School

[maj]

Being the presentation guy on group projects is always the best, I get to make pretty slide shows and talk while everyone does the work and I get the same grade

[vgtbls]

Two tests back to back today. One is really qualitative and one is really quantitative and I wish they could meet in the middle.

Edit: First one went decently, second was good.

[sagc]

I'm in my fourth year of my undergrad, and my classes have started to be structured as really ineractive seminars, instead of lectures. It's great - The interaction with all my peers really, I think, helps me come up with relatively novel ideas. I've also started attending public lectures put on some of the academic working groups here, and that's also been a real boon to writing papers. Really enjoying things so far.

Oh, and I earned $2 from my prof today for answering a question correctly, so that was pretty great.

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

currently on a gap year. until the end of January I'm doing really intensive work and I'm in a foreign country (Mexico), but after that I'm back in the states. what could i do this year to prep me well for college next year?

[finolino]

@CheerUpBrokeBoy probably wrong but i thought the purpose of a gap year was usually not to study for school or even, in most cases, think about school and instead rather to just experience things you normally wouldn't experience, like this one kid i know who's used the two gap years he's taken so far to travel the world with his skateboard and just skate all day in different places. your time in mexico is already substantial for that and, if you really want to get prepared, then maybe a simple review of some of the concepts you think will be necessary in college (esp. math and science related) a few months before would suffice

[Blastoise]

...most people that I know that take a gap year use it to work/save up for school and maybe take an online class or two so they don't get too behind.

[CPV1]

Everyone from my school seemed to just spend it wearing harem pants while smoking hash in India and getting drunk in South East Asia.

[silvaeri]

really not all that enthused about the idea of going into the typical graphic design field after graduation. i'm not enjoying design school right now nor enjoying the typical kind of design work that's usually associated with the mainstream form of graphic design. that's not to say i don't want to do anything design related. i love design thinking and solving problems in that manner, and i definitely want to design things. but that's just it, i want to design things, physical, made with your hands, tangible stuff. Ideally if I could somehow make it work I'd love to either combine that style of designing with something in the cycling industry, or maybe fabric/textiles/clothing design. I just want to make physical stuff, not stuff that will spend it's entire life in the confines of the digital space.

[Ques]

[brlmski]

Looking at the attitude some of my peers have with senior capstone/design/project really makes me a little sad. It's supposed to be the culmination of four+ years of learning where you finally apply what you've learned to make something, but so many of them just want some quick and easy project that will get them an A so they can gtfo.

[JewTurk]

Everyone I got to asking about double majors and career paths has given me almost the exact polar opposite answer to the previous person I had talked with... Parents say just do engineering, councilor (high school) tells me to do what makes me what, brother says to meet both in the middle and do both, friends say just do visual communication and maybe major in something relevant to that like marketing as well.

I got an internship with the U of A's opitcal science college and I start this coming week. Just trying to figure out what degree(s) I want to go for. I get my advisers e-mail next month for this summer program I'm doing, hoping they can give me answers on the honors college, NAUs is pretty bad apparently and a lot of STEM people get turned off from it because of how liberal arts focused it is. Hoping to meet with a lot of professors in the honors college and talk with them, sadly almost all of the honors profs deal with liberal arts classes (which isn't a bad thing, just not relevant to my interests right now). Not super interested in optics but being around university students will hopefully help me get some info on things... more or less.

Started looking at different ways I can get credit for NAU and I'm looking at what AP tests I should take (as in I can get credit for them for my degree of choice), IF (big if) I decide to pursue Electrical Engineering and Visual Communication (double major, or whatever the correct 'term' is) the only AP tests that would help me would be Physics Chem and Calc BC. I already have credit for Calc I and I got a 4 on AP Lang so I may go for the 5 on AP flaxy but we'll see... I don't need any elective credits because of how many credits the engineering would require of me so I'm foregoing AP Psych and Econ tests for sure. If I double major I definitely won't need any general electives so psych and macro wouldn't be worth the $89 as I'll just end up not using them as credits.

Not too worried about AP tests though, I know I can get a 5 on physics and calc bc so I'm not worried about those. But I'm not 100% sold on getting a 4 on chem right now. But everyone I know who's gone into college has just decided to retake chemistry anyways.

I've always enjoyed graphic design and so I really like the idea of maybe doing marketing or design for misc businesses working through an advertisement company of sorts but it would be nice to have electrical engineering as a back up with an emphasis in computer engineering as I've always been interested in computers. My only problem is a lot of people say those two majors don't go together and it wouldn't be good to do both.

[rjbman]

Electrical and Computer Engineering have overlap but don't go into Electrical Engineering if you're wanting to learn about computers... just do Computer Engineering then. It touches on hardware and software sides of computers.

[yubbermax]

I wouldn't double major personally. It's a ton of extra work and you don't know how you'll handle the workload. Keep in mind, if you decide to just do a single major that it'd be much easier to get a graphics design job without a GD degree while it'd be quite difficult to get an engineering job with just a graphic design degree.

[Stingray Sam]

Have you considered minoring in Graphic design or taking graphic design courses at a community college over the summer or during a gap year? From what I've heard about Community Colleges, at least in Washington, is that they usually do a very good job at teaching you all the technical skills needed to do a job like graphic design.

