Nathan Nordling

Cpre 494

10/18/19

Cumulative Reflection

My collegiate experience has been a sort of uphill battle, especially with the fact that as a high
school student I didn’t know how to study or work on things ahead of time (and I still have trouble with
the second one). Getting closer and closer to completing this has helped me in a lot of ways especially
with handling difficult obstacles and learning complex information. Luckily with being almost done I
know that I am far more capable of handling trouble, have a better time asking for help when necessary,
and can deal with stress far easier than I ever could before.

My first semester here I started out with most of the type of starter general education courses
out of the window due to having plenty of AP classes under my belt, so I basically was throwing my half-
alive-but-still-functioning-probably high school self from a cool bath into the fire. Or that is somewhat
what it felt like but looking back it was not much different from my high school experience. I had the
same jumble of different types of courses such as chemistry, Cpre 185 which is just intro to coding in C,
English 250 which was more or less the same as a high school English course but graded more harshly
aka he didn’t give out A’s (and I still didn’t read the books), and lastly Calc 3 which wasn’t that bad as I
had a good Indian Professor who gave me a ton to write down every day. I was also trying out the
honors program, and most of what I got out of it was that the people in it were both a) not engineers
and did not seem to have as much difficulty to get A’s in their courses as I did, and b) the one engineer
girl in it definitely did not have any free time. Back then one of the big things I had learned from high
school was a sort of time optimization strategy to get as much free time as I could possibly attain, and I
really valued not trying to burn up all my time to just get 10% higher in grades. Unfortunately for current
me that has not helped that much as far as my GPA goes though, since now I often need to sacrifice A’s
on assignments for the sake of my own lack of time, and not intentionally. I ended up deciding to quit
the honors program, but in the long run I think it was a good decision because there wasn’t any way I
could keep a 4.0 unless I were a completely different type of student, specifically I had gotten here from
just being smart, I had literally not studied until I got to college. This first semester I had a few run-ins
with my inability to do some things other students may find as a sort of first nature, but it wasn’t until
the second semester I would really need to deal with it.
 My second semester was rather bad, and I learned a lot from the experience, but it was a
horrible time to live it. As far as what went well this semester my coding Java course, I got a reasonable
grade in and I really enjoyed the flexing of logic and learning how to code more effectively, as my
experience in Cpre 185 only got me a bit toward understanding what coding was all about. Cpre 186,
which is a small project sequel to 185, gave me some brief experience working in a group and it helped
that it was relaxed as far as what we needed to do. The main thing I learned from that course was that it
was difficult to come up with something on your own and especially implement it. So, what was bad
about this semester was I got 2 D’s in Diff EQ as well as Physics 1. Diff EQ I decided to not retake since I
did not need it as a requirement for anything, but I would need Physics 1 to be able to start Electrical
Engineering courses in the future. The main issue with Physics 1 was that the problems on the exams
were completely different from what we had been doing on homework and in class, and honestly that
seems ridiculous now, as well as when I retook it, knowing they give past exams out and the questions
are the same every time. Thankfully I was able to get that in my head and I have done my best to study
past exams whenever they are available now. Diff EQ had my first run-in with an incredibly difficult to
understand professor; I have nothing against the Italian Prof I had for it, but I just could not understand
his accent, and that made class useless to me, and in turn I needed to try to learn it myself. I completely
sucked at learning the information myself. You may ask, “Why did you not try to find help and get
assistance?”, and that has been something I have been still working on to this day, which is knowing
when to ask for assistance. My poor performance was tough to deal with in these two courses, but it did
slightly make me a better student, but these were still rather basic failings, and I would have more issues
to deal with.

