It was EE20N quiz today!

It was alright, cause a short survey showed that quite a lot of people in the whole class didn’t quite get the entire problem in page 2 as well, which is basically the same fate as mine.

22/45. (mean unknown at point of writing)

UPDATE:  Mean was 19.4269/45 and the standard deviation was 7.50. Not bad not bad.

After my professor Babakued us (his name is Babak), there was candy for us in front of the lecture hall!

Talk about being evil, haha.

(There’s also a Facebook group called “I got Babakued!” for all the EECS people who have been prepared as delicious delicacies on Babak’s grill stove over the years through his tough exams)

So I guess that “Guest” is right.

Ern Sheong is one heck of a self-centered person. (Sorry I deleted your message from my Shoutbox cause I was not in a right mood when I read it. Coupled with the fact that it was anonymous and I was not having the best of days.)

I guess no one likes it when they are being labeled as self-centered and proud. So do I. But then again I think that describes me best anyway. Self-centered, selfish and proud.

OK, so I admit. I am selfish, self-centered and proud. I guess it’s been a journey over many months and years tackling this problem within myself.

I try to be more generous and caring toward others, but somehow there is always something that I could have done more to help others. Worrying too much about myself, when there are many people out there who could benefit a lot from a bit more of concern from me.

So yeah. I’m still working on it, thinking about life in general a lot, and wondering about many things in Berkeley despite this self-imposed “busyness.” And yeah, I know I should worry and think less than I do now.

But hey, I wanna embrace a changed outlook from now on.

Even if there are many people who do much better than I do in many things, I just wanna be grateful for the opportunity to rub shoulders with all these wonderful people and actually learn all these stuff that I am learning now. Bad marks for some quizzes and midterms don’t really do much harm to me anymore. It’s just part of the journey. And life out there is like that. And hard work is becoming an enjoyment.

I feel down a lot of times and I pick myself up most of the times. For the rest, God picks me up. I just smile when I think that I am stressing myself out. I am learning to take things slowly and enjoying the process. Soon, Berkeley will come to pass for me. Better enjoy the moment and not sweat the small stuff.

Man I have to learn how to be cheerful and not take things so seriously all the time.

It was a week of sorts. I realise that my body has grown accustomed to only 5 hours (and less) of sleep on weekdays. Haha.

I learned a new term in Berkeley:

“bombed”

Usage is as follows:

“I bombed my midterm yesterday.”

Meaning: You totally screwed up that midterm.

Usage in personal context in a sentence:

“I bombed my Comp Sci. 61A midterm last Wednesday. I prepared hard for it. But nevertheless I got stumped by some questions with a lot of marks. Damn.”

Anyways. I shall cease to whine about midterms. No point. That’s life at Berkeley.

—

One moment I was listening to my iPod. Moments later, I walked into a room with the iPod inventor in it.

Tony Fadell, the creator of the iPod, came to UC Berkeley last Wednesday to give a lecture or rather to conduct a Question and Answer session. He was pretty cool. Had a degree in Computer Engineering from U of Michigan, started a few businesses while he was a college student.

He revealed that he and his friend once gained a few hours of access to their school lab.  They looked at the laboratory key they had with them, and then they looked at each other.

Then they duplicated the lab key.

Thus they worked all-nighters in the lab creating their own chip during those times. Subsequently he told us of his story of start-ups and of trying to establish his own company. He was trying to revive his struggling company when one day Apple contacted him and asked him to consult on the project to build a portable music player. He took six weeks to prepare a paper for the Apple iPod. It sounded easy but it wasn’t. But now, we have our 17th generation of iPods thanks to Tony Fadell and his team. And the rest is history.

Another thing he said was that Apple built a business surrounded by high barriers to entry. China might duplicate tonnes of copy-cat iPods and iPhones, but nothing beats the environment of support and the beautiful integration of hardward and software that Apple provides. He repeated during the session that it is absolutely important for a business to build high barriers to entry for it to survive in the long run. Makes sense. If you do something that other people can easily do, your company would probably not survive for too long.

I was pretty quiet throughout the entire session. Americans really love to ask questions. Many of them were good ones. But somehow I managed to get the opportunity to ask the very last question:

“What is your advice to students who are looking to start their own companies?”

