sophomore spring class review

i don't want to call it my sophomore spring review because i've done more things than just take classes, but it'd be too long to put them all in one post, so here you go

School's over! Well, it's been over for weeks now. I've just been... processing? The last month has been an endless flurry of assignments and miscellaneous things I had to do. But I survived all of that like I survived IAP. Somehow, I managed to make it to the end, and things didn't turn out too badly.

In lieu of a big sophomore year blog post, I just wanted to write about the past couple of weeks. It feels like it's been ages since I've last written (Now that I look back at it, I've only written one post about sophomore spring? gasp!) and it's hard to get back into it. I end up envisioning these big, daunting pieces that are big and daunting. And I get daunted, and then I don't want to write. Hopefully this will be a little stepping stone back into my blog.

This was an interesting semester. It was a semester in which I had a lot of time but also a lot of things to do that I didn't want to do. Way too many things that I didn't want to do. I had to force myself through a lot of tasks, and then I get burnt out.

I think the main thing was that my classes weren't really classes that I wanted to take. I wasn't really interested in the spring math department offerings, so I ended up taking two CS classes: 6.1220 (formally 6.046) Algorithms (which follows the other algorithms class I took, in which I got my first B) and 6.3900 (formally 6.036) Intro ML. Originally, I was taking an essay writing class, because I want to get better at writing creative nonfiction. However, that class had a different notion of essay than I. Thankfully, I got off the waitlist for the number theory seminar and I took that class instead of this one.

The last class that I took was a Harvard class. It's Math 137: Algebraic Geometry. If you know me, you'd know that I'm really excited about algebraic geometry. That's what I want to study and research in grad school. After taking this class, I have some doubts about that path. All I'm going to say is that I now understand firsthand why the Italian school of algebraic geometry collapsed. You do not have any tools to prove anything and everything was just such a pain to get into full rigor (not that the graders cared anyways; harvard grade inflation is real. I kid you not, I really did not deserve to get an A).

The class I enjoyed the most was probably the number theory seminar (which was in arithmetic dynamics, a really interesting and relatively new field). It was a communications seminar and we had to give presentations and write a paper at the end. Honestly I really enjoyed all the assignments, so I suppose I won't hate academia. Good exposition really requires a deep understanding of the subject matter.

I just had a slight procrastination problem in that class. Well, it was more of a underestimated-the-amount-of-work-this-would-take problem. In the last couple weeks of the semester, I was spending hours and hours writing and rewriting my final paper. Honestly it felt like I was writing a short story to be published or something and I kept having to do revisions. I more or less liked my final draft. It was a little rough around the edges (and I forgot to delete my notes to self) but it was more or less a good exposition.

The professor, Robin Zhang, was also really good! He put in a lot of time and effort into crafting a good class, and also was very receptive to feedback. He also cares a lot about the students themselves. Thank you Robin for sitting with me for 2 hours figuring out notation that I never ended up using in my final paper.

We invited him to a dinner at the end of the semester, and at that dinner, he mentioned that the math environment at the different schools he's been at is completely different. It really shows with the way his teaching compares to the other professors I've had. MIT is really research-focused, and so less attention is paid to teaching. Many of our professors just pick a textbook, then go through it more or less linearly, and assign problems from the textbook. I mean, most of them aren't bad pedagogues. They understand the subject really well, and so they do provide valuable insights during lecture, but they don't really put in extra effort into the class.

Enough said about that class. My second favorite class was algorithms. I liked this algorithms class more than the last one. It's a lot more math-heavy and so I think it was relatively easier for me (whereas the previous class felt more like one needed pure problem-solving power to come up with solutions, which I'm not so good at). I've never worked harder in my life than in this class, and this class taught me so much about what the result of hard work is.

I got a B in intro algorithms. I can't get another B in this class. That would mean that I couldn't do algorithms. I don't care that it's not even my major. I had to get an A in this class to show that I was capable of doing that kind of work. To achieve that, I had to put in my full effort. No, I had to put in more effort than I thought I was capable of putting in.