The next year I had a good first semester and a bad second one, and this pattern would continue
another year past this unfortunately. Com S 228 was great, and I liked the ability to do more
complicated programming techniques. My last project apparently did not submit properly so I got a 0 on
it, but the class was still curved hard so I didn’t notice until it was too late; I noticed this to be a trend as
well with getting A’s for me, there was always some random issue that would chop my grade down an
entire level, which is somewhat depressing when I think about it, I would have had an A in this course as
well as Cpre 281 which I did well in, but faceplanted on the final project and had no idea how to do it, so
I took the L aka a B+ in the course from a -10% from the final project. I retook Phys 1 this semester and
got a B from literally just studying past exams before taking them, no additional work, fantastic. The
second part of the year I had some more issues, though. Largely that was due to Cpre 288 with the
worst prof I’ve had, and he ended up not being allowed to teach again after that semester which
probably spells out why I had issues. But since this was a required class, I decided to take more time and
retake it rather than moving on. My other courses during this semester were fine, but I also had trouble
with Com S 309 which I would need to retake. Basically, our project was not very interesting, I did not
know what I was doing, and there weren’t really any tutorials for our project, so I had some real
problems figuring out what to do. We were doing everything wrong for a “newbie” like myself and at
the end I had to retake it.

Next semester taking the course again I made sure to not run into those mistakes and made
sure my group was doing a game which would have plenty of help online, and the team members and I
got along much better than with my past group. It ended up being a great experience and I brought my
D around to an A the second attempt. Cpre 309 helped me to be able to work in a team-based
environment, and I really understood what the do’s and don’ts were the second time around. It was fun
to make some new friends and work hard on a game together despite many setbacks and errors with it.
In this course I also experienced the benefits of tutorials for dealing with something very complex as we
used a lot of a Mario Bros 1 tutorial for our game as the basis, which we built off somewhat. Cpre 288
with Dr. Jones went a ton better than with the other prof, and I now have him as well as our client that
we are working with in Senior design which is neat to see everything coming back around. I also met
some great friends this semester in Eng 314 who I would take more classes with in the future, and EE
201 with Tuttle went reasonably well. Overall it was my best semester and the first 2 A’s I got. The
semester after that was mediocre, though, and my run-in with a tough professor in Cpre 381, which is as
most people in our major tend to say is the hardest course already, meant I failed in style with a 59.5%.
It was just graded harshly, and I couldn’t get Duwe’s exams, or anything really. The biggest problem was
just how much he expected us to pick up instantaneously, as a prelab for lab 0 he wanted us to learn an
entire programming language in VHDL.

The next year I was at least able to hang on better due to my transfer friend catching up to
where I was in the curriculum, and he brought more friends he had with him, and I did manage to scrape
by in Cpre 381 this time. The final project was very difficult, but it was extremely rewarding to see all the
complexicated information from the course come together in our processor as we verified each of the
MIPS instructions working. I remember we had a weird issue that wouldn’t quite get fixed but eventually
I did find out that in our design one of the parts we had was upside down. That can somewhat describe
how engineering problems can be, where there is a random simple issue that can take hours to fix when
its not much, but it really helps you to understand the in’s and out’s of your system, as me and my
partner scoured the entire design and eventually managed to converge the problem to that one part. A
large part of my collegiate career has been this sort of experiencing failure and redoing classes to get
them right. I just wish it weren’t so expensive on my GPA and funds, its just a bit too punishing
nowadays with how expensive college is for one of the best learning options which is failure, to be
punished so heavily. I’m glad I at least have an intrinsic belief that I can do anything if I set my mind to it,
because that has helped me to persevere even with so many setbacks. It has been Com S 311 too ended
up being a class I would need to retake to understand, but I was just somewhat insulted because of how
much better the second round of professors were than the first, who hadn’t even given us class notes to
use for studying… I did truly appreciate the second round though with David Fernandez-Baca I believe,
he made it so much more straightforward and overall, I really understood what I was doing. The other
most notable course from last semester would be Integrated Electronics which was always very difficult,
but I felt I learned a lot.

Finally, I am in senior design now and even though there is still a year ahead of me I feel far
more comfortable in my classes and knowing that I will be able to persevere. I know there are many
difficult things that I will need to deal with in the future, but I am sure of my ability to fight on and learn
how to solve them. Once I have graduated, I know that I will continue to learn and grow and that I can
do a lot of great things in the world.