And that means first impressions of my 1B classes. Excitement and wonders abound within!

MSCI 261 Engineering Economics — Fuller

MSCI is the most boring and useless class you’ll be taking. That and 8:30 means much sleep. Contrary to what the title may suggest, this has little to do with real economics, which can be interesting, but is actually accounting and crap.

SE 141 Logic and Computation — Malton

Logic is easily the most interesting of the courses in 1B. Unfortunately, it’s also impossible to do. Another thing to note is that this course is actually CS 245, which for the CSers is in 2B. Yes, they took a 2B course and made the first year softies take it.

The basic premise of the course is to look at the nature of thinking and be able to prove things that are true. I’d heard bad things about the prof, but for this class, he’s actually really good.

SE 141 Digital Circuits and Systems — Thistle

This class is fairly easy, dealing with circuits at gate-level. The labs are annoying as hell, though, and the prof is not the most interesting lecturer in the world. Rumours are that this will ramp up after the midterm. This is also another one of those second year courses they make us take. This one is ECE 223, taken by 2A Electricals.

CHE 102 Chemistry for Engineers — Grove

Starting with our year, all softies must take this course. This used to be a science elective, until the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board decided to threaten us with the banhammer unless we took chem, so we’re forced into it now.

There’s really nothing that’ll be very helpful to us in the future, so this is another one of those annoying courses. It’s basic chemistry, all calculations. Luckily, our prof is pretty good.

MATH 119 Calculus II — Allison

The continuation of MATH 117, it starts off in something new with approximation and series. While it could’ve been kind of interesting, this is calculus for engineers which means that the mathematics will be stripped out of it and we’ll be left to memorize the assignment solutions for our tests.

Our prof is acceptable, but not particularly interesting. This isn’t really good after four hours of lectures beforehand.

CS 134 Principles of Computer Science — Case

Thankfully, this CS course is slightly more interesting than CS 133. We’re actually learning some theory now, with basic data structures, instead of just learning how to program. Of course, this class is also just kind of meh, instead of really good. Same for the prof.

Conclusion

1B is a pain. Most of the courses are either annoying or just passably interesting. Add that to the fact that there are six of them and that we’re looking for our first coop jobs and 1B becomes an incredibly annoying term filled with an immense number of inconveniences.

Tags: School, Waterloo

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