End of Freshman Year

I'm on a flight out of Boston, having slept approximately 60 minutes in the last 36 hours in the form of ten minute naps and microsleeps, and I lost my left Galaxy bud to the depths of the airplane floor. The turbulence is going kinda crazy, but I'm only bothered in the sense that every little bump and jerk the plane does, my earbud rolls a little further away from me and my chances of finding it after we deplane decreases. I'll probably recover it, I think.

The end of the year happened so fast. I was hit with an endless onslaught of finals, one for each of my five technicals. After I got through a final, I had to pick myself up and immediately start working on the next. And the day after, we get kicked out of our dorms at 12pm. Some people left as soon as their last final was over, and the goodbyes were so rushed, I barely processed what was happening. Comparing this to the lively signing of yearbooks at the end of every year of high school, it honestly didn't feel real.

Anyways, classes:

18.702: Algebra II

The second part in the algebra series here, this class focuses on ring, field, and Galois theory. I've personally had a lot of experience with these topics, so I found this semester easier than the last, but I think the general consensus is that this kind of mathematics is more difficult? The average enrollment for 18.701 is like 100 people, and the average enrollment for 702 is just shy of 50, which is kinda crazy. I think it's because a lot of people who've done competition math in high school take 18.701 since they've been doing math all their life realize that they don't want to be doing this kind of pure math for the rest of their life, and so they don't take the second part of the algebra sequence. I mean, it makes sense. There's really no use for this class unless you're interested in pursuing research in this area.

The professor was the same from last semester, which is kinda odd. His quizzes were hella mean last semester. I got a C on the first two oops. He then made the subsequent two quizzes easier. The quizzes this semester were also decently straightforward. A lot of people got A's on them, sooo. The one issue is that since they were both out of 16, if you get one subproblem wrong, you're going to get bumped down to a B. Then, our dear Zhiwei said "The final won't be as easy as the quizzes and the psets. It will be less computational and more theoretical" and then I didn't finish half the problems on the final lmao. I got a lot of partial though, because I wrote a lot of stuff that was in the right general direction, and thus scraped together an A- in the class. That was the hardest shit of my life lowkey.

I was looking back at what I wrote about the first week of classes, and that was really funny, that I underestimated this class.

18.901: Intro to Topology

Another pure math major requirement. The first half is point-set while the second half is an introduction to algebraic topology (we did homotopies, fundamental groups, van Kampen, covering spaces). It wasn't taught particularly well. The lectures either went really slow or spent too long on little details (and topology has a lot of pedantic little details regarding open and closed sets). The more complicated concepts weren't explained well either. I swear, I would go to some lectures and walk out confused out of my mind, only to read the lecture notes and realize that it wasn't that deep. The first 2/3 of the psets were mad easy, with half of them being definition checks. The last third held some interesting and difficult problems, but at that point of the semester, I realized that I didn't care about topology anymore, and I just math stackexchanged the ones that I didn't know how to solve within 15 minutes.

The midterm and the final was kind of rough, but for the midterm she gave everyone 10 extra points, and for the final I got tons of partial where I really should not have. Also, the graders for the psets were SO FUCKING MEAN. IT MAKES ME SO MAD. You would understand the essence of the problem, do the problem right, and then get like a third of your points taken off because you missed two or three SMALL details. I genuinely wish death onto the graders for this class.

3.091: Intro to Solid State Chemistry

Ah, the chemistry requirement. You have to choose between this or 5.111, which I hear is a lot like AP Chem. The defining feature of this class is that there are no psets, only quizzes and exams. I took it originally because a friend of mine was also taking it, but she ended up dropping, and I commit way too hard to things, so I kept going. The original plan was to flex p/nr it, and I was only aiming to pass the class (which would be getting 50%), but I kind of got carried away and I ended up try-harding again. The quizzes are weekly 10-minute affairs, and the questions are quite honestly very basic compared to the exam questions. Those exams were annoying to prepare for. I didn't go to lecture, only the twice-weekly recitations, and so I had to self-learn the rest of the content by skimming various course resources.

