two, eh?

Struggled a bit as to whether I wanted to write this or not- especially if the focus is on the academic side of things, it can vary from person to person! Ended up deciding though that who knows, in maybe 10 years I would like to read back a little bit about what 2A was like. Also looks nice to have a little recap on each study term , so here it is:

Preliminary Information

Same “classes paragraph” from my review of 1A, in case you are new around here :)

If you were ever wondering what the course descriptions of any courses at Waterloo were, you can check out the course descriptions page. There is also the degree requirements page for computer engineering. Depending on the year you start, you may need to navigate to “past calendars”. The link defaults to the most recent calendar, so right now that would be 2022-2023. For my course requirements though, I would need to navigate to the 2020-2021 calendar since that is when I started.

Some preamble

2A was in Fall 2021 for me and was the first term I was actually on campus in Waterloo. The model for this term was hybrid and varied between faculties and departments—some faculties had all their classes online, while others had a mix, such as Engineering. For the ECE department, we had all our tutorials and hardware labs in-person, with software labs and lectures still online. For the online portions, it was up to professors whether they wanted to do them synchronously (live) or asynchronously. They would all be recorded though since there were still many students who were in different time zones compared to Waterloo. You could also opt-out of the in-person component, so I think maybe a third or less of our cohort was actually in Waterloo for the fall term.

An exciting time to be in Waterloo, as things continued to open up more and more as the term progressed, although for our classes not much changed about them. There would be a lot to talk about outside of academics for the fall term (such as CCF!) but that is not in the scope of this post (maybe in another one?) I do my own reflections which encompass a much broader scope, but maybe those will stay as my own for now

Courses

ECE 109: Materials Chemistry for Engineers

This course is another half-credit course (0.25 credits). Pretty sure it exists so that our engineering program remains accredited by the CEAB. Overall, a fairly straightforward course that you should not need to worry about; for us, the questions for our quizzes and assignments were all from the textbook (some with answers, some without), and collaboration was permitted among the students. Our professor was a nice guy too, he would share about the weather in Waterloo before each lecture

I do think the people in 2A this term though (at the time of writing, Winter 2022) have had a more difficult 109 in the sense that their quizzes might be in-person and they had a final exam (I think). We only had a final project, which was also collaborative.

Fun fact: For most of the term, it was just me and another student in the tutorial class! I think that was the smallest class size I have ever been in

ECE 204: Numerical Methods

Well well well

If you want to read more about the course and how it went down, check out this Reddit post.

If you have just finished reading the Reddit post, then you will know there is not much for me to explain about the course I think normally, the course would have been fairly interesting, but unfortunately it was just executed extremely poorly and so we were not able to get much out of it. Definitely one of the courses that if someone in the future asks me about, I may have forgotten that it existed.

Regardless, I hope that your experience with the course goes much smoother than ours did! I think the professor that we had will not be teaching that particular course anymore, so future courses should be pretty normal

Shoutout: I think our class representatives and some other more vocal people in our program were really important this term, especially for courses like 204 where we had no clue what was going on with the professor. They were able to communicate with our department on the many issues we were facing, and I think for a lot of our a class we are really thankful for that

ECE 205: Advanced Calculus 1 for Electrical and Computer Engineers

This course was a pretty straightforward course! In addition to our professor’s lectures, most of our class also watched the lectures from a professor who previously taught the course—his videos, although long, are well-explained and makes it all make sense! You can check out the YouTube playlist here.

Our professor was quite understanding and made accommodations for our class since we were in a weird term. This was the only course in 2A that had marked weekly assignments, the rest were midterm/final/lab and/or project-based. The assignments were generally straightforward, and the YouTube playlist I mentioned above really helped in understanding the concepts and then applying them.

It was nice to have just a good overall course in 2A- one that was relatively straightforward, when you put in the effort you did do well, the professor was nice and understanding, and there were no surprises.

ECE 222: Digital Computers

I think this could have been one of the more interesting courses in 2A, but unfortunately, the delivery of the course was not supportive of that idea (pretty dry and incredibly minimal professor-to-student interaction). A good number of people (including myself) also misinterpreted one of the questions on the midterm, and that did not bode well for the result (we had three questions out of 30 total, that one question was worth 9 marks I think? 0/9 on that one question is no fun ). Another shout out to our class representatives, they did quite well though in helping us get through the final, I think the marking for that was much more lenient and I ended up doing better than I expected.