I used to only do an in-depth review of the concepts for each test I had and that usually sufficed. However, algorithms is a difficult class, and just being able to regurgitate the concepts was not going to earn you an A. It asked you to apply the algorithms you learned to problems that seemed very removed from the environment in which you learn the algorithm. Many people would just open the tests and draw a complete blank. The averages were around 50% for each test (slightly more for each midterm, slightly less for the final).

I took the class with many friends, one of which did well in intro algorithms, and he's someone I greatly admire for his problem solving ability (he did IMO). I asked him what I could do to get an A in the class. "Grind practice problems. Simple as that."

I've never been a real big fan of grinding practice problems. When I was in high school, I tried to do math competitions. Keyword try. I never got anywhere with it (I've never made AIME), even though I was doing practice problems. I don't think I was very diligent with my practice, which explains my poor results.

But it was sink (get a B) or swim (get an A) here. Thankfully, the course had plenty of resources in the form of practice problems and previous tests. Before each test, I would list out all the different content areas. Then, I pretended I was in World of Warcraft or something (I haven't played the game), and I would grind only practice problems of a certain content. After doing this, I would give myself one more skill point in that area. It was pretty fun ngl.

For example, I would sit down and work through 5 problems in just hash function questions. After completing each problem, I would grade my solution. If I got the problem wrong, I would circle my mistake in bright red and write down a method to avoid making this mistake that I could use on the test (a lot of the mistakes was me not reading the problem fully). More often than not, I wouldn't be able to do the problem. I wrote in the same bright red the things in the problem that pointed towards the solution algorithm. I tried my best to review and learn from my mistakes, because this wasn't some goofy math contest that ultimately meant nothing. It was going to go on my transcript forever, and I was going to apply to grad school, and people are going to see that.

Come the first test, I ended up scoring higher than the aforementioned friend, just barely above the A cutoff. This friend has taken a strict superset of the classes I have (excluding my music classes), and I've NEVER gotten a higher score than him. He's easily aced every exam in every math class he's taken. AND I GOT A HIGHER SCORE THAN HIM. God I've never been so happy and proud with myself. It was validation that my effort was actually yielding results.

My friend was a little bit devastated by that result. He cursed at the CS kids who had years more of experience than him, and decided he was going to take the class seriously too. He ended up as one of the top 3 scorers for the final exam, or something like that.

The second test didn't end up too well for me, and I got slightly less than a B. I was pretty busy at the time + worried about other things, so that partially explained the result. I was super worried but at the end of the year, I just didn't end up having the motivation to study really hard for the final. By some miracle of God, I ended up doing quite well on that exam. It was a combination of getting lucky with the questions (true always), not strict grading, and what I assume to be other people also being burnt out at the end of the semester (=> the curve was lower than the other tests) that got me something like the top 10% on the final test.

What a success story. Honestly, thank you 6.1220 for teaching me what hard work can achieve. I never thought I'd be "good" at problem solving, especially compared to a lot of the top students at MIT, and here I am, walking away with a solid A in one of the hardest (harshly graded) class that I probably will ever take.

To wrap things up, I'll quickly mention ML. The information was a little poorly organized, and it was, simply put, a CS class. It was pretty theoretical, but things weren't really rigorously defined, and there was a lot of handwaving. We also had to go to these participation-required labs and recitations where we had to do problems in the classroom and get them checked off. We also had homeworks that were half theoretical and half coding, but they don't really teach you how to code at all, and so the Google code autocomplete on Collab basically did my homeworks for me.

I got below the median in the (one and only) midterm and I was super pissed because I felt like I knew the concepts well. It was an easy exam but the cutoffs were at a strict 80 for a B, 90 for an A. I complained about getting a B incessantly. I was then also super worried about the final because my ego cannot handle getting a B in what I deemed to be an easy class. I fucked up pretty bad on the final because there was a string of questions that didn't make sense to me (it seemed like they were all asking the same thing) and I figured out later what it was really asking. I ended up with a 90.24 in the class. One point less on the final and I would have gotten a B.

Anyways that's my semester! I made it through with all A's (mashallah) :DDD. Hopefully there's more writing in this summer.