This past Tuesday (October 1) I once again had the fortune to proctor the CS18000, the inaugural CS course, fall midterm 1. Unfortunately, I’m unable to provide the problems or solutions (or even my own solutions) but I figure some general discussion is okay. Any sort of incriminating or sensitive events will be left out.
Continue reading “CS18000 Fall 2019 Midterm 1 Reflections”MA 35100 Course Notes
I have just uploaded by MA 35100 course notes to the handouts page. Contrary to the page name, this is not a handout (and not something I would physically hand out, ever). These are not polished or edited; I welcome any and all suggestions and corrections. As a credibility statement, I finished the course with an A+.
25 pages are handwritten and makes the document quite large. I apologize.
As a note to those reading these notes that are taking MA 26500, this does not cover all topics in the MA265 curriculum (orthogonal bases). There’s also more proofs than the MA265 curriculum as well.
Demystifying the computer/data science CODO process
In recent semesters, an increasingly large number of students aim to CODO — Change of Degree Objective, essentially switching majors — into the Department of Computer Science to varying degrees of success. As someone who has successfully CODO’d into the Department of Computer Science to major in data science as well as being in contact with students that have attempted/are attempting to/have successfully CODO’d (both friends and students I have TA’d for), I have discussed the CODO process countless times. Misinformation has certainly been spread. In this post, I will detail the CODO requirements and give some commentary on how to increase one’s chances.
My information comes from two official sources: the College of Science’s Academic Advising’s CODO Requirements for 2019-2020 and the Department of Computer Science’s CODO Requirements.
[EDIT 2020 April 13]: I’d like to mention that outside of parts that make direct use of official sources, much of this blog post was written with some guess work. While I wrote this after having had successfully CODO’d into data science, I know more now than I knew then. Unfortunately, the things I have since learned and confirmed are not things I can make public, sorry.
Continue reading “Demystifying the computer/data science CODO process”On academic lesson structure
Months ago in March, I visited University of California: Davis, and attended a MATH 17C lecture with a friend. This course parallels (partially) the Purdue course MA 16020; both are essentially “calculus with random advanced topics, targeted at non-stem majors.” The lesson was on the dot product and its applications to vectors and geometry in 
CS18000 Summer 2019 Midterm Reflections
This past Monday (June 8) I had the fortune to proctor the CS18000, the inaugural CS course, summer midterm. Unfortunately, I’m unable to provide the problems or solutions (or even my own solutions) but I figure some general discussion is okay. Any sort of incriminating or sensitive events will be left out.
Continue reading “CS18000 Summer 2019 Midterm Reflections”Studying myths
[All-nighters] are romanticized.
Christopher Lin, 2019 February 26
People really like to gas up the idea of an all-nighter and other practices that entail putting life on the back-burner and absurd self-sacrifice for some noble goal. This could not be farther from the truth. But I don’t think this stops here, no, I think in terms of studying, people tend to have a lot of false beliefs, often to their own determent. I think part of the reason why I have (at least at time of writing) been successful in academic endeavors is that I have personally dispelled most of these myths. That’s not to say that these myths are inherently bad; many people are able to succeed while believing in said myths, and some people are able to succeed because of said perpetrated myths. But I think for most people this is not true. It’s probably better for them to know the reality of these things, too.
Continue reading “Studying myths”Comparing CS18000 and CS15900
TL;DR: I think CS180 is a difficult but fair a class whereas CS159 is potentially easier but a lot more tricky.
But why?Talent is (often) an excuse
Whether or not you think talent exists, if someone brings up talent, it’s an excuse for something else.
[EDIT 2020 April 13:] I wrote this on a whim and very quickly. I add this disclaimer not as means to avoid being held accountable for my opinions but because I find that my prose and explanations were, frankly, not the best. I’d like to revisit this topic later.
Continue reading “Talent is (often) an excuse”A Disgusting Function
I have a few friends in the engineering program at Purdue. They have to take a class called CS159, which formally teaches them the programming language C, presumably with its applications to engineering. I don’t really know the details, as I neither am in their program nor the class.
They had an assignment that revolves around a user selecting between three given formulas, inputting an argument and receiving the computed value. The catch? If-statements are entirely illegal. The majority of C is similarly off limits.
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The smartest stupid person 