As of Monday evening, I finished the last final exam I’ll most likely ever take in my life. Wow.
It really was a whimper-type rather than a bang-type ending. The class was Algorithms, the one that I’d put off taking for all of my academic career ’til now. Not because it’s not an interesting subject (dynamic programming is pretty awesome, powerful stuff if taught right), but because it’s rarely well taught. The particular class I took was taught by an instructor who, while being a good lecturer, didn’t spent enough time at all in preparation. Book, problem sets, lectures, and tests were all completely disjoint from one another–if I could hazard a guess as to class organization, the book was chosen because it was a famous one in its field, the instructor’s notes were taken from a prior class he had himself attended, problem sets were plagiarized from algorithms courses in other universities, and test questions were written by the TAs. Not exactly a cohesive learning environment
Preparing for the final this weekend was like pulling teeth. ~20 hours spent pretending to study, ~4 hours actually studying.
Really, this class has shown me the distinction between masters-level and doctoral-level classes. Honestly, and unfortunately, it seems like most of the classes in graduate-level computer science here at USC are built to cater to our Masters-Degree-Diploma Mill. Granted, this diploma mill does much to fund PhD students like me, but… the resulting classes are so large-sized, so banal in content, that it feels more like an extension of undergraduate coursework. There are exceptions to this, of course. Arbib teaches an amazing class on Human-Brain-Inspired AI, and Knight/Marcu/Hovy teach a set of mean NLP courses, but these are exceptions rather than standards.
</rant>.
The important thing is it’s over now.
Now that course work for my PhD is done, all that remains is a year or two more of research. And then I get to call myself “Doctor Nick”, and feel happy about myself because I have a paper diploma with my name on it, and face the vast unknown that is the future =).
Getting married in December, and graduating a year or so after that, that’s the plan. Then it’s hopefully a bit of post-doc work, and then emigration. Honestly, my dream someday is to be a professor in some country/area that doesn’t have as much academic infrastructure/resources compared to the U.S. Call it holistic tentmaking. Or reverse brain-drain. Or something, I dunno yet. We’ll take it one step at a time, for now.