His response was something to the tune of, “This is the time! You are young, and you are able to take risks without major consequences. Worst comes to worst, when you fail badly, you can go home to your parents.  I am now married with two kids. If I were to do what I did then at my present situation, I would probably not do it. Last time I was accountable to no one but myself. But now my wife might say, “Who’s going to pay the bills if you fail?” And your parents might want to dictate what you want to do, but their are just giving advice and advice can or may not be followed.”

Nice words, but would I really act?

Really nice to hear someone from the industry come and talk. One of the benefits for being so near the Silicon Valley.

Alright folks. Later.

THE - QS World University Rankings 2008

2005 Rankings:

1. Harvard University, United States
2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
3. University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
4. University of Oxford, United Kingdom
5. Stanford University, United States
6. University of California, Berkeley, United States

2008/2007 Rankings:

2008/2007 Rankings

1/1 HARVARD University United States
2/2= YALE University United States
3/2= University of CAMBRIDGE United Kingdom
4/2= University of OXFORD United Kingdom
5/7= CALIFORNIA Institute of Technology (Calt… United States
6/5 IMPERIAL College London United Kingdom
7/9 UCL (University College London) United Kingdom
8/7= University of CHICAGO United States
9/10 MASSACHUSETTS Institute of Technology (M… United States
10/11 COLUMBIA University United States
11/14 University of PENNSYLVANIA United States
12/6 PRINCETON University United States
13=/13 DUKE University United States
13=/15 JOHNS HOPKINS University United States
15/20= CORNELL University United States
16/16 AUSTRALIAN National University Australia
17/19 STANFORD University United States
18/38= University of MICHIGAN United States
19/17 University of TOKYO Japan
20/12 MCGILL University Canada
21/20= CARNEGIE MELLON University United States
22/24 KING’S College London United Kingdom
23/23 University of EDINBURGH United Kingdom
24/42 ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of T… Switzerland
25/25 KYOTO University Japan
26/18 University of HONG KONG Hong Kong
27/32 BROWN University United States
28/26 École Normale Supérieure, PARIS France
29/30 University of MANCHESTER United Kingdom
30=/33= National University of SINGAPORE (NUS) Singapore
30=/41 University of CALIFORNIA, Los Angeles (U… United States
32/37 University of BRISTOL United Kingdom
33/29 NORTHWESTERN University United States
34=/28 ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE France
34=/33= University of BRITISH COLUMBIA Canada
36/22 University of California, BERKELEY United States

Naturally, as an international student studying in Berkeley and as a citizen of a country which is obsessed with rankings (Malaysia, where the main newspaper publishes such rankings), I ask the question:

“What in the world is going on?“

“Did Berkeley actually drop in rankings?”

Firstly, UC Berkeley definitely did not go backwards in the last few years. On the contrary, the ranking methodology used by THE-QS went “forward” or rather it “progressed.”

Let’s take a good look at the Rankings by Subject found on the same web page (based on responses to Academic Peer Review only):

Arts and Humanities

1HARVARD University United States (100.0)
2University of California, BERKELEY United States (93.1)
3University of OXFORD United Kingdom (91.3)
4University of CAMBRIDGE United Kingdom (89.1)
5YALE University United States (86.2)

Life Sciences & Biomedicine

1 HARVARD University United States (100.0)
2 University of CAMBRIDGE United Kingdom (87.1)
3 JOHNS HOPKINS University United States (84.7)
4 University of California, BERKELEY United States (83.7)
5 University of OXFORD United Kingdom (81.4)

Natural Sciences

1 MASSACHUSETTS Institute of Technology (M… United States (100.0)
2 University of California, BERKELEY United States (99.5)
3 University of CAMBRIDGE United Kingdom (98.3)
4 HARVARD University United States (96.1)
5 University of OXFORD United Kingdom (92.3)

Social Sciences

1 HARVARD University United States (100.0)
2 University of California, BERKELEY United States (91.6)
3 STANFORD University United States (82.6)
4 LONDON School of Economics and Political… United Kingdom (82.1)
5 University of CAMBRIDGE United Kingdom (81.8)

Technology

1 MASSACHUSETTS Institute of Technology (M… United States (100.0)
2 University of California, BERKELEY United States (93.9)
3 STANFORD University United States (85.3)
4 CALIFORNIA Institute of Technology (Calt… United States (81.6)
5 University of CAMBRIDGE United Kingdom (76.2)

As we can see, Berkeley is Top 2 in the world in every Subject except for Life Sciences and Biomedicine, where it is ranked fourth. How come this does not translate to high rankings in the overall rankings?

