Finals!

Hello All!

Sorry I've been completely MIA lately - I've had a bunch going on what with finishing up the second round of midterms and then Thanksgiving break!  This Thanksgiving I spent my break in Baton Rogue, LA with my family being presented as a debutante by the Baton Rouge assembly!  Of course, most of my readers are my family and were therefore attendants at the ball thus making this statement redundant, but, since this is in fact a blog about my life, I suppose I should say it anyway.

Well, the real point of this blog post was for me to say that I'm currently in the midst of finals week (and should be studying right now since I procrastinated most of the morning).  I already had my hard final, physics, and since I'm not worried about any of my other classes I'm finding it difficult to get motivated to study like I did for physics.  And let me tell you, I studied A LOT for physics.  It paid off though!  My score was 10 points above the average putting me in B+/A- range!  Normally, I wouldn't be excited about anything other than a solid A, but, 1) this is college (and I have gotten two B+s since starting college :( ...) and 2) this is Advanced Physics 2: Electricity and Magnetism (someone please remind me why I chose to be in the honors track??).  Since I did fairly poorly on the midterms (ugh) this grade is really going to help!  This class has been my nemesis all semester and I have put more effort into it than all my other classes combined..and I still haven't done that well.  Part of the problem is that I have a really hard time understanding the material and another part of the problem is that the class is half physics majors and electrical engineers to whom "imaginary currents" actually mean something.  I mean honestly, what's the point of solving for the "imaginary current" if it isn't real?!  The mechanical engineer in me just wants to say: "Screw this! Give me an gosh multimeter and I'll tell you what the current is."  This class has been so theoretical and abstract it makes me want to scream.  Sorry dad - if you still harbored any hopes of me "seeing the light" and switching to electrical engineering, they have been ruthlessly dashed against the rocks by this class.

But, enough complaining about physics.  The rest of my classes have been going fairly well in spite of having horrible professors.  My statics professor was truly the worst professor I have ever had in my life.  He was a new part-time lecturer that the department brought on since the number of students has increased greatly over the past 10 years but the number of faculty members has remained fairly constant and there aren't enough professors to teach classes.  Not only did he speak so softly in a lecture hall filled with 70 people (ha! you mean the 20 who were stupid enough to show up) that not even the people in the front could hear him, he also never prepared lectures so he would consistently make mistakes on sample problems during class.  Furthermore, he changed the syllabus SEVEN times.  I have the emails he sent with "new syllabus attached" to prove it.  He never gave warning during class that he was planning on changing the syllabus nor did he ever explain why.  He changed the grading scale so that the in-class quizzes count for more than both midterms combined.  Normally, this wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that the quizzes he gave were insanely random.  They were either ridiculously easy or impossibly hard.  Once, he changed a homework assignment that was due to be turned in on Tuesday the Monday night before it was due.  And, as if that wasn't enough, he clearly did not enjoy teaching and openly expressed dislike for his students.  One day he accused all of the students of "cheating" because many people were using Cramster (a website that posts solutions to various textbooks, mostly engineering and technical sciences) to do the homework problems.  Clearly he didn't realize the answers to both the even and odd problems were in the back of the book anyway.  Statics has honestly been the worst learning experience I have ever had in my life including second grade when I had a horrible teacher.  The professor even tried to get away with not giving course evaluations at the end of the semester but one of my friends went and complained to the department adviser who organized for course evaluations to be administered after the end of classes.  I was honestly surprised (and pleased) at how many students showed up to express their anger since it was a Friday afternoon and not during class time.  Thankfully though, my sources in the department have told me that the chair, Dr. Spedding, has been dealing with the situation personally (he had a meeting with the professor midway through the semester after receiving several emails from students) and that this particular professor will no longer be teaching at USC.  Good riddance to you sir!

So, now that I have successfully ranted about my statics professor, I would rant about my math professor, but I think that would be too much anger for one post.  So, instead I will say that I did actually have a really good professor for Thermodynamics and because of him found the class very interesting.  Anywho, I have a ton of pictures and stuff that I should post up here so next time I need a study break I'll start updating this here bloggeroo!