Farewell to college
Today was my last day of classes in my last year at college. Ironically, the only class I had today was General Physics II, a course usually taken by freshmen. Why I’m taking the course now is a long story about AP Physics credit and medical school admissions, but half the time I couldn’t/didn’t go to the lectures while the other half I sat in the auditorium grinning about the absurdity of the situation. It could potentially have been problematic though. I never fully understood electricity and magnetism (cue the question: why are you an engineering major again?), but luckily the several years I have over my classmates apparently gave me some additional intuition. On the first midterm I scored two standard deviations above the mean and I nearly aced the second midterm. Not too bad for someone who flinches whenever he sees the word “magnetic field”.
Yesterday was the really killer day though. I had a project due and two presentations to deliver for some senior engineering classes (though a hottie told me later that she liked my presentation, so it wasn’t entirely too bad a day). I’ve been working on the project 24/7 for basically the entire week. It was for a class called “Statistical methods in imaging” and my project idea was to track highways using something called the particle filtering algorithm. This class is out of my league and I would have dropped it in the first week if I could, but unfortunately I needed this to fulfill some graduation requirements. The good news is that some of the students in the class are in the same boat so we’re all sinking together. But while my project isn’t as refined or as advanced compared to one from someone who actually knows what he’s doing with statistics, I gotta say I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
Here’s a sample image of my program: the user clicks on the image to specify a starting point and a direction, and the program tries to trace the highway. It’s clearly not very precise, but I think it’s cool nonetheless.
I’m not completely done with college yet though. Two finals, two more papers, and one more project in the next two weeks. But those will be more low stress so I’m over the hump. Start the countdown to graduation!
