4A with a dash of 3A - second last study term! 🧂

Preliminary Information

They recently changed the course descriptions and calendars, so this paragraph differs from the ones you will find in previous study term posts. For new students, you will need to go to the undergraduate calendar website, which for the current posting time is the 2024-2025 calendar year. There, you can find “Programs & Plans” on the sidebar, and search for your program. For anyone who started before 2024-2025, you will need to visit the archives website (which is also on the academic calendar page) and click the relevant year in which you started to see what your degree requirements are.

Electives

4A is kind of the first term where you actually get to pick your own technical electives (TEs), without any restrictions (save for prerequisite requirements, which you generally should already meet.) Technically, you would have already taken three TEs in 3B, but there are not really that many options (CE students would generally take 3 of the 4 following courses: ECE 351, ECE 356, ECE 358, and ECE 320.)

So that is kind of neat! Entering your second-last term of school, and you now can have some choice of courses that you might want to take. If you are also trying to pursue an option (such as the Artificial Intelligence Option), then you may be forced to take certain electives to meet those requirements. Since course selection is typically done the term before you start, make sure to consider all these things then. Some courses this term (ECE 457A, ECE 452 I think) were quite popular, and not everyone who selected them got it.

Courses

Why 4A ish? well, I include a course I took two terms ago in F23 (ECE 307), and also there are two courses from this term which are actually supposed to be taken in 3A (ECE 327 and ECE 318) but I took them this term due to my exchange.

ECE 307: Probability and Statistics 2 (Fall 2023)

So I took this course in the Fall of 2023 since I did not pass the equivalent abroad (oops), but I did not want to put it in a standalone post (so here it is in the 4A post).

The professor was very kind and generous throughout the term, but the final exam was quite different from what we had received previously (this was made evident in the numerous post-final Piazza posts.) It seems though that generally people were content with the final results, so I guess it turned out well!

Summary: should be a relatively “normal” ECE course.

Now, onto the courses from this term!

ECE 318: Communication Systems

This is normally a 3A course.

Pre-midterm, the course content is manageable. Post-midterm, it can get more complicated and the pace of content seems to quicken. I found the lectures to be very helpful (and necessary to not fall behind), more so in this course than some others I have taken, so gauge for yourself whether that might be the case for you.

The professor also taught quite well! She was generally quite excited to talk about her research and the content, and I think in my time at Waterloo so far I have not seen the same kind of enthusiasm too frequently, so I did appreciate that.

Summary: probably one of the more conceptually difficult courses in what is normally taken in 3A. But then again, you have ECE 380 and ECE 350 in 3A too, so maybe not!

ECE 327: Digital Hardware Systems

This is normally a 3A course.

Somewhat interesting, since it has been a while since I have had a more hardware-focused course (the last time would have been in 2B with ECE 224). In this offering of the course, we used Verilog (some previous offerings used VHDL).

The professor did redo all of the projects for the lab component of this course, but they were done well and I would say were quite fair. It was nice to see how long a project was expected to take (# of hours), though for some of them I did go over by quite a bit! At times it was super frustrating, but I did end up with solutions to all the projects, so there is some closure there 😅. Verilog (and hardware) is inherently parallel, so trying to think in that paradigm was challenging, at times frustrating, but at times a fun mental exercise.

Summary: generally straightforward and interesting.

ECE 454: Distributed Computing

We had a new professor teach this course and though sometimes it was not very clear with the administrative aspects and sometimes the teaching ones, the professor and teaching staff were still pretty understanding and kind which was appreciated.

The labs were a large component of the course mark (60%), with the rest being the final (40%). So, labs are very important!! The groups were also not too big of a size (3 people max). In terms of possible ECE TEs you could take in 4A, this is probably one of the more challenging ones in the Spring term, especially if you have not seen this content before (some people, like one of my group members had seen this stuff in a previous co-op, so very grateful for that!)

Summary: Can be a challenging elective, but could also be industry-relevant!

ECE 457A: Co-operative and Adaptive Algorithms

It seems that there was some last minute changes with the teaching staff, so we actually got one of our previous TAs from ECE 208 who recently graduated from his PhD to teach. The teaching staff overall were super nice and friendly and very responsive on Piazza. The content was also pretty interesting, and the assignments gave opportunities to look more into different kinds of algorithms (a lot of search algorithms). If you are thinking about taking the AI Option then this should be a required course, but even if not it was still pretty interesting.

Summary: Probably one of my favourite courses this term in terms of course delivery, interesting content, and teaching staff.

GENE 403 (FYDP): Interdisciplinary Design Project 1

CAPSTONE! FYDP! That thing that old students would mention when you were a prospective student and thought it might be “cool” or something.

