Starting the term, I quit my job at Tractor to focus my attention on school and Sailbot. Not working 35 hours a week meant I had enough energy to remember what happened.
Introduction to Engineering II
Section 201 - Carol Patricia Jaeger - 87% / 72% Section Average
APSC 101 is the continuation of the UBC flagship engineering design course. Most students find the second part of this course more boring, as the projects aren’t as hands on. Instead the course covers ethical/legal basics and completes 7 C’s of communication (ironically, the 7 C’s break their own communication rules). I found the final course project very interesting. The project was to design a rainfall catchment system, given a system model and objective function. The intention was to build a excel sheet to manually tweak the design parameters, but I saw potential for a computation optimization approach. The only tricky part was building an accurate weather model for rainfall. After a few hours of reading papers, I reazlized I could fit a Markov chain and Gamma ditribution to historical data of the “alleged” site where the data was taken from. I pulled my first university all-nighter finishing the MATLAB code to run a genetic optimization on the problem. It’s a messy job, but what APSC 101 group carry isn’t. My group reluctantly let me take on the heavy lifting for the simulation. Sadly, the test dataset were three cherry-picked examples representing the extreme flood and drought conditions. My comprehensive model simulating 10+ years per iteration gave a solution ranking in the bottom half of the class. Oh well.
Geography, Modernity and Globalization
Section 201 - Trevor Barnes - 83% / 68% Section Average
GEGO 122 was the first complimentary studies elective I took. I have a soft interest in both history and geography, the course description caught my interest when broswing the course list. The course itself was many hundreds of pages of reading, supplementated by explanations of the reading in lecture. This was my strongest exposure to the origins of capitalism and the history of marxism and communism. While this course had the most reading and essay writing out of any course I took at UBC, the course content made it well worth it. Very interesting stuff.
Integral Calculus with Applications to Physical Sciences and Engineering
Section 209 - Michael Jeffrey Ward - 77% / 68% Section Average
MATH 101 was another embarrasing awakening on how poor my integration skill was. Ward did an reasonably good job of explaining all the concepts in lecture. I also kept up with the Webworks and studied comprehesively for the midterm and final. The final I remember was really pressed for time. My mathematical speed was not able to keep pace with the exam - this resulted in a few too many incomplete answers. I’m lucky I got into ENPH with such a poor math score. The next few years of my degree would whip my integration into shape.
Linear Systems
Section 208 - Colin Macdonald - 83% / 70% Section Average
MATH 152 was the engineering introduction into linear algebra. Nothing too complex came up, mainly row reduction, lines and plane parameterization/intersections, as well as a few MATLAB problems. There was much hate for this course, but who doesn’t love the cleaniness of simple linear algebra. My 83% surprised me, I thought I was aced the course. But I stupidly didn’t read the questions on the final. Again. First year learning expereience.
Introductory Physics for Engineers II
Section 201 - Michael Hasinoff - 84% / 70% Section Average
PHYS 158 was the continuation of the PHYS 157. The course expanded on simple harmonic motion adding damping. We also cover some basic optics and RCL circuits. Hasinoff was an amazing professsor. He had this subtle attiude of “good try student, but you’re wrong because physics”. It gave the impression he really knew the material well and was light hearted about it. Added some fun demos also to the lectures. PHYS 158 is a first year engineering classic.
Introductory Physics Laboratory for Engineers
Section L2F - Marina Litinskaya - 91% / 79% Section Average
PHYS 159 was the lab course meant to supplement the material in PHYS 158 and PHYS 159. It consisted of weekly 2 hour labs. Playing with the hardware was fun, but the writeups were absolutely brutal. The rules were you have to complete everything in the 2 hours of the lab. In the last 10 minutes, everyone makes a rush for the printer, which had less ink than a water-stain. Forget any notion of neat lab notebook. To finish in time, we had to glue the fully printed pages in the notebook. All you had time for was one glue stick wipe and quick slap to attach the page. No cutting or alignment or additional notes. PHYS 159 left a bad taste in the mouth.
Mechanics I
Section 201 - J Malcolm McMillan - 94% / 79% Section Average
PHYS 170 was the first year introduction to simple statics and some brief constant acceleration equations of motion. McMillan was an old timer with wobbly handwriting, who took his time in lecture to fully explain the concepts. Very patient and kind. Shows he cares about student learning. Since the material was simple, many didn’t show for lecture or just goofed off. I felt a little bad, as he derversed more respect. I’ll always draw a “Big Beautiful Free Body Diagram” whenever solving statics problems. McMillan also made me cracked at using my TI-84 to row reduce linear systems. That’s a skill I’m proud to have.