Finals

Ahh … finals are over at last.
Actually, they’ve been over since Tuesday, I got out of my statistics final (which was my last one) at about 9:30 pm Tues night. I don’t even remember what happened to Wednesday, I think I slept most of the day. I spent Thursday getting my head screwed back on straight, and didn’t start planning what I was going to do over my break until Friday. My finals period was particularly grueling, for a few reasons. First of all, I had six finals; none of my other friends had so many. (I’m only taking 5 classes this semester, but Chinese has a written and an oral final) The way finals around here work, the last day of classes is on a Monday, then students have the rest of the week, called the Reading week, to study & prepare for finals, which start the following week, and students have tests throughout. From what I understand, it is against the rules to schedule finals during the reading week. However, someone forgot to tell this to the Chinese dept; both my Chinese finals fell on Weds of the reading week. So my prep time got cut in half. Plus, my other four finals were all on either Mon or Tues of finals week. Good side, it means I was done early. Bad side, very intense, and less time to prepare.
However, as it says in Ezra & Nehemiah, “the gracious hand of our God was with us”. In spite of feeling under prepared, and feeling that at least one test went very poorly, things have turned out well. I will review each class below.
Chinese: As I mentioned, I had far less time to study than I wanted to, and I could have made an issue about their scheduling had I chosen to. However, my instructor this semester, Prof. Li Jinghua, had been very gracious to me on a number of occasions. One of the big things she did was instead of making me attend the mandatory drill sections, which are an hour per week each and in my opinion, not a good use of time, she agreed to let me spend 15 minutes per week one on one with her TA. This is just one of many such examples. So, I went ahead and took both the exams on Weds; the written one went fairly well. I was actually taking it early due to a scheduling conflict with another exam, so Prof. Li agreed to meet me early, 7 AM in her office, and let me take the exam there. It says something about the level of trust/confidence she had in me that she actually stepped out of the office a few times, leaving me there taking the test alone. The oral final actually went much better than I thought it would, and afterwards one of the other instructors complimented me in particular on my tones & pronunciation. Even though my tests during the semester were not my finest work, I pushed hard at the end, and I believe the instructors saw that and made note. I expected to receive a B+ for the course, so I was surprised and extremely pleased with the generous grade they actually gave me. Especially since Chinese is a 5.0 credit course (most courses are 3.0), this helps my GPA significantly.
Final Chinese Grade: A-
MicroEconomics: There were two different instructors available for Micro this semester, Prof. Miyagawa, and Prof. Susan Elmes. Miyagawa is known for being less difficult in terms of material, but I’ve heard that his English is not quite smooth enough that there aren’t some difficulties in understanding him sometimes. (I do not know him myself nor have I heard him speak, this is based on reviews of him I read, and from things I heard from others.) Prof. Elmes, on the other hand, has no such language difficulties, but is known for being VERY tough in terms of the course material. In particular, she’s famous for giving out very LONG and COMPLICATED problem sets, which I found to my dismay was not an exaggeration. So I had the choice between two … seemingly less than optimal choices. I chose to take it with Elmes, since most of my friends were taking it with her as well. I was never quite as on top of the material as I would have liked to have been. Some of this is due to a bit of laziness on my part, and the fact that there was much in the course I didn’t find very interesting. I also had other time demands, and think the homework was pointlessly long, I don’t think it made for good learning. Though I did come away from the class with one major insight, and that is that price in the long run is not driven by demand; it is driven by COSTS. Demand only drives quantity traded/sold in a given market. This was very interesting to me. The final went about like I expected, perhaps slightly less well, I came out of it knowing I’d fumbled things a bit. A B+ was what I was both hoping for and expecting, so I feel that given my efforts and work throughout the course, it was a perfectly fair and reasonable grade.
Final Micro Grade: B+
Statistics: Stats was … strange. This is actually the second time I’ve taken stats, having taken it before at BCC, where I got an A in it. (I had to take it again here because many of the micro courses require Stats w/ Calculus as a prereq, and the stats I’d taken before did not include Calc) However, I didn’t really understand then much of what I was doing. I was able to do the calculations because I’m fairly good at math, but I had no idea where most of it came from and what much of it meant. Sadly, I’m afraid to say the same thing is somewhat true here. I’ve come to the conclusion that Stats is just a difficult course to teach. Conceptually, it often doesn’t make much sense, and requires a specific way of thinking.
Prof. Hernandez was a really good guy, and both the tests he designed were very fair. However, I didn’t always get a lot out of his lectures, I generally got more out of going to his office hours and talking with him there. He was also a bit disorganized near the end of the course; he promised he’d post up guidelines and practice exams, which were then late or never showed up. This made studying for the final a bit tougher, and there was one entire question I missed because I didn’t find out until 3 hours before the exam that it would be on there. (It was a fairly complicated derivative-type proof). However, I had perfect homework and a perfect midterm going into the final, which I thought went much worse than it actually did. I fumbled it somewhat, though if I were to discount the question I missed entirely due to not knowing it would be there, then I didn’t fumble so badly. The final grade hasn’t been posted to the transcript yet, but I know what my score from the final was, so even without any curve, an A- is certain. I would have liked an A, but in fairness both exams could have been much harder, so I am still satisfied with a slightly lower grade.
