which has been extremely difficult so far.

My life at Cornell has been centered around doing work (especially this semester), I’m always thinking about upcoming tests and assignments; it’s the focus of why I’m here. But of course I don’t do nearly as much work as I ought to, there are always so many cool things to do and only so few hours in the day. Whenever a small break in work comes around and I slack off some, I’m suddenly behind in everything. It’s really tough to keep on top of everything all the time and sometimes I just get sick of the constant battle and need a nice break even at the expense of my work. It’s really hard now that spring has come just look how green it is! But somehow I’m surviving the battle and I enjoy being challenged; I think I’m getting a lot out of my hard classes.

I’ve found it extremely difficult to find the right course load that works for me. Too much, I can’t focus enough on each class, too little I’m wasting my time here. Taking full advantage of everything at Cornell is impossible and it’s hard to find how far to extend yourself without becoming overwhelmed. The following guide may help tell if you have too much work:
You are overloaded with work if you find yourself:

• Trying to get some rest by closing your eyes while walking to classes
• Telling time based on exam dates and when assignments are due, “When was March, like 3 problem sets ago? I forget”
• Applying what you learn excessively, “Wow, I’ve been getting a lot of observations of photons at 510 nm lately” (trans: Wow, it’s been very green lately)
• Being jealous of people reading newspapers during lunch, “Who has time for that, don’t they have work to do?”
• Never posting on your blog as often as you should
• Thinking late times aren’t that late, “It’s only 2:31 am, I have plenty of time”
• Feeling uncomfortable, like something is not right with the universe, when you fully complete an assignment before it’s due
• Trivializing things not so trivial, “After that it’s just algebra” or “After that it’s just Calculus” or “After that it’s just solving the differential equation” or “After that it’s just solving Laplace’s equation in a toroidal coordinate system” or “After that it should be easily solvable somehow”
• Shielding yourself from being hit by an exorbitant number of photons on the rare chance you emerge from your protective shelter deep underground

Yay, it’s finally time for break. I’m going home to get some serious rest. This is a nice week-long break, although it ends on Easter Sunday arg. My suite is eerily silent as all my suite mates are already gone for the Cornell Glee Club China Tour. Unfortunately I do have work to do on break: a problem set for 322 and I need to implement Conway’s Game of Life for a project in CS 312. I’m not going to be doing much on break so I might as well get work done. It is now about the half way point in spring semester and I’m doing okay so far. My grades aren’t too good but I’m definitely passing everything and that means a lot! It has been a fun and exciting semester so far and I’ve already learned a ton of stuff. Some things haven’t worked out as nicely as I’d like but that’s how it goes.

I’m taking a bus home today so that means yes, I’m cutting a couple of classes and yes, I’m missing Dragon Day. Although I’d like to go to these, I feel a heavy case of laziness setting in and I need a break from school. Yes, Yes, I’m missing Dragon Day, how un-Cornellian like of me. I went last year and it was fun (I mean who doesn’t like a bonfire in the middle of the arts quad?), but it isn’t nearly the all glorious Cornell tradition that tour guides like to paint it as. The Architecture students are really into it as usual. They crashed Duffield the other night dressed up as “Engineers” (I was there; it wasn’t pretty) and ran through the arts quad all painted in green and wearing very little. Anyway, it is finally time for some relaxing. Goodbye Ithaca.

Update: I just learned from the Sun that apparently what happened at Duffield is called the “Nerd Walk”.  The article here.

Bear Access is going to be replaced with PeopleSoft (owned by Oracle) during break. It is cool that Bear Access is created by Cornell, but it is always a pain getting it to work, especially for pre-enrollment, which was all I ever really used it for. From the main page on the Cornell University Registrar site:

We are implementing a new student system that brings admissions, student records, bursar & financial aid together into one system. We started several months ago with admissions & financial aid & this March, bursar & student records go live.

When you return from Spring Break you’ll see the reincarnation of Just the Facts/CoursEnroll with a different interface and new features. There will be some new terminology & we’ll be making the transition from 3 to 4-digit course numbers. The 4-digit numbers are in the current Courses of Study in parenthesis after the Department and 3-digit number, i.e., ASIAN 219(2219).

I hope this new system is easy to use, but there are always problems with such large changes. Cornell has been using Bear Access for a long time and this seems like a sudden switchover. The Sun talked to David Yeh, vice president of Student and Academic Services, about the change:

Yeh confirmed that in the upcoming pre-enrollment, students will be able to make use of five new features — a course-specific waitlist, auto mated section enrollment, swap, reserve capacity and dynamic dates … The new system has gone through “extensive testing,” but Yeh warned that issues could still occur when it is implemented because the system is “very complicated.”

The new system is be able to handle more simultaneous users, a big issue since most everyone accesses it right when it opens. It is will also now be through a browser (yay!) and have new features that will make pre-enrollment and managing classes easier. I’m pretty excited about the switch and think it is a good move given that pre-enrollment has been an unnecessary pain every semester; I just hope it transitions well.

Cornell has been pushing Ruckus, a company that provides free music downloads for students. According to this article in the Sun, almost 6 thousand people have registered for Ruckus at Cornell so far and “over 750,000 songs have been downloaded.” Now what exactly these numbers mean I wonder. I do know a lot of people who have signed up for Ruckus, but I don’t actually know anyone who liked it and still uses it. Also, how do number of songs downloaded relate to number of songs listened? In any event it is clear that some people actually do use Ruckus. I’m not a heavy music downloader, but what is important to me is that I can get what it is I’m looking for and that it is not DRM. Ruckus does not do this. The Sun goes on to say:

Cornell’s agreement with Ruckus is one of many initiatives to decrease illegal downloading and educate students about its consequences … Beginning this coming school year, the University will take further steps to educate new students in an effort to prevent illegal downloading.

