Northwestern
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General Information
First off, here's the NU Homepage which, of course, should contain some useful information about the place. Just don't believe everything single thing you read.
Students don't get much of a life here, at least not for me. To prove that, you're currently seeing one guy who's bored enough to write about how bored he is, and that's pretty boring as well. The only activities I do outside of class are pingpong and movies. Century Theaters has one close by with 12 auditoriums, and they're bragging about it.
When I complained about the rising prices in Houston, I should've really looked at the cost in Chicago. What is wrong with these misers. My buddies and I have formulated a relationship between the distance from the university and the prices of "goods." The as d goes to zero, p reaches infinity, which makes dp/dd equal to -k/d^2, where k is a positive constant, most likely to be very large.
Although you may have discovered that the general NU webpage is worth crap, at least the students try to put up a better one at HereAndNow Online, where we can search for people using ph and exchange books online. It also contains some useful links, unlike the general university webpage, where they have links which would link to the links that link to the links which go to various useful pages.
Dorms and Food
Anytime I have no class, I will most likely end up in my dorm room (pictures: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), studying, napping, or wondering how I ended up living in this dump. Here's the general housing page, which lists all the other dorms. Compare them with Foster Walker, and you'll see the difference. Update: now I usually spend my spare time in Tech, whether it be the computer labs, library, or other student activities rooms.
Do not be fooled by Foster Walker's phrase "food service in building," for the food is not fit even for rats to eat. 1/3 of the plates are dirty after they supposedly washed it. 2/3 of the utensils have water stains, and 1/4 of the utensils have food remains. The ONLY time the plates were clean was for the Christmas lunch FOR THE EMPLOYEES. Oh my did they work to clean them. We had some extra clean plates to use during dinner, and whoa, was I seeing snow white plates and shining silver utensils. Update: I now eat all lunches and dinners in Sargent, which is the best dining hall on campus I believe, except for Norris, but that requires extra money.
I asked the manager why the food sucks so much, and she replied that it's the TOWN TAXES. Seems like they charge different tax rates for Sargent and Elder then, since the food there is much better. Foster Walker has no selection. My Sunday dinner on 2001/01/20 consisted of spaghetti (I didn't say spaghetti and meatballs.) as the main course, and potatoes as the side.
Foster Walker also has no quantity. Any good food (good defined as what the homeless is willing to eat) runs out in four minutes, and we wait fourteen more minutes for them to bring out some more. Elder's refill rate has always been less than one minute, and Sargent always has more food ready before the students empty the buffet.
Not only does the selection and quantity stay at minimum, the food's quality is even worse. There's no need for a max/min calculus equation to find the quality, it's simply f(t) = - infinity, where the independent variable is time (school days), and the dependent variable is the quality of food on those days. Testimony from vioviolet says she almost threw up on their pasta. By the way, pasta is the only food they always maintain in stock, probably because it is so CHEAP. $8.35 for dinner, and all we get is pasta, for even the orange juice runs out, and the dude does not come to refill the machine until after dinner.
They labeled the place "all you can eat buffet." Their diction proves erroneous, it's "all you want to eat buffet."
Academics
I am an engineering major, belonging to the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. I want to study EE. They are ranked nowhere near top in the nation, and I ask myself how did I choose those majors. The better majors in Tech are Material Sciences and Biomed. Although the profs are nice, I really must wonder how much did some of those students spend to buy themselves into here. University president says he tries to keep the tuition increase below ten percent a year, and I think, did he mean to be proud of that?
Around nine in the evening of January 21 of 2002, Winchoice and I went down to the FW lounge to play pingpong. MLK day is about to end, and the performance was over. We see 20 girls hip hopping. Winchoice comments that he thought (correctly) that MLK performance has ended. Then those girls exploded at the "ignorance," dissed Asians, and kicked us out of the lounge. Asians would not do that because they don't even think in that direction. What kind of idiot automatically puts her neuron to the heard-racial-slur section of her head (I did not say brain)? If Lunar New Year just ended and I go into the lounge and see KASA dancers, I would not be kicked out for saying that I thought the performance is over. Violence does not work, unless you're the US, then you can be the international bully police for all you want. Anyway, this changed my mind about the carat guys. I wronged them. Before, I always thought that the NU ranking is low because of those people, who do not know how to multiply matrices and do cross products. In fact, they raise the rankings here. Heck, with those girls, anyone can raise the rankings of this joint. I know better now, after seeing those girls. How the heck did they get in NU with that attitude? No wonder the average SAT here is only 14 some.
I recently talked to a very nice prof here about my plans for EE and CS. He asked me, what would I do when I graduate? Would I get a job in EE or in CS? The employer will only hire me for one of them, since one is hard and one is soft. He made a good point: EE should not have to worry about finding jobs. Since I'm not that good on the soft side, I'll do EE, instead of CS. However, sometimes there are simple soft stuff that a EE needs to do, such as in robotics, so he suggested that learning some CE can be beneficial, which is my plan.
Here is a list of my classes at NU (updated near the end of every quarter):
- Freshman
- ES_APPM 252-1, Honors Cal for Engineers
- HONORS GEN_ENG 205-1, Engin Analysis (Linear Alg)
- ECE 202, Intro to EE
- CS 111, Fund of Comp Prog-ing
- ES_APPM 252-2, Honors Calc/Engg
- CS 211, Fund of Comp Prog-ing II
- HONORS GEN_ENG 205-2, Engg Anal II (Civil)
- GEN_ENG/ENGLISH 106-1, Engin Design & Comm
- ECE 399, Independent Study (Solar Car Electrical Systems)
- ES_APPM 253, Honors Engg Anal IV (Diffeq)
- HONORS GEN_ENG 205-3, Engg Anal III (Mechanics)
- GEN_ENG/ENGLISH 106-2, Engin Dsign/Comm
- PHY 135-3, Gen Phyx Waves
- ECE 399, Independent Study (Solar Car Electrical Systems)
- Sophomore
- ECE 223, Fund. of Solid State Engg
- ECE 302, Probabilistic Systems and Random Signals
- ECE 230, Progg for CompEs
- ECE 222, Fund of Signals and Systems
- ECE 224, Fund of Electromagnetics and Photonics
- ECE203, Intro to Computer Engineering
- ECE221, Fund of Circuits
- ECE225, Fund of Electronics
- ECE308, Advanced Electromagnetics and Photonics
- ECE399, Independent Study
- spring quarter...
Extracurriculars
The Solar Car Team is a great way to learn engineering and have fun at the same time. I have a separate page about NuSun, but a short description is that students learn almost all fields of engineering, management, organization, and financial balance.
The other activity is pingpong I guess. Our only pingpong table in the dorm of 600+ students is in the basement. The table becomes a dinner table once KASA or Angels or CSA or some kung fu club or AACM comes in to have a party, and we are left with all kinds of mines when they finish. Most annoying is the Angels though. They take over the West Lounge (if you call it a lounge), which has the TV and the pingpong table, but all they use are the sofas. So why do they not use the East Lounge instead? That way, they get their sofas, and others can watch TV and play pingpong. I haven't played much pingpong during my second quarter here (Winter, Freshman). Perhaps I have too much homework with five classes. However, I usually play some in the weekends, and while before we broke a ball every week, we also break a ball every week now. But, we played seven times a week last quarter and only perhaps twice a week this quarter. We have better balls, too, so I don't know what happened. Maybe we just slam harder.
And after reading all this, if you are applying to college, and are still interested in NU, here's the admissions page.