Ending summer semester, starting fall semester...

Finally, the summer semester ended unofficially on 3 Sep 05 and the fall semester starts officially on 7 Sep 05. The summer semester was a killer. Hopefull the fall semester will not be that bad, (although I strongly think that it can only be worse).

Some thoughs and views of the 1st semester in the SMA CE/CDO program...

Expectation

Prof Khoo told me no less than 5 times that this program will be tough. Prof Lim SC warned me that the jump from Bachelor studies to Master studies is huge. However, I think I am still not well prepared for the program when it first starts. Especially when the semester only lasts for 5 weeks, the learning curve is just too steep. When the MIT semester starts for 13 weeks, I hope it will be better.

Efficiency

I had a chat with Prof Lim during dinner and he explained how the American universities work. We are supposed to be able to do our assignments in a short period of time. Most of the time, a day or night is the only time we have. I asked a friend from MEBCS about the studies life in MIT (they went over and came back) and he told me that they are required to submit their lab report the next day and the night is the only time they have to finish whatever it is required. My friend at MIT Sloan said the same thing. Gone are the luxuries of undergraduates’ life when an assignment can take a week to complete.

I am now working on improving my efficiency to meet the new demand. Asked Lian Hing how to write report efficiency. He told me to answer to the point, don’t explain too much detail and draw plenty of flowcharts and diagrams. Smartdraw should help.

Coursework

The courses are tough, but I can see that they are mostly useful and important. However, the arrangement could be make better. For C++, the lectures by Prof Wang are very dry. I believe that he would agree that not many of us are paying attention. Half of the class bought the C++ textbook to self-read when Prof Wang starts teaching. For Prof Wang’s lab, he told us that we need not do a particular coding because it is too tough. However, the TA who mark our report minus marks from us because of that. There is a method that fulfill the requirement to a lesser extend and some of the class did it. But the point is we didn’t do it because Prof Wang told us not to.

For MPI, professors try their best to teach and we try our best to listen. But I think I didn’t absorb much in class. For Prof Murali lectures, he mostly taught on iteration methods (Jacobi, GS and SOR) rather than MPI.

There are 6 labs for MPI. The 4th clab took 2 weeks to complete instead of the usual 1 week because we had a lot of difficulties understanding what the questions want and a lot of time is wasted generating answers that were not needed. The 5th clab is during the C++ final exam week. We spent the week preparing for exam instead and after that another week explaining what descretization is. Then came the Linear Algebra final exams and time is spent preparing for it. In the end, clab 5 only start after 25 Aug, the Linear Algebra final exam. The MPI coding used matrix-block iteration, which is fairly simple. Much of the time was spent instead on generating the matrix [A].

I personally find it peculiar as how to obtain [A] should not fall into the MPI module. It is hard to get [A] but this will be covered in the MIT modules. This is why the whole class spent so much time on Clab 5, trying to produce [A] rather than coding on MPI, which told up only about 10% of the efforts. In the end, we finished clab 5 on 1 Sep. There is still clab 6 which is due on 2 Sep, which the TA has kindly extended to 3 Sep noon. Clab 6 involved using build-in codes and no time was available to read into it. Hence, for the 1st time in NUS, I submitted an incomplete report. ScaLAPACK was just too tough to understand and pooling all resources together, none of us finished that question. In the end, we have only a break of 3 days (4 to 6 Sep) to recharge for the MIT semester.

Preparation

I don’t know much about this program. I don’t have a very clear idea of the difference between Computation Design and Optimization. It was only when Prof Willcox gave us a summary that I understand where this program is going. It will be good to give us an outline of the program especially when we are from different background. Especially the NUS student, before the program actually starts, we have a month break. It will be good if the reference texts are disclosed earlier to start reading. I was reading “Fluids Mechanics” by Frank White during the break which doesn’t seem to be very helpful now.

Why the program is worth the hard work

Our program is much tougher than the rest of the SMA programs. It will give students more drive to push through it if there is more encouraging news. Prof Jacob White told us that the CE students get a higher pay in industry than the CS students. Prof Khoo told us that our MIT Master’s is research based while the rest of the programs are course based. We get to spend 8 months in MIT while the other only get either 3 weeks or 4 months. It will be much better if this encouraging news is told to us right at the start of the program. My younger brother told me a few weeks ago that he saw the SMA seminar in NTU and he told his friends not to join this program because he saw me reaching home almost everyday at 11 pm plus to eat dinner. haha


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New semester started, 4 MIT modules, 3 w/o final exams. this means that there will be alot of assignments and projects. I used to spent 90% of my time on studies during undergraduates. Now I think I have to spent 95%. There wont be time to do anything else... but what to do??