First Day of Classes...woo!

After doing nothing for two weeks during the winter break, it is a relief to be back in classes again. Of course, it is NOT pleasant to wake up at 6:30 in the morning, but that's a minor point. Well, a not-so-minor-but-not-important-enough-to-keep-me-asleep point.

A summary of classes thus far:

• 8:30 - Thermodynamics (sit-in): Surprisingly, I did not fall asleep during this class, although the professor takes things a bit slowly (it is the first day of classes, after all...). Perhaps the scariest thing that happened in this class concerns the exams: everyone is allowed to bring 2 - 4 pages of "summary material". Imagine how challenging the exams must be for him to afford that luxury for us! The professor is nice enough to let me sit in his classes even though I am not officially enrolled in the course, which is good. (Note to self: remember to do the assignment - first one to be up!)
  
• 9:30 - Calculus: We covered two sample (the professor called them "motivational") problems today. Then we started on defining/using partitions. Now I am beginning to know why we can integrate discontinuous functions! As the professor is quite a lively speaker, this hour (well, technically, 50 minutes) was quite fun. First assignment (with a bonus question) will be out on Friday! *excited*
  
• 10:30 - General Chemistry II: The first-year introductory chemistry course last term was Really Awful, but this term (a continuation of last term's course) is much better. Even if the material is mostly review. Somewhat surprisingly, we started with phase diagrams. Interesting.
  
• 11:30 - Linear Algebra: After the usual introductory material, the professor began by putting on a sales pitch for vector spaces in the lecture (Let's just say that 3/2 board-ful of relatively small words can be summarized by the statement "Vector spaces are useful and pervasive in mathematics."). That was rather amusing. It started to get a bit tedious when he began defining the binary operations of vectors, but things became increasingly interesting after awhile, so that was good.
  
• 12:30 - Statistics (sit-in...hoping to change that!): This is actually a mandatory class, but due to a situation with my schedule, I am not enrolled in it yet. To be frank, I was not particularly eager to be in this class due to an aversion to combinatorics/probability/statistics that derived from high school math. However, the professor gave us a small, informal "exam" today that didn't actually involve ANY of the said subjects (yay!). The exam itself was somewhat cute: 5 problems in order of increasing difficulty. Question 1 was a simple "rearrange this expression" problem; Question 2 was a reflection problem (which I embarrassingly did incorrectly); Question 3 was a really simple geometry problem; Question 4 was a "determine the 1999th term of this sequence" problem that took some time to do but was not challenging; Question 5 was rather interesting, requiring us to determine the sum of an infinite series where each summand is of the form fn/2^n (fn denotes the Fibonacci sequence, starting with f1 = 1; n naturally runs through the set of N like a sequence would, no pun intended!). The solution is really quite nice and short.
  All in all, I now look forward to be in this class, even if 3/4 of the people in it are extraordinarily brilliant and will probably make me feel like the slow, combinatorics-fearing person I am.
  
• 1:30 - Organic Chemistry II (sit-in): This professor is nice enough to let me sit in her class, too! *Happily.* However, I spent most of the class in shock - I forgot so much stuff! Even worse: I did not take Organic I (due to a course conflict last term), so I really shouldn't be in that class. Oh well, since we are starting with IR spectroscopy and NMR, I should be alright. The temporary reprieve will provide time for a review.

The only event that marred this fairly pleasant day (thus far) is the fact that the local job fair (which I must attend) is on the same day as the organic chemistry midterm. Eep! I can either a) skip the midterm because I am not officially in the class anyway or b) email and beg the professor for a rewrite. *Sigh* Oh well, life goes on.