Spring Semester 2008

There's no better way to celebrate surviving the first week of class than going directly into the first three-day-weekend of the semester. And no better way to spend a Sunday afternoon on such a weekend than to blog about that week. These are my classes for the semester:

MATH 445: This class is going to be all about partial differential equations and such, but so far all we've done is Fourier analysis, which allegedly is an important step towards solving PDEs. My favorite parts of this class are the professor telling us that the required textbook kinda sucks, but we have to buy it anyway, and the fact that we spent almost no time on boring administrative stuff, instead diving right into Fourier series, deriving the formula for it, and then proving it converges, all in three lectures. For the first time in a USC math class, the homework is actually required, but there's none assigned yet.

EE 101: Very low-level digital logic stuff. Binary representations of numbers, and gates, or gates, etc. The "textbook" for this class is a course reader that only cost about $18, and since everything so far is fairly trivial, I've been reading ahead about how to build multiplexers and adders and such. Seems like this is going to be an easy A.

MUEN 308: Men's choir. I did this last spring, but I've never done it in the fall. I guess this is a pattern that could continue to work: Band in the fall, choir in the spring. Anyway, the director is redoing some pieces from last semester, which puts the new people (there are about five of us) a little behind. This was fun last year and it's looking like it will be fun again this year.

PHIL 262: This is my category I GE. The title is something about "Mind and Self." Since this is a philosophy class, I was worried it would be a little like this. And it might be, but I'm very optimistic about it, at this point. The professor told us we can call him Jake. "You do NOT need to call me Professor Ross. My father was Professor Ross. Well, my father wasn't a professor, but if he had been, then he would have been Professor Ross." What's more amazing, he actually listens when students ask questions, instead of assuming he knows what they're going to ask, then going on and on about something unrelated. Again, it's only the first week, and we've already examined five alleged "proofs" for the existence of God. Not an easy A, but it should be interesting.

CSCI 101: I had already heard from my friend Greg, who took this class last semester from the same professor, that the professor wouldn't be all that great, and it's looking like it's going to be a few weeks before we get into anything remotely challenging. Eventually, I might learn something, and it looks like another easy A.

Basketball Band: Another semester of Tony Fox. Joy. This week, we recorded this Foo Fighters song for some youtube contest. Every other week is going to be pretty lame in contrast.

Concert Band: This year's show is all Broadway songs, so I couldn't really pass this up. Still, I feel like the music is way over my head, so I'm going to have to practice a lot. Apparently, I'm allowed to reserve PIC rooms since I'm officially in this class, even though I'm not a music major. This could end up being a really rewarding experience.

Overall, I'm pretty excited about this semester, and I'm fairly confident that my GPA will go up when it's all over.