The last one!! 🥹

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 2025-2026 calendar year. There, you can find “Programs & Plans” on the sidebar, and search for your program. For anyone who started before 2025-2026, 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.

Introductory Thoughts

This is it! The last academic term recap of my undergraduate degree. With all my outstanding courses from exchange completed in 4A (see here), my 4B is a “normal” 4B term, like most people in my cohort. So that’s a plus, after having online 1A/1B, hybrid 2A, somewhat normal 2B, exchange 3A/3B, and a 3rd year/4A mash up. So kind of only two “normal” terms, in terms of situation and courses: 2B and 4B!

Courses

In order to meet my graduation requirements, I only had two required courses I needed to take: one, which is a capstone course (that everyone in 4B takes), and then one TE (technical elective), as I had already completed 5 out of the 6 needed to graduate.

In past terms, you may have seen that I still took courses out of interest, sometimes overloading, but this term definitely had much more flexibility to take interesting courses, without the need to overload! Going into the term, I wanted to have some more flexibility with my time (something that perhaps is not as common with ECE heh), so I opted to not overload, which I am happy about.

I will start with the two ECE courses I took this term, both of which were TEs.

ECE 457B: Fundamentals of Computational Intelligence

The professor we had has also taught ECE 457C in the past. He was pretty laid back for our last term, and relatively friendly, which I appreciated. We did not have a set outline to begin with, but I think his intentions to make the course a bit more applicable to us and also interesting (allowing student input into the syllabus) made sense.

I have very little (if any) experience in machine learning, and I felt like that was a minority in this class: most people had at least some, if not a lot of experience in it, whether through projects or co-ops. So although it is called “fundamentals,” and we did kind of cover varying topics at a more surface level, it probably would be things that if you have been in the ML area for a bit, you probably would have seen most of the course content anyways.

I took this course because I thought it would be interesting, and it was okay. This is probably obvious to a lot of other people, but taking the course showed me how much probability, statistics, and other math is involved in these (and you know how I fare with probability! Haha.) In addition, I find the societal questions about AI/ML more interesting, and so this course was also to give a bit of a more technical understanding to what that means. At the core, when we say it is a “black box,” it really is just math and equations that we are using to pick one option over the other, but what some of the newer advances in ML show us is that when we stack these layers, we get compounding effects that our human brain just cannot do ourselves (hence perhaps the “black box”.) So in some sense, it is not really a black box, but because of the compounding effect, maybe it is.

I think for someone who was just looking to get a more technical perspective in AI/ML, this course was okay for that. Was it the most interesting for me? Probably the least interesting out of all my other courses. But still somewhat interesting, so I am glad I took it.

For evaluation, we had some assignments that you could do in pairs, and then midterm and final. Fairly standard on that front, for an ECE course.

ECE 493 T26: Special Topics (Social Robotics)

As I mentioned earlier, I only needed one TE, and if I had to only pick one TE, I would have picked this one, since it aligned more with my interests. But I still think it was good that I took this one and 457B.

ECE 493 is a special topics course code, so there usually is more than one section of ECE 493, but each do their own special topic. Generally the class size is much smaller, and I think in our case we also combined with the graduate level course, which meant our class was mostly graduate students actually.

Although I don’t have a particular interest in robots per se, I was moreso drawn to the social part, and also noting how there could be similarities between Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This course was less technical and more broad, and the assignments were all writing based, which also involved trying to write in research-style (this was good!). The final project did involve some technical components in order to program the robot to do certain behaviours with a platform called WeBots (I lost some marks on not being technically-complex enough haha), but the main bulk was on the research proposal and the paper itself, which was fine.

There was also no final for this course, which was kind of nice! I was mainly looking forward to 1) doing more writing and 2) taking a more research-y course in a semi-related field to some of the interests I wanted to explore, and this course delivered on both fronts. That’s a success!

RS 236/JS 236: Paul, Life and Letters

So initially, I was not planning to take this course. I was actually already enrolled in another course (STV 208- Artificial Intelligence and Society: Impact, Ethics, and Equity), which talked about the social implications of AI and such in society. Sounds right on topic! However, after attending the first lecture, it wasn’t entirely what I expected: 3 hours on a Wednesday night, and a fairly large class with mostly students who needed to fulfill that “society” aspect of their (likely) AI option or degree. I left after the first break (oops!) and then enrolled in this one (RS 236), which I already had some friends in.

RS 236 was actually a really interesting course, and this was definitely heightened by taking it with other people with whom we could discuss the content with. Most of our classmates were also coming from Christian backgrounds, though some were not, which was also interesting. The course was online, so we had discussion posts, some assignment/book report, and a final assignment where we had to write a letter to a church (the situation of that church is in the description), as if we were Paul.

Again, more writing and reading (good! Though sometimes at that moment, not as good. But I did enjoy the reading and writing process quite a bit overall. Difficult does not mean it cannot be enjoyable!). I thought the book report (which had us pick a book talking about Paul, and then writing a report on it) was really good, and I enjoyed very much the book that I read. The final assignment with writing a letter like Paul is weighted much more. That one was not as fun as the report, but still an interesting exercise and still kind of fun.