To be fair, some of the concepts are not difficult to learn as a math major. VSEPR diagrams? You mean the platonic solids? Lattice structures and calculating densities? They're essentially Euclidean geometry problems. To be honest, there was a lot of cool content, and cool math, though the instructors love to gloss over it (which is to be expected, I suppose). I definitely had a little bit of math major arrogance when I went to class. One thing that kind of annoys me is how certain definitions are given only in the form of examples rather than rigorously and formally, and when you run into a problem that does not look exactly like the exampls given, you get tripped up. This would be totally avoided if we got the formal definitions in the first place. I'm just saying. (From a pedagogical standpoint, I understand why they're not, but stilllllllll they should be doing things that are helpful to specifically me :3).

8.02: Electricity and Magnetism

It was fine, easier than 8.01 at least. In the end, Maxwell's equations are really just calculus (Stokes and Divergence theorem). I didn't really have to study much to do well on the exams, so it was a breeze for me. There were definitely some things that I don't understand, but the exams aren't weighted super heavily and so I got an A with a B average on the tests. (The problem sets have an answer checker, so if you put in the time and/or you ask your friends for their completed psets, you could get 100% on every pset). A PROMYS friend of mine was my undergrad TA and we just yap the entire time during class.

6.101 Fundamentals of Programming

AKA an absolute time sink where you spend your Thursday nights frantically coding and debugging (there was so much debugging that happened). You can follow along the course at py.mit.edu and try your hand at all of our assignments. It's a Python project-based class where you just code up their projects and take some tests about Python tricks. We learned BFS/DFS, recursion, backtracking, and some stuff with classes and inheritance. There was lecture, but it wasn't mandatory and it was hella boring so I played games the entire class period since you could get bonus points for attendance. You learn from the readings.

I genuinely don't know what I gained from the class. I mean, yeah, I completed a bunch of cool projects and did a lot of coding, but did my coding skills really improve? I have a friend who I would text on Sunday mornings with "r u awake?" followed by "can u debug my code" and he told me that out of all the people that he has helped in that class, mine was by far the ugliest and worst-written code. No comments, unnecessarily complicated functions (it makes sense in my head), and it's really slow for some unknown reason. There were so many things you could do to bypass the style checker (like putting your long string of if else statements into a helper function) and I didn't have the time or energy to make my code nicer that I truly don't think my coding style has improved.

I could feel my motivation waver towards the end of the semester. I had so much to do, and I didn't really care to get them done. The decline in my quality of work throughout the semester is actually tangible, but I think teaching staff get more lenient near the end of the term as well. My burn out probably stems from the amount of classes that I took. I am not taking this many classes in the future. Despite all that, I managed to scrape together A's in all of my classes. I genuinely don't know how I did that.

I wish I could have spent more time thinking about my math classes. There was a period of time where I wasn't really putting that much effort into Algebra, which was the class that I cared the most about, because I had already seen the material before. I had to focus on my other classes and get them done, and so I felt like I never did that class justice. Oh, and topology too. I would tell myself that I would read the textbook in between lectures, but I never get around to doing that. I really wish I had the time this semester to spend on math, but the shitty six double o nine (old numbering for 6.101) had me staring at my failed test cases on vscode instead. Sigh. You live and you learn I guess.

But overall it was a pretty good semester. I definitely got my shit together in terms of living, mainly sleep schedule. I got good grades which I was definitely not expecting. (I tell myself that I'm okay with getting B's, but it's such a relief that I got A's in all of my classes.) I made some new friends and hung out with more cool people. I also think I might have overthought myself into actual anxiety, where I get random bouts of visceral tension and I can't work. But I deal with it in the end, and I think I have a better sense of my direction in life right now compared to half a year ago. And so I'm happy with the year. It's been a great time.