“3B” - 2️⃣nd semester abroad

Preliminary Information

This is the same paragraph I inserted into my “3A” review post:

If you know what area of study you would mainly be taking on exchange, then you can go to the “study plans” on their website, checking both the Bachelor and Master cycles. (If you are exchanging in your 3A/3B term, chances are you will likely take at least one Master’s course, since those typically count as 3rd/4th year courses at Waterloo. In Computer Engineering, they usually are counted as TEs, or Technical Electives. The reason is that a Bachelor’s degree is only 3 years here, so a first year Master’s course is really a 4th year course, in theory!)

You can also use the search function at search.epfl.ch to search for specific courses based on the course code, name, or general keywords.

Courses

There have been some changes to the courses; from what I heard, CS-322 (Databases) is no longer part of their core curriculum for students in computer science, but I don’t know if/how that might affect exchange students. Otherwise though, let’s get into these courses!

COM-490: Large Scale Data Science for Real-World Data

4 ECTS
Waterloo equivalent: TE (Technical Elective)

A master’s level course, though the course structure is quite interesting compared to more theoretical/standard courses. Largely self-directed, all project-based assessments (in groups), and quite practical with the tasks and tools used. The teaching staff all work at the Swiss Data Science Centre (SDSC), so it makes sense that what they teach and what they do is more practical than just theory. Having not had any exposure to these tools like Spark, Hive and Hadoop, it was a pretty neat course.

CS-322: Introduction to Database Systems

4 ECTS
Waterloo equivalent: 3B TE, ECE 356 (Database Systems)

Relatively standard course, we had a split of 30% project, 30% midterm, and 40% final. The textbook was quite helpful to review content that was taught in class.

DH-412: History and the Digital

5 ECTS
Waterloo equivalent: TE (Technical Elective)

This was my favourite course this term! It is a master’s level course in the DH (Digital Humanities) program, which is something we definitely do not have at Waterloo. Although they say that there are no hard prerequisites, it does help if you have done any kind of applied data analysis (typically students in the master’s DH program would have already taken Introduction to Applied Data Analysis in the previous fall term.) I did not have any experience with that, but still managed in the course (and learned quite a bit along the way.)

This course focuses on history and applying these DH tools to historical questions. The structure of the course incldues one lecture that usually goes through some relevant papers of a particular tool or question we are asking, and it is interactive and engaging. Our class size was also pretty small, around 15 people, so participation was kind of needed.

Throughout the term, you work towards your final deliverable with two milestones that are placed at different stages of the project. It is done in small groups, and you go through the whole process of crafting a research question, reading the secondary literature, choosing and applying computational tools, and then generating results and deriving conclusions and analyses from them.

I really enjoyed the mix of computational and non-computational that we had in this course! I suspect I won’t have any TEs back at Waterloo like this, but I will keep an eye out . If you want, you can check out my group’s final project here: github.com/rac99/framing-feminism

MATH-232: Introduction to Probability and Statistics

6 ECTS
Waterloo equivalent: 3B Core, ECE 307 (Probabiliy Theory and Statistics 2)

Although it is meant to be an equivalent for our statistics course back at Waterloo, the course content was largely probability (everything but the last ~2-3 weeks was probability.) In theory, this would make passing easier, but unfortunately I’m not that good with probability So I will be taking ECE 307 next term when I come back, which hopefully will be doable.

I would say it is more theoretical than the Waterloo counterpart.

Projet Afrique (Language centre course)

3 ECTS

This course is offered by the language centre, and although it doesn’t teach French directly, it uses French as the language of the course. One of the teachers runs an organization called SOS Eau Giteranyi, and in the course the students help the organization with writing funding requests, writing content on the website, and doing presentations with potential donors. We also got to collaborate with a local high school in Geneva and work with those students in a presentation on a sustainability topic, which was pretty neat. All of this is done in French, so there is also a pedagogical component and opportunity for one to practice their French in different contexts (minimum B2 level of French to join the class.)

Concluding Thoughts

Overall, a fairly more interesting term compared to the previous one, likely because of the two master’s courses I took, especially the History and the Digital one. The term was pretty busy near the last few weeks because of the many projects that were due, but I think compared to the previous term it was not as busy. Another factor could also have been that there was no need to adjust to the school and the environment as much, having already been there for a term.

I still have two 3A courses I will need to take when I am in 4A (ECE 318 and ECE 327) since I was not able to take those abroad. Otherwise though, that leaves only 2 more school terms left! Hard to wrap my head around that fact, but we can leave that for the next time.

Since I am taking ECE 307 next term, I will consider writing a short blurb on that, but we will have to see.

This was a fairly short post compared to other term reviews, but I wrote it on the plane on the way back to Canada (so I have returned now!) Will see if we can get some more exchange related posts out.

See you around