Again, the intrigue of this course was augmented with the many discussions I had with my friends about the topics we were learning. Some of them were quite new to me, such as learning about the disputed and undisputed letters of Paul, and I still have some questions about that. But overall the course content seemed to be generally objective in terms of a historians approach.

So, a good course, but definitely made even better with friends :)

CHINA 120R: Advanced First-Year Chinese

Chinese! I wanted to take a language course, and was deciding a bit between Chinese and German, but settled with Chinese and I am glad I did. CHINA 120R combines CHINA 101 and CHINA 102 into one term, and is meant (usually) for CBCs (Canadian-born-Chinese) who speak Mandarin at home, but cannot really read or write. Or, on the flip side, for people who speak another dialect (can read/write Chinese, but cannot speak Mandarin), though I suspect that number of people to be quite few nowadays.

I don’t quite fit in either, coming from a Cantonese-speaking household, but I did know some Mandarin (some very occasional learning throughout the past couple of years) and they do this placement quiz when you register (I got put into 120R). In the second week of class, I tried the level above for one class (201), and I would like to think that I could have done that too (here is the ego speaking), but opted not to because I wanted a more relaxed 4B term. I tell myself that if I had taken Chinese in any prior term, I would have switched into 201. But there was still a lot that I learned in 120R, and I am quite happy with what I did learn.

The teacher was very nice, some dry humour, but I really enjoyed class. It was helpful to formalize a lot of things that I did not really have a framework for before, and I think things like pronunciation improved much more than before I took the course (at least that is what I was told in my oral exam!) And then obviously the reading part, which was really nice—I remember actually recognizing more words in some other context halfway through the term, and being quite excited about that.

Starting Spring 2025, they are actually making the Chinese classes all typing, so no more handwriting! That is probably more useful to everyone these days, especially if the target audience are people like me who if we can type and read and speak, that would already be amazing. So if you are considering taking Chinese but aren’t sure about the handwriting, you should definitely register!!

We did still do handwriting this term (which was actually optional, but I found it helpful in remembering the characters), but moving forward I think the focus will be more on character recognition and pinyin. I tell myself (maybe too idealistically) that I will continue to learn new words and such, but we will see how that goes.

Course grading is through weekly homeworks, a group assignment, and then the oral exam and final exam. As long as you are up to speed and following along each week, then you should not have any problems in doing well in this course.

GENE 404: Interdisciplinary Capstone (now called i-Capstone?)

Did I save the best for last? Maybe!

A continuation of GENE 403, though a lot of things seemed to have changed from when we took the first part in Spring 2024 to the Winter 2025 second part. It seems that in Fall 2024, they actually ran it much more differently, and across all faculties, as opposed to being more engineering-focused (as was the case in our Spring 2024 term). I think it is good to include a wide array of faculties in an interdisciplinary capstone, but that did mean that we seemed to diverge somewhat from a more typical engineering capstone, even moreso than we had already been different in the Spring 2024 term with interdisciplinary engineering disciplines.

There is not as much to say about the course itself though for this term, since a lot of the term was just working on the capstone itself. Our team met quite frequently, and I think it was nice to do so (especially already being friends). I think we were all pretty invested and interested in our project, and I’m quite happy with what we were able to research, prototype, and present.

As you may already know, all the capstones across the Faculty of Engineering have a day where they set up a poster board in E7, and everyone is welcome to come and visit, walk around, and ask questions to the teams about their project. Our team actually won one of the awards (we did not expect it!). So that was pretty neat. Overall I think capstone is what your team makes of it, whether you want to try something interesting, just get it over with, shoot for the moon, etc. It works best when your whole team is aligned on how they view the capstone!

Concluding Thoughts

These would be the concluding, concluding thoughts! The last school term review post :0. I wrote the majority of this post in May, but did not get around to finalizing a post until October now. Even in that short span of a couple months, it does feel like 4B was quite some time ago. It was still a great term overall, both with classes and with all the other things outside of school that were going on.

Trying to keep the concluding thoughts more related to 4B, as opposed to undergrad in general. I think one of the major themes for 4B was a theme of gratitude and thankfulness. There was time to look back at what God had been doing throughout university, and what He was still doing even in 4B. There was also more time to spend with others in our year, to enjoy the uniqueness of university in being in such close proximity to one another. CCF’s theme was also on “fullness of joy,” and it was nice that this tied well with thankfulness and gratitude. I think there was a sense of contentment, peace, and of rounded yet robust joy.

Final Conclusions

And that’s a wrap! I’ve updated the about page to reflect a bit more the change in seasons that this blog will be going through, now that university is being wrapped up. Not sure if I have any specific plans for the blog, but I think it is a good way to continue to document, reflect, and think (mainly for me, but also for some of the random readers out there.)

See you around