Second Year Fall Course Rankings

2 Minutes, 14 Seconds

I want to continue what I started with the first blog post on discussing first-year courses.

1st: ECE241

You learn a lot of content but don’t dive too deep into it; if you’re especially interested in something, you need to learn it on your own.
Labs are quite fun, if not the greatest olfactory experience. They reflect lecture content and teach out about digital hardware design/verification.
As daunting as the project seems, much of the stress/pressure is what students bring on themselves; the instructors’ expectations for the project are significantly lower than what I thought they’d be.

ModelSim ModelSim ModelSim (did I forget ModelSim?)
Practice your Boolean algebra consistently instead of trying to cram it all before the midterm and the final.
Make good use of the textbook, it’s well-written for a second year audience.

Course schedule was unclear at times, and the instructors aren’t on the same page regarding what should be taught and when.
Content itself is great and sets a good foundation for future electronics courses.
The first two or three labs are quite a snooze but they pick up in iddifculty (and in how fun they are) very quickly.

In addition to the pre-lab exercises, take a good luck at what you’ll be doing in the lab itself. It will save you a lot of time debugging and you won’t be as dependent on the TAs, who are busy.
It seems easy to get away with memorizing a lof of the content in the course, but I believe doing that stops you from actually learning anything.
Remember that even if you get lost or stuck on a question, you can solve any problem in the whole course using just Ohm’s Law, Kirchoff’s Laws, and element equations.

Two sections being significantly behind the other two made studying for the weekly quizzes quite annoying as we’d be doing questions on content covered one or two weeks ago.
The course covers a lot of content but does a good job of tying everything together by the end of the course.
We could benefit from learning more engineering applications than just basic RLC circuits that we already know how to solve.

A pretty standard programming course.
The first and last two labs were extremely boring but the middle two made me a little more optimistic about programming and it’s applications.

Use the reference executables when in doubt.
Don’t bother doing the textbook problems; just do the past midterms and exams they’re taken from.

Again, practice makes better.
Use the textbook and the instructor-provided lecture notes. They cover far more content and examples than what is actually presented in the lecture.

I actually had no clue what I was doing throughout this course I can’t really say anything :(