Of course if Ruckus really does decrease illegal downloading, it can only relate to music. This does nothing to illegal video and software downloading, which bandwidth-wise take up the bulk of pirating. I personally think that groups like the RIAA and MPAA are fighting a losing battle to control media as it becomes more and more user controlled. Ruckus is a nice compromise for music, but what happens when the user can’t find what they want?

See also Matt Hintsa on Ruckus, Wikipedia on Ruckus, Defective by Design

I have been super busy as of late. I’m always amazed by how much stuff there is to do and get done here at school, especially compared to when I’m at home. Anyway, last week I reached a point where the only way for me to even attempt to complete all of my work was to skip sleeping. It wasn’t because I was slacking off, I just had too much on plate. So because of my love of sleep I dropped MATH 413, I just simply didn’t have any time to devote to it. All my classes this semester are quite good, but it is pointless to take so many if I can’t spend enough time on each one. It is really hard to find the perfect balance between having plenty to do and being overwhelmed with work.

Despite this I’ve been enjoying my semester so far and I’ve already learned a lot. Here are a few random things that I’ve learned in the past six weeks:

• Applying for internships is a pain, but there are tons of cool jobs out there. You might as well apply.
• Even though every week of Mathematical Physics feels like it can’t get more difficult, it can and it does
• If you go sledding down the slope, don’t go down the steepest part with the asphalt path in your way that makes you flip over and fly into the air…
• I can’t survive without regularly consuming delicious Cornell chocolate milk and apple cider
• Simple combinatorics are never that simple
• When you can work with a partner on a CS project you really should, it helps a lot. This might have been why I was having so much trouble with CS 211 towards the end of last year. Speaking of CS211, there is a lecture up on Cornell Cast of 211 taught by Graeme Bailey, check it out. I’ve never had Bailey, but I always hear good things.
• I finally understand Cantor’s diagonal argument
• Astronomers are super clever in figuring out how to measure distances of far away objects
• Functional programing languages are very compact and powerful as well as awesome
• The physics of stars is incredibly interesting, difficult, and cool.
• The methods of solving differential equations are endless
• Being in the MSDNAA is quite awesome
• Always have backup batteries, even the simplest of devices can lead to failure. That and the fact no one uses AA anymore.

Oh, and if you so desire, click on this picture for a short clip of one of my treks up the slope. I’ve been playing around with video a bit but wordpress really seems to dislike embedding video.

Although I wrote how I was enjoying MATH 311 (Intro to Analysis) a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t like the pace of the the course during the second week. I was liking the material, but the math just wasn’t as rigorous as I had hoped and anticipated for. Luckily there is an honors version of the class (MATH 413) this semester and it doesn’t conflict with my schedule. I talked to the professor and sat in on a lecture. Although this class is much more difficult, it was more of what I was looking for, so I decided to switch to the honors course.

I’ve actually never switched classes after they have started before, probably because I was just too lazy to change anything. In retrospect there was definitely some classes I should have changed or dropped after the first couple weeks, but oh well it’s in the past now. Anyway, switching was rather simple, it’s still within the deadline to add a class and I made the change in add/drop in 10 seconds. One problem was that the classes use different textbooks. I bought the honors textbook at the Cornell Store to do the homework while the textbook I bought used online for way cheaper was in the mail. The Cornell Store often doesn’t have a very good price for textbooks, but I love their return policy of 7 days after purchase or 3 days after drop for a full refund. So although it’s a little annoying, I didn’t lose any money from switching textbooks.

Being overloaded with awesome classes as I am, I hope I don’t end up regretting this decision. I love challenging classes, but I hate doing all the hard work required for them. It’s kind of a problem.

I’ve been meaning to make this post for a while now; this is about the class I took last semester.

I had two choices to fulfill my circuits requirements, take AEP 363 or take ECE 210 and 230. While 363 was two labs a week for one semester, the alternative was one lab a week for two semesters. Going into fall classes I was afraid about taking 363. I heard some horror stories such as someone working 20 hours a week in labs for this class. Luckily this didn’t happen to me, but it was still a lot of lab. I spent on average 5 to 6 hours in lab every week.

I’ve had bad experiences with labs before. Often I would go to a lab and just have no idea where to start. Instructions were vague and I just didn’t know what I was doing. 363 has definitely been my best lab experience so far at Cornell. The curriculum is very well integrated with the lab experiments and topics build up naturally going from analog circuits and transitioning nicely at transistors into digital circuits. Other things that improved my lab experience:

• I paired up with a smart senior who knows how to ask questions (something I’m not very good at).
• The TA and professor were very helpful, they didn’t just say “figure it out on your own”, they actually helped me arrive at the answer without giving it to me.
• The lab set up is nice (pictured).
• Instructions were usually clear.
• I used to play around with electronics when I was little so I was kinda familiar with some stuff already.
• I liked the pace of topics (fast but not too fast).

There was also a 2 hour lecture every week. The professor was a little monotone, but he knew what he was talking about and gave everyone donuts in the middle of class : ) One of my suite mates took ECE 230 and when I saw his work I cringed in fear; he had to make enormously complicated virtual circuits. In my opinion once you understand the basics, making something very complicated is just busy work and needless pain. I’m glad I went with AEP 363.