CS2101 Communication for Software Engineering

For a communications course, I have very little to say. What a forgettable course.

CS2101 is best described as a series of disjointed assessments that attempt to put you through public speaking, documentation writing and business pitches. The little actual learning present in this course is contained in the assessments feedback, but the assessments themselves are heavily rubricked, punishing you for taking risks, experimenting or having fun with the style and structure of your work. The end result is a drab stream of same-y presentations from across groups every time it's presentation day.

When we're not presenting in class, it's an excruciating 3 hour generic public speaking advice seminar where the non-technical teaching staff pretend to understand what makes communicating difficult for computing professionals.

I spent most of those Monday mornings daydreaming, dwelling on the stories that I actually want to tell.

CS2103T Software Engineering

I spent most of this semester grumbling about CS2103T. It's tedious, pedantic, long-winded, constantly demands your attention - it's everything I fear about marriage.

But it's not that bad, actually. Despite its verbosity (the final exam instructions were nearly 2000 words), the teaching team distills just what you need to write good software. The course website is a hodge podge of colour coding and formatting and cross-linking (the team really needs to take CS2101 themselves), but I still found myself referencing it the week after finals for a personal project

The course tries to prioritise learning above everything else - and it shows. A no-questions-asked deadline extension policy, redundant content delivery across lectures, tutorials and notes (so you can skip things and still keep up), and most notably, its... unique assessments. They're complicated but logical - you can tell they're trying to test this difficult to test subject as well as they can. Unfortunately, a lot of it is related to diagrams which they concede aren't really used that much these in practice - but at least the exams didn't have any gotchas. The course does not shy away from acknowledging the role of LLMs in software engineering too - hell they have an option to do your entire individual project with AI. CS2103T really feels like it's alive and evolving.

But we weren't meant to be. It's just a shame I found it unstimulating and downright irritating. The awkward timelines with weekly Thursday deadlines (meaning work starts on Fridays), and tight restrictions on the projects (making it tough to be creative and get excited about them) left me feeling estranged.

Welp. In any case, I'll be seeing a lot more of you going forward. 💘

CS2100 Computer Organisation

I no longer need a calculator to convert between decimal, hexadecimal and binary instantly.

CS2100, the last of the Holy Trinity, was easily the least enjoyable. It drowns you in content across labs, tutorials, recitations AND recorded lectures that routinely hit 4 hours a week. Much of this is filler - I literally skipped every recitation without consequence. Just axe them already.

The course is effectively trying to answer the question: how do 1s and 0s become software? It's genuinely fascinating. But CS2100 constantly TELLS you how MIPS processors work rather than building understanding from first principles. Having done NAND2Tetris before (where you literally build a computer from logic gates up to writing a game of Tetris), CS2100 felt backwards. It ends up feeling so specific that exam prep devolves into grinding past papers until you could regurgitate what it demanded (well, hindsight is 10100 10100, it's probably not as easy as I'm saying it is). The worst part is that I'm not even sure I could apply these concepts to non-MIPS systems.

The early labs lasted all of 15 minutes, mostly spent queuing for attendance. It killed me to drag myself to COM1 every Wednesday so my Lab TA could tick an Excel box. They get really, really fun in the second half though, implementing circuits with physical gates and wires. But it is as disconnected from the rest of the course as my wires frequently were from my breadboard.

The tutorials were excellent. Song Kai is a top-tier TA. Perfectly paced, incredibly organised, and genuinely sweet. He condensed mountains of content into a coherent hour, flag things to look out for, and has gone out of his way to make accommodations whenever I had a rough week. I really hope he gets a teaching award!

NST2064 Social Insect Societies

My soul has been crushed by how many people have laughed when I told them I was taking a course about ants. This was the only NUSC course I knew I'd take before I even matriculated. I met Dr Pohl a year before joining, sat across from him at an offer-holders lunch, and yapped about ants for over an hour. I've been fascinated by ants for years. In fact, it was the subject of my NUSC admissions essay. Taking this course was a dream come true. I could finally justify getting lost in Wikipedia rabbit (or rather ant) holes.