I decided to do capstone with two other friends (one from computer engineering, the other in civil engineering), and so we enrolled in the interdisciplinary capstone course which allows students from different engineering programs to work together on an engineering design problem.

Personally, I have been gravitating more towards this idea of interdisciplinary work since the start of this year (been doing a lot of thinking on related concerns, such as what I might do post-graduation, part of the reason for less blog posts), and so I was pretty intent on doing an interdiscplinary capstone to try and explore more of these diverse interests of mine. You do not have to have a group to join the capstone, but you will need to email the professor/your department advisor so they can enroll you into the course.

I really enjoyed the delivery and format of this capstone course, though sometimes it can seem a bit eccentric or strange (most notably because normal courses in CE do not teach design thinking or other important skills in engineering design haha oops).

Summary: Do it! (Also, ECE Capstone course also introduced a new requirement this year where you have to meet 2 of some 8 categories (basically forcing you to do some hardware-related project), which a lot of my peers were not too happy about...)

But in all honesty, I find the interdisciplinary nature, going into fields that are not engineering-related, design thinking, problem and solution space, thinking about things like UN SDGs, etc. super fascinating and fun. So if that is the motivation, you should definitely do it!

GENE 303: International Studies in Engineering

I do not think I have mentioned this in previous blogs, but I decided to do an “International Studies in Engineering (ISE)” Option, which is actually being discontinued (so I may be one of the last, if not the last 😆). Not many people elect to take this option, and for those that did it would still have been a while ago since COVID-19 basically made this option impossible for many.

But anyways, as part of this option, I took this course (weighted as a seminar, so an odd 0.13 credits where a normal course is 0.25 credits). Since it had been a while since anyone has taken it, the professor had to come up with a new syllabus and format.

It used to be a report-writing course, but this time around we used a SLICC format (Student-Led Individually Created Courses) which was super great. It gave space for me to reflect, create, and share my experiences from abroad in different formats. I also enjoyed the smaller setting (just me and the professor, and for my last presentation some other staff members). This course was also tangentially related to many questions and thoughts I had been asking myself since coming back from my exchange, and it was nice to have a space for that to occur at the same time.

There is discussion and some thoughts on how the university might be able to encourage more cross-cultural experiences and opportunities for reflection and discovery in the future, so it is quite exciting! I am quite hopeful from what I have heard, because I do believe these experiences are helpful and can be formative for people (I found so for myself.)

Summary: well you probably cannot take the same version of this course that I did, but I am hopeful that there will be some kind of similar course available in the future!

SDS 400R: Comparative Social Policy

Partially out of interest, partially to fully complete my ISE Option in 4A, and partially because I could not find any research opportunities for the Spring (a bit more on this in my concluding thoughts), I decided to take this online course (which had an in-person final exam, strangely enough.) I was trying to look for something that I might have interest in, and this was one of the only courses (or the only course) that met time, interest and (online) requirements. I was initially worried because it is a 400-level course and I do not come from a humanities/social sciences background, but it still turned out quite well.

I wish I was able to spend more time in this course; the term was quite busy overall, so I could not have as much sustained focus (they were all in bursts throughout the term, especially for the final paper). Lots of readings, but pretty interesting! Course weightings was mainly working towards a final paper (60%, subdivided into different parts leading up to that), some class discussions (20%) and final exam (20%).

I am glad I took the course, because it gave me a more tangible look at what a course in the humanities/social sciences might look like, and the work that could be involved. Apart from the content, it was also kind of fun to do research and do some writing (which we do not do much of in engineering!).

Summary: Not sure why a computer engineering student would take this course, but maybe it interests you, like it did for me! So just take it then 😛

Concluding Thoughts

Maybe you can tell by the relative length of each course what I found to be more interesting this term 🙃. Spoiler: not quite engineering-related!

As I mentioned a bit earlier, I was looking for opportunities to explore research this Spring term, and also for something in the Fall term. I will not elaborate too much here, but to say the least would be that I am thinking about research, and by extension graduate studies. And it would be in some kind of interdisciplinary field (maybe you have gotten the hint by now through this review.) I am not entirely sure what that might look like, but just wanted to throw that out there 🤹‍♂️

So that is 4A; only one more study term left before I would have officially completed the study portion of my undergrad (I have to do a co-op term after 4B; will explain how that came to be eventually...you will notice I have never written about a co-op term yet!) 4 years ago at this time I was just starting 1A, and now I am nearly at the end...wow!

4A was also a fairly busy term in general (school things, life things, thinking things), probably the busiest term yet. But I would suspect that normally this would not be the norm. So do not fret too much, 4A should be a good time!

This post is being wrapped up as I have just come to the end of my second week of co-op, from Vancouver! Maybe I will write a bit about this city, or not. But it has been pretty good so far :)

See you around