The lab instructor was nice and helpful though, and it was interesting to see how (some) of the stuff we were learning in class was actually applicable to the lab. Some of the labs did involve a lot of work though- I remember there was one whole day spent at E7, maybe like 12 hours, just working on the lab (and it was not finished that day ).

The next edition of this course in 2B with similar concepts is ECE 224, so hopefully that one will be more engaging and better run.

ECE 240: Electronic Circuits 1

Oof.

I think this course is well-documented on Reddit, and pretty infamous in general, especially with some particular professors. Some people do definitely find it manageable and relatively straightforward, though I think for most people that is not the case. It is not necessarily that the content is super conceptual (like ECE 106) or super difficult to understand, but somehow we just do not get it . For some EE students, this is where they decide to switch to CE . I think if you are diligent in doing the practice problems and keeping up to speed on those, you can probably do relatively well.

Although the exams that our professor gave were very difficult (or at least based on the class averages it seemed that way), the professor himself taught well, was generally understanding and sometimes funny too. So cannot really blame the professor in this case—all on us! For some stats, our midterm average was 47% (this was after he gave us some mark boosts, originally the average was 41.6%), and our final exam averages were 54% and 50% for the two sections (again, after a mark boost). The average course grade for both sections were 59% and 56%, which is not terrible?

The labs for this course were a highlight, even though they could be stressful at times. Seeing how the content we learned in the lecture was physically applied in the lab was really neat—this is what I imagined engineering to be like in high school! Ironically, this physical component becomes less and less in CE compared to EE, in terms of circuit components. That is okay though, since I definitely would not be able to go through the next circuits course (ECE 340).

So this course was a mixed bag, but it was definitely still difficult—I failed both my midterm and final—but by God’s grace I passed (with a 51!) For most CE students, this course is not as important compared to an EE student in terms of building foundational knowledge for future courses, but it is still interesting (hopefully). Just do not be discouraged when you barely pass (you still passed!)

ECE 250: Algorithms and Data Structures

Also a pretty straightforward course. The marked components include projects, the midterm, and the final. Professor was also nice and understanding, also very responsive to our Piazza questions and emails. The content is pretty interesting and useful if you have never seen any algorithms or data structures before (like me), some of which you might use in a technical interview (although perhaps not to the same degree as you learned in class). In one of the interviews I had, I actually explained a concept from this class and I ended up working there this term, so it is plausible!

One of the TAs for this course who was in charge of the in-person tutorials taught the concepts in tutorial really well. His PowerPoint animations were also on point, focusing on the conceptual understanding rather than just giving examples/doing problems. You can definitely have tutorials that are more application-based, like going through problems together (such as in ECE 240), but this structure was quite good for the course content.

Short and sweet, also no complaints about this course.

Closing Thoughts

2A was many firsts: first time on campus, first time with hybrid courses, first time seeing real people relatively frequently (wow), first time actually almost failing a course (definitely not the first time that I thought I was failing a course though.) A lot to take in and process! I was also in the process of applying for exchange (more to come about that in future blog posts), so trying to maintain a certain average to not jeopardize that was a challenge too.

A few years back, before they did a major change to the ECE curriculum, 2A was without a doubt the hardest term (or at least from what I have read and heard.) With it being rearranged though, I think it is a bit more manageable (plus I was in a hybrid model, so cannot say how fully in-person would be like.)

2A does have its struggles, particularly with something like ECE 240, but it is doable! We did not have too many people in our cohort who were in-person, but also getting to know your classmates means you can study together and help each other out with difficult concepts or any questions you might have. Also quite nice to have other people share the same struggles going through the courses and celebrating when we pass

As much as we might think of academics to be separate from our spiritual lives, both are related—learning to do your best and leaving the rest to God, understanding the role between work (in this case school) and faith, etc. It can be hard, especially when school gets stressful, to try and be in control of everything—you are not! If we work heartily for the Lord (Colossians 3:23), and do good work, we can only leave the rest up to God and His perfect plan. There are actually a lot of interesting things to explore in the relationship between work and faith—this term (Winter 2022) some of us did a book study on Every Good Endeavour by Timothy Keller, and so much good stuff! Hopefully a future blog post is incoming for all our thoughts and takeaways

That’s all for this one, I know I mentioned a lot of potential topics to be written about, so hopefully we will hear from those soon :)

À bientôt!