Prof Pohl goes to great lengths to locate myrmecology with experimental design, ecology, systems theory, even epistemology. One class discussed the politics of calling slave-making ants "slave-making ants." He'd lean into whatever interested us, even if it meant pushing topics to future classes - especially since we only had 6 students. The small class meant we could do things like conducting experiments on actual ants around campus (the "red ants" everywhere in Singapore nest in trees!) and even a field trip to Bukit Timah hunting social insects. Also, Prof Pohl is INCREDIBLY funny. Blink and you miss his dry double antendres.

The teaching is great, but assessments are gruelling. It's literally worse than NTW. THREE essays, a presentation, a final test AND weekly readings. Prof Pohl verifies every single source you use in your essays, checks if newer research contradicts your claims. Between his standards and the workload, NST2064 sharpened my scientific writing immensely. I could probably hold conversations with experts on my essay topics. I even read an entire textbook on desert ants for one.

The benefit of many components is, of course, that you can bomb some with minimal impact to your grade. My sleep schedule wonked out later on in the semester and I struggled to stay awake during the 2-4pm slot. I'm glad he didn't hold it against me. I also completely bombed the final test, leaving half the questions blank buuuuuuuuut—

This course was the first time I ever got an A+ in an NUS College course. I guess, if I wasn't a computer scientist, or a physicist or a sociologist or a linguist or a musician or novelist or director or teacher.... maybe I could have been an entomologist.

NGT2001A Global Social Thought

I now have traumatic flashbacks every time I come across the word "modern".

Every week in Global Social Thought, we read two seminal texts from social and political thinkers worldwide. The course splits into two segments: past struggles (primarily colonialism) and current struggles. I was excited to read and discuss the Communist Manifesto by Marx, Hind Swaraj by Gandhi, and even Edward Said's work on Orientalism.

But I wasn't in the headspace to truly sit with the readings this semester. Even what little I did was meaningful, however, and will inform my words and views going forward. Truthfully, the content is too dense for 3 hours weekly - especially with time lost to student presentations. I'd have loved more time discussing and arguing about readings, but that's tough in an introductory class where texts are difficult and it's unfair to expect students to grasp them without sufficiently unpacking arguments in class.

Dr Bjorn Gomes, who replaced our initial instructor midway through the semester, was excellent. I was smitten by his articulateness, self-deprecating humour, and random tangents. I was sold his very first time in our class, when he rambled about the limitations of words in understanding society and politics, but also in communicating with the people we care about. He's knowledgeable enough to quote and explain lines from memory from any of the bajillion books strewn and stacked across his office, but grounded enough to grant extensions 10 minutes before deadlines and never hold it against me when I showed up to consults completely unprepared. His consults were incredible - he'd engage with such genuine interest we overshot by over an hour every time. He'd shut down my weak arguments so effortlessly, but in this discursive way that pushed me toward something sharper.

There are times I'm lost in thought about something (completely unrelated to the course) and wonder: What would Dr Gomes say? I wish we were friends, but I don't think I'll stand a chance after subjecting him to my horrible submissions. This is the first NUSC course where I felt disdain for everything I produced. I wrote essays criticising the renaming of British-era names in India and the centricity of Western allopathic medicine - both positions I realised far too late I didn't agree with as much as I thought.

In many ways, NGT was a microcosm of my semester. Between the change in instructor and shifting deadlines, the experience was erratic, stressful, despairing, but also interesting, enamoring and awe-inspiring. It was bumpy.

The course constantly asked of us: How can we make people feel seen? How can we empathise with people who we cannot be? How do we move on from pain that has been inflicted? I learnt about what I'm willing to condone, and what I'll stand against. I learned the courage it takes to stand up for your values, and how when you don't, it takes even greater courage to recognise that contradiction in yourself. As with most arguments on all sorts of issues in the world, conflicting things can be true simultaneously.

It was a mess that shook me up. I understand a little less about what I believe -about politics, about history, about medicine, about myself and the way I treat and let myself be treated by the world around me. But I guess in that way I understood more about everything. I wouldn't have it any other way.