Final Stats Grade: A- (anticipated)
Music Hum: This was a sincerely enjoyable course, from start to finish. I was recommended this professor by a friend (thanks again Sagit), and I wasn’t disappointed. Exams & assignments were easy, Prof. Josh Walden was quite easygoing and made the class fun, and we got to listen to some GREAT music. (Even though I deplore the man’s politics, I think I’ve fallen in love with Wagner’s music) One of the real highlights was that when we got to the course section on jazz, rather than lecturing about it, he got a live jazz quartet (piano, upright bass, sax, and drums) to come and play for us, which was absolutely OUTSTANDING; probably the single best lecture I had all year. I got A’s on every paper/assignment, and we had a very good idea what would be on the final, so it was an easy coast to the finish. This was the only final (finals are normally 3 hours) that I really smashed; I walked out after only 70 minutes, and knew that I had aced it. This was the one grade I was certain of.
Final Music Hum. Grade: A
Frontiers of Science: FOS is an interesting course; or perhaps rather I should say, it is a great idea but not yet a very good course. Basically, it is a survey course of a couple of different disciplines (earth sciences, biology, quantum physics) and where the most current research is going on. The tested content itself though is more about scientific habits, or the scientific method. As far as the work went, the course was very easy. However, the main lectures were often quite distracting because it is a huge course (500 some students), all undergrads, and all VERY immature. Sometimes the talking was so bad I couldn’t get much out of the lectures. Science, I’ve also realized, is just very hard to teach; people either tend to be turned on to it, or they aren’t. This is unfortunate, because like statistics, it is becoming more and more important to our world. In ancient China, civil servants and rules were required to pass certain examinations in order to qualify for service in government. Usually these exams were in writing, classics, military tactics, ect, but there’s no reason the same type of thinking couldn’t be adopted today for our government. Entrance exams could be designed for things like sciences, stats, math, language, and others in order to insure lawmakers are knowledgeable in important subjects. But I digress.
I didn’t learn a whole lot from this course, but the work was easy, and it knocks off the last science requirement for my curriculum. The lecturers were rotating, depending on the topic, but we did have a regular section leader who evaluated our homework, and our final. I would like to say a special thank you to Dr. Michelle Buxton, my leader, who really did bend over backwards to help the kids from my section learn and do well. I didn’t require much help myself, since many of the basics I’d covered before, but I was struck by her dedication and passion for her subject, and I hope she continues on as an instructor. Her students will be fortunate to have her. Grades haven’t been released quite yet, and my final wasn’t perfect, but since I anticipate a curve and my coursework was very good, an A is quite possible, and an A- is fine too.
Final FOS Grade: A or A- (anticipated)
So that was my semester, and now it is over. I did better than I'd hoped, and better than I thought I'd do; I expected A's in FOS, Stats, and Music Hum, and B's in Micro and Chinese, so the fact that I got an A in Chinese will really give a good boost to my GPA. I'm quite pleased that I exceeded my own expectations. This semester had it's own challenges, but I'm glad that I was able to turn in a superior performance to last semester, especially given that I was taking an extra course.
The REALLY strange thing is to see all the preparations for this year’s commencement, and realize that in 367 days, I will be a part of that commencement. It will really feel downhill once I finish my classes this summer, I’ll be taking Econometrics and Game Theory. Once they’re behind me, it’s two semesters left and then I’m done. I have another week before summer classes start, so if I do anything memorable in that time, I’ll post it up. I may not do any more updates until my summer classes are over, since they are intensives, it’s basically a semester’s worth of instruction in 6 weeks. And these two subjects are not known for being easy. So I may not have much time. But, they will be over by June 30, and the rest of my summer should be more relaxed before classes start again in the fall.
A final note about the picture. I’ve told many of my friends that Columbia has a very ‘old world’ or ‘classic East Coast’ kind of feel to it; this is a picture of a very standard classroom. Notice two things about it: the fairly uncomfortable wooden seats (which for some reason are actually bolted to the floor), and more importantly, the chalkboards. Yes, that’s right, chalkboards. Not whiteboards. I have no idea why they still use chalk here; every professor I’ve ever had in every class here always ends up covered & smeared with chalk dust at the end of every lecture, it’s a horrible mess, whiteboards are far superior and the only reason I can possibly think of why they have not been replaced is that the school wants to preserve some kind of ‘classic higher learning’ motif. Every institution has its quirks I suppose, I’m just glad I’m not a lecturer here …