Continuation for Summer 2025

Published: 09-22-2025

Relatively easier semester, went pretty smoothly, but slightly bummed out about one of my course grades (but overall was a great semester). It was also kinda nice that there was no one on campus during the summer, after experiencing the sheer number of people on campus in the fall semester. Anyway, here are the courses.

MATB41 | Multivariable Calculus - C

I took this course with Tatiana Pilehrood and this was definitely one of the courses I have ever taken. The way of teaching and content both reminded me of high school, leading to an incredibly boring experience. This course was nothing like the previous calculus courses in difficulty, it felt like it was tailored for other people. Which it was, as I found out that this course is a requirement for other majors and was not specially made for math people.

Every lecture I felt like skipping and the content was not interesting at all. The prof never even gave motivation for the things we did, all of it was memorize and apply, the main reason why math in high school was such a bad experience. At least it was easy, I just did all the assignments and spent a week or a couple days before the midterm and final and ended up with an easy A+.

MATB24 | Linear Algebra 2 - B

I took this with Thomas Kielstra and for the first few weeks, I really enjoyed the content we were learning about. Rings were an interesting concept and finite fields were my favourite concept of linear algebra 2 by far. It answered one of my burning questions I had for linear algebra 1, which was about why they stressed so much that things such as additive or multiplicative inverses are not always the negative or reciprocal. That emphasis ended up messing me a up a lot in linear alegbra 1, but now with finite fields that actually matters. It feels like this concept really changes up the game as we know it and provides a very fresh experience. The rest of the weeks in the beginning were basically relearning linear algebra 1, but with new topics added in.

But thats about it, the more we moved on from this the more confusing it got. By the end I was totally confused and Thomas Kielstra’s teaching did not help me understand it much more. The course turned from my favourite of the semester into multivariable calculus. For the second midterm and the final, I just ended up memorizing and applying, which is why this course stands at a B. Overall I did great though, I did good on the final and ended up getting the same mark as in multivariable, an easy A+.

CSCB58 | Computer Organization - A

This one was with Kareem Ibrahim, while his teaching was very straightforward and not too compelling, this course ended up being a lot of fun because of how it was structured. However, he mentions this and I agree, this course is a huge timesink. Biweekly quizzes and labs (which were not short) and a project that took a good couple hours. This course is all about computer engineering, more specifically, the internal components of a CPU. For me, the simple parts of it was fun and interesting, but as the course went on and we abstracted everything, I started to get more and more confused because I felt like I couldn’t fully understand it all. So around the middle of the course near flip-flips I started to get a bit lost. However after that section, it became interesting again, the labs were fun and the last part which was assembly was great. The project was creating tetris in assembly and I definitely can say that I have not had this much fun with an assignment in university as I did with this one.

This course was a big time sink, but was quite fun, although the final was actually pretty hard, leading me to just barely scrape by with an A+ as I ended with a final that was right on the border, which was a 90.

CSCB09 | Software Tools and Systems Programming - B

This course, I took with Albert Lai.

Unfortunately this one broke my 4.0 streak this semester as I landed right behind the border with an 84 or an A- 😭.

However, there is a lot to talk about with this course. First off, the professor. I cannot lie, this guy was not good at teaching at all, his english was hard to understand due to his heavy cantonese accent and stuttering. His slides were like presenter notes so it was hard to keep following if you couldn’t understand him. But it really sucks because he seemed fairly nice and passionate about teaching this course, his setup was nice too. A slides with info and a board for demonstrations of what he was talking about. If only he fixed his english and presentation skills this course could’ve been a banger.

The content was shell programming and then a bunch of things to do with C and a lot of internals. All of it was very difficult to understand and I definitely had to put a lot of time into this course. This course covered so much stuff that it would be too much to mention here, but I will admit that learning about it was pretty interesting. I enjoyed a good deal of it except for the shell programming and some of the stuff near the end.

Tests were tricky and pretty hard, but Im super proud of cooking one like crazy, hitting a 99 on midterm 2 😼, although it didn’t put me at much better standing as I got around a 70 on the first one 🥲. Assignments had some tricky test cases and the marking for those were certainly not too generous. Another thing about the marking was that it was very frustrating with how slow they were. On the day of the final, our class consisting of only 1 section was missing our second midterm and two assignments (full course had only 4 assignments). This really sucked as I think I could’ve done a bit better on the final if I had my second midterm and other resources back. Maybe enough to get the 4.0, but yeah that’s about it. I’m pretty conflicted with this course but it was overall alright

Conclusion

3 A+ grades in 1 semester I cooked. I geniunely thought I’d never see A+ again after the first two semesters. Pretty cool semester, but am now looking forward to fall as I have a really easy and free semester.