Coming Home!

I can't believe that it is on the day that I come home that I start to develop a cold sore on my lip.

Peace out.

KY

Last Thursday or Friday, I was sitting in the BH lobby doing some homework or Facebooking or something in the middle of the glass-lighted table where most people do their work while here. I was sitting on the side closest to the doors, and across from me, a bit to my right [closer to the Brown Food Cart] were two people talking about a bunch of courses at Brown. I can't remember exactly what I heard or in what order I heard it, but I remember at one point the girl suggested creating a class numbered ENGN0070 because she liked the number "7." Then she and the guy that she was sitting with started talking about what would be in the course - I remember they said it should be fun, with group projects, design projects, things like that. I guess they were trying to come up with a new intro course for Engineering track freshmen that would get them interested and keep them there.

Actually, before that, I remember them going over some statistics on some paper the girl brought with her. I think one of the questions that was surveyed and reviewed on one of the pages was "What needs to be fixed in the Brown Engineering Department?" I think one of the answers was that the professors didn't seem to care, or something along those lines. Another one of the questions was "What is the best engineering school?" Of course M.I.T. was #1 - I forget how many responses it had - and Brown only had one respondent name it as the best engineering school. There were some other things they talked about on those sheets but I can't remember what they were.

A little bit later on they were talking about the requirements for the ENGN track at Brown, and what it should and shouldn't include. Apparently Linear Algebra (MATH0520) is currently a requirement, but people blow it off more readily than any other course on the list of pre-reqs, and they seemed pretty upset about that. They looked at the list and saw that CHEM0330 was a pre-req, too, but that it could be satisfied with CHEM0100. They decided if the pre-req could be met with 0100, there was no reason to make engineers waste their time with 0330, so they took that off the list, I believe, and hoped it would give people room to take Linear Algebra instead.

At one point, I looked over on their paper and saw a big circle with AM33 & AM34 inside it that said "DIFF EQ" [differential equations], which apparently they thought was a big problem. They started talking about APMA0330 (Applied Math 1) and APMPA0340 (Applied Math 2), and I could tell that neither of them had been in those courses for a while. I spoke up and said, "I'm in AM33 if you have any questions about what it's like now," because I could tell that the curicculum had changed over the past four years from what they were saying. I told them that we did tons and tons of forms of ordinary and partial differential equations, and he seemed to think that was good enough for the needs of the program and you could learn anything else along the way. I showed him the homework set I just got back - which included the method of variation of parameters, etc. - and he commented that he never had anything like that in his year. He said they spent a month on population models alone - we spent one-fifth of a problem set on it. We agreed that AM33 needed to be fixed, though, because it's kind of a hodge-podge requirement course for a number of different majors [Engine, business, applied math, comp sci, some more?] and tries to satisfy them all while not actually satisfying any of them. I think they agreed to design a differential equations course specifically for engineering majors.

At that point, I think the girl asked me for my name, so I told her, and she said her name was Teresa. They guy's name was Ky [I wasn't sure how to spell it, and the time I thought it might be Kai or something else]. She had really short black hair, glasses, thin. He had blondish hair and a little bit of facial hair. Both were white, and young - she was a new staff member and he was a senior engineering major.

There's more to this but I have to go to class now...

Peace out.