Yes I am now dropping double degree to pursue only Computer Science.
Courses
I overloaded again, so I took the default 6 courses.
Course review!
- STAT230 (Statistics): Pretty comparable to the workload of the previous Calculus courses. Completed bi-weekly quizzes which were pretty easy compared to the homework problems which I found difficult. I felt that lectures were pretty useless in comparison to the textbook. More than half the lectures were the professor just proving theorems and formulas and working through boards of algebra, in contrast to the homework which is mainly just application of those formulas. I still showed up to lecture, mostly to see where we are in the course to make sure I am on track.
- CS245 (Logic): An abundance of what feels to be useless information. I stopped showing up to lecture after the first month. It is a challenging, yet extremely predictable course. There is so much information taught in the course, but so little of it is actually testable, which makes testing predictable. What I mean by that is, you will know exactly every type of problem that will be on the test, and know the general algorithm to solve those problems, but the hard part is how complex those problems might be on the test and if you will have enough time to solve them. The bi-weekly written assignments feel like MATH135/MATH136 written assignments where we once again write proofs/solve problems.
- CS246 (C++ OOP): In here, lectures are actually not worth attending. I stopped attending after the first month. Painfully sitting through a 1h20m lecture where the professor wastes probably 30 minutes because he's handwriting the code AND fixing mistakes, is not as fast as just quickly reading previous year's notes and immediately practicing those concepts in the assignments. Sitting through an entire 1h20m lecture could probably be understood just as well as a 10-20 minute skim through of the notes of that lecture.
- BU127 (Accounting): I stopped going to lecture after the first week. What's taught in the slides versus what's actually tested felt like night and day. For example, one-hundred slides of course notes probably had like 2-3 slides of half-useful information to solve the specific accounting problems we had to solve. The information needed to solve problems felt burried under a bunch of accounting jargon and history. But this is an arrogant take of mine, because one who is interested in an accounting job would find the information useful. I just had no interest and needed to finish the homework.
- BU283 (Finance): This class followed a "flipped" model. This meant that class contained no instruction, and was only a test of your knowledge through participation marks. I showup to lecture, I open the participation software, new problems showup every 10 minutes or so, I copy each problem into GPT, and fill in my answer. It was fully my fault for being behind in this course, and when it came time to finals, I essentially spent 1-2 days learning the entire course. This little review was enough because I was able to get a 58% on the final exam (above the class average). Many of the tested questions required alot of intuition, whereas the homework problems were extremely formulaic.
- BU288 (Organizational Behaviour, i.e. HR): Probably the reason why I am dropping double degree. Constantly felt like I was learning nothing. Lectures and the textbook would be explaining things like "Sexual harassment is bad for the workplace 🤯," "Communication means the exchange of information 🤯," as if I've just landed on the planet Earth. And the people who take the course seriously also blow my mind. The part that is hard is that you are gonna be tested on the extreme specifics of certain terms and you'll have to be really precise in your definitions, otherwise you won't be awarded marks on the exams. It just felt like a whole lot of useless memorization, with no real purpose.
Co-op
Definately felt alot easier this term. I landed 5 interviews in Cycle 1 through only WaterlooWorks. 1 interview was through refferal of a previous intern at Ford. It was 2 front-end interviews, 1 ML interview, and 2 general SWE interviews. I was ranked first for the Ford interview, and only ranked for the rest despite thinking I that I did well in those interviews.
Why am I dropping business?
- I want some free time to do whatever, whether thats academic or just fun.
- I did not enjoy accounting.
- I did not enjoy finance
- I did not enjoy organizational behaviour.
- Most people in the program don't seem that software oriented.