[JewTurk]

[zayg]

ugh school makes me mad

some of my professors just have the worst teaching style. lectures filled with non-specific business jargon for an hour and a half does not make a good learning environment. my longest class is during the mid-afternoon yet the professor's teaching style somehow leads me be alert and engaged throughout the entire thing. i wish at times that i went to a better school because if all the seemingly over-romanticized notions of "brilliant geniuses" that teach at elite schools are actually true, i would welcome an entire class schedule full of professors like this dude.

its amazing how much of a pain in the ass studying is when you have to basically learn the entirety of the class material on your own because your mind can't focus for longer than five seconds in class

[pei]

fuck rules break school

[SteevMike]

[station]

Yeah, this is mainly because a lot of universities are hiring professors based on their ability to do research/contribute to their field of study rather than their ability to lecture to undergrads. AFAIK many schools will offer professors who don't meet tenure qualifications lecturer positions (hold undergrad lectures, but no research/grad students to work with) and will only deny tenure to professors due to teaching for extreme cases. In the end, you might get screwed a few times cause of this, but its probably better for the university. (unless the guy is abusing the tenure system but that's another issue)

[Muzzle]

This is probably the first time I've felt positively towards high school (junior now). My classes are going well and the workload is entirely manageable. The only thing that bums me out is my German teacher cancelled her bi-annual trip to Germany (she's scared of ebola?) and I'm doubting my resolve to go through with another year of language without that pay-off. She's a great teacher, but is high-school-level German even useful?

[zayg]

that awful test that i was whining about ended up being pretty easy and was made up of a few multiple choice questions and a bunch of essays

nailed those multiple choice through the help of some nice educated guesses (100%!) and we had a choice of 4 out of 6 essays. managed to actually understand 4 out of 6. lucky meeee

[JtotheWhat]

Just got confirmation that assuming I don't fail any of my classes this semester (which should not be a problem) I will indeed be finished my undergrad. I was pretty sure that this was the case but was waiting for approval of all my transfer credits from my exchange semesters ...now that they are all approved for the required slots I am pretty excited...only a couple more months!

[theweathercock]

I'm a junior in high school, and every student was issued an ipad and usb keyboard. Let me tell you it is so easy to not pay attention and browse various fashion forums all day. I try to avoid doing that to the best of my ability. To prevent that I just do it in my joke class instead haha. With great technology comes great responsibility.

[rjbman]

We got laptops my senior year. Set up a Minecraft server and me and my buddies didn't pay attention in any of the classes. Oops!

[windowflowers]

My school's had laptops for the past 8 years or so. We currently all have Macbook Airs. It's definitely cool for a lot of technology classes, and useful for the general usefulness of having computers, but it's also pretty distracting, even though most sites I would want to go on are blocked. Care-tags isn't, but all image hosting sites are, so browsing is kind of pointless. Still lots of other thing to be distract by in class, though.

[exprof]

Most of my teachers since hs have pointed out that you can't concentrate/retain as much A lot of my profs actually have a policy where if you want to use a computer, you can only do it if you sit in the back rows (because it distracts ppl in front of you as well).



edit for clarity

[brlmski]

but i use a tablet to take notes

[chadnik]

re: technology and learning: I'm TAing a hybrid class (mostly online, with weekly lectures that I teach). maybe I was a goodier-two-shoes as an undergrad than I remember, because it's kind of shocking to see how many kids are completely taking advantage of the online format to attain a good grade, in a way that nearly precludes any possibility of actual learning. basically, there are multiple-choice quizzes integrated into the online lectures, and they can retake them as many times as they want. I can see how many times they submit the quizzes, and how long it takes from start to finish. it's obvious by the number of submissions (as high as 25 for one person) that a lot of people are just going through and noting which answers are wrong, and retaking the quizzes until they get the correct answers by brute force. and then you have the kids who submit the quiz in 7 minutes or something ridiculous, making it obvious that they've gotten the answers from someone else (the content is all unique to this course, and it should take at least an hour if they're going through all the material; there are a lot of videos that you couldn't ctrl+f the answers to). I'm trying to set aside my personal attachment to my field/subject; obviously, the majority of these students aren't going to major in the thing I love. but it pains me to see that so many people blatantly don't care about the class, and to feel the disconnect from my physical classroom (which is generally pretty invigorating and gets decent participation). granted, I think a lot of people get shunted into courses because they fulfill some bullshit requirement, and I never want to hold people hostage to learning the exact things I want them to. but this is raising a lot of questions for me about the way online classes crack open the door to temptation (sort of like how y'all were talking about the distraction of laptops in general, even if your intentions are pure) and their viability as pedagogical resources at all.

[Stingray Sam]

I usually hate online classes because I feel that the programs used make it often times too difficult to do required tasks at times and too easy to cheat the system at other times. I feel like more often than not when doing work on paper versus online I'm going to retain and learn a lot better from having to write it out even if i'm not trying to cheat the system. However right now I am taking an accounting course that uses LearnSmart to do all of it's reading and homework and I've found that it's not only a good alternative, but does a better job than paper and pencil. It has assignments that force you to go through and read the section and will only highlight information to read that is pertinent to you. After reading for a while it will pop up and say now it's time to practice and you will go to another section and review the material you just read. After you go over everything it will have you start reading again and you will have to go back and read information you had trouble with in the practice and then you can continue on to new information. It forces you to do that for the entire reading assignment and I think at most it's only ever taken me an hour and a half. I definitely feel like I have a lot better handle of the material than I would have had we not used the program so I'm pretty happy with it. Anyways, I think if online classes and course materials are to become just as good as in class and paper and pencil materials they have to focus on using the computer to force the student to do specific activities like reading and review in a comprehensive manner and a way that adapts to the student rather than just forcing every student to do the same thing. There are still some problems with LearnSmart, like if you know all the material and are confident with all of your answers you will still have to do the minimum amount of practice work, which has a lot of repetition. Overall it's a very good program though.

[hot coffee]

That very cool moment when you overwrite your take home essay exam that's due the following morning with a non-important document.