Post exam feels
Now that those pesky exams are past me, let me do a lil bit of a recap, almost like a “wrapped”, but probably worse…
What a season
Sep ‘24 to Jan ‘25
Leaving home
While I didn’t really expect it, the first term really demonstrated how much I came to miss parents and home. I’m not weak or anything like thay, but I suppose this is just a byproduct of 18 years around the same people coming to an abrupt end. With time, I will firmly find my independence and the process is definitely underway.
A mechanism that has helped has in fact been thoughtful communication. But not just phone calls and occassional visits. We’ve started a new tradition of letter writing. This lets thoughts be articulated clearly, and accumulated over a few days or so rather than just casual remarks typical of a phone call. Needless to say, these letters will someday be a precious memory.
The course - Computing side
Probably my favourite side to be honest*. We’ve been doing Haskell and Kotlin in Computing Practical 1, and stuff like first order logic in Logic and Reasoning.
(*except the ethics project, I like ethics but this project was structured pretty badly by the department)
Kotlin is pretty OOP-ish, so quite normal for me since I’ve always been used to the likes of C# and Java.
However, Haskell I’ve actually found pretty fun, especially preparing for the 3hr Haskell final that I had on Wednesday. Tony clearly puts a lot of effort into his exam papers and I would really recommend trying some out here! They are some really fun beginner-level introductions into the theory and deployment of various programming concepts. Plus several fall out beautifully in Haskell!
Starting to miss Haskell and its purity a bit as I return to OOP-land :( Though Kotlin reminds me of C# a fair bit so I’m actually quite happy with that..
This year Monads were assessed for the first time, and oh were they! It was quite funny to see how smug our lecturers were around the exam room, I’ll refer to them as J and T here. There were some slightly untoward posts on an Insta account known as “Imperial Uncensored”, which J saw, subsequently smiled and started calling himself “public enemy number 1”.
Other things that happened:
- J declared that he “is not like [his] predecessors” in order to justify the unhinged exam
- T said “oh baby!” every time some code ran in revision lectures
- J and T sent an email telling people “not to worry” about how they did in the test
Oh, and it turns out the mistake I made in the exam was trivial and I simply forgot that I couldn’t pattern match on a variable - the fix code I needed would have been half a line longer :0.
tldr ~ Haskell’s cool and if you want to discuss anything, get in touch!
The course - Math side
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this in a previous post or not, but at the moment, I am taking 3 maths modules - calculus, analysis and linear algebra with groups. In order, I probably like linalg with groups the most, followed by calculus and analysis falling decisively into last place!
I mean, I like the fact that we’re proving what we’re using in Analysis, but in my opinion, some of the steps can get a bit much.
Each of them had January exams, which I took on Monday and Tuesday, and in my opinion went okay-ish.
- Analysis This one was definitely easier than last year’s paper, though with all the marking strictness I have no idea really. The lecturer had helpfully provided his thoughts on the difficulty of the paper in advance, prefacing it with 4 quantifiers - “my”, “own”, “personal”, “opinion”… what more could fill us with confidence.
- Calculus Q1(c) was painful and the bizarre inclusion of Parseval’s Theorem threw a lot of people off, but probably not too bad
- Linear Algebra At the time of writing this, I already know my result. 37/40 ~ 93%. Not bad but still could have been better (for reference, both friends who were around me when results dropped got more). It’ll be interesting to know where my mistakes were but overall a fairly straightforward paper. Our lecturer for first term linalg was epic though!
Life-y stuff Life’s going decently I would say. Happily, my MH seems to have held together despite the intensity of the course and general day to day stresses. All too often, I go to do something like eat or whatever, and I find that I’ve forgotten to buy food. In a tragic realisation, I’ve also realised that the Tesco near me has stopped selling the Costa hot chocolate powder that I like.
Lots of family stuff happening at the moment too, what with my sister’s wedding and exciting stuff like that going on. 2025’s going to be quite a year.
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