Hence to gain a deeper understanding let’s examine the methodology of the overall rankings applied by THE-QS:

So it can be seen that Berkeley has performed extremely well in the Academic Peer Review but it only consists of 40% of the total grade. Thus it can be concluded that Berkeley’s performance in the remaining 60% was not so stellar.

The following statements are of my own view and no in-depth analyses were made to produce the following statements. However the statements are the result of a few simple yet logical observations:

• Employer reviews tend to be geographically biased. An employer in some part of the world might favor places like Harvard because it is internationally well-known in general, but might rank other places which is just as good lower just because they are not familiar with the names of those universities.
• Berkeley is a public university with much more students than any other private university. Based on this, faculty student ratio suffers. Furthermore, Berkeley is facing budget cuts this year which decreases funding for the recruitment of new faculty members. America’s economy is in a bad shape, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is not increasing funding to UC campuses. Furthermore, Berkeley’s endowment is still small (US 1.3 billion) compared to places like Stanford (US 17 billion).
• For Citations per Faculty, I don’t see how Berkeley can do badly in this category, until I saw the words “international faculty.” So to gain marks in this category, Berkeley has to employ more international professors who can churn out research papers, which is of course not the case always. Berkeley professors are mostly American.
• Berkeley has tripled its international student enrollment this year, but it remains as a very small proportion of about 3% compared to the total number of incoming students. Compared to many other international universities which admit international students by the droves until it reaches to high proportions, Berkeley is still an American institution at large. The name University of California, Berkeley also implies that most of the places go to the top students in California.
• The last criteria is also biased toward universities with high international student proportion.

It is not hard to see why Berkeley performed badly in the remaining 60% of the grade. But that by no means makes it any worse. Actually, it doesn’t really matter at all. THE-QS rankings is an international ranking and hence it tends to put in a lot of emphasis on the international component, but that does not determine the success of a university per se. Just because a university is internationally focused does not mean that it is better than another university who is “less international.”

Conclusion:

Don’t let the rankings deceive you. Many rankings say this and that, so do not take it at face value and do your own research. Berkeley’s engineering department as on the same footing as Stanford and MIT, and is a very well-recognized.

If you are a Malaysian or anyone else reading this, by all means apply to Berkeley. It’s an awesome place for academic study and exploration. Do not let such rankings affect your decision to apply to Berkeley, thinking that at the rank of 36 Berkeley is a “rubbish” school. It is not. I have been here for a while and I must say that this is a great school.

Cheers. Be wise!

It was Computer Science 61A Office Hours.

My TA (Teaching Assistant) was illustrating data-directed programming, so he came up with an example of a grade-scores list.

First representation: (list of pairs)

((Sarah, -10) (Barack, 100) (John, 0))

Second representation: (list of two lists)

(Sarah, Barack, John)

(-10, 100, 0)

If you follow American politics you would know what I am talking about. Haha

Yesterday I did something which I had always wanted to do.

Walk out of an exam early.

Despite not studying much for the Physics 7A Midterm due to the many other midterms jammed together (I started the night before the exam), I did pretty well.

Ironically, it was the day when I thought that I was pretty stupid. Like I don’t know what in the world was going on in lecture and everybody around me does (especially in my major, EECS, everyone is so smart.) So I went into the exam later in the evening expecting something hard again and walla, it was all done with 15 minutes to spare with checking. And it was really fun shooting down the 5 problems one by one. Maybe it was easy, I don’t know. I dare not say anything is easy these days. So I got a B in my Math midterm. And 21/40 in my CS61A midterm (that really sucks, average was like 27). But overall it was generally alright. Not the genius not the last guy in class, which is pretty fine.

Awesome. That Physics 7A restores some confidence in myself. I can actually do something awesomely.

——

Well I am still thinking about what I could be doing with an Electrical and Computer Engineering degree. I still don’t have that big picture. For all I know I might be doing this major and then not utilizing an single thing studied in the future. But then again if I do not do this I don’t know what I can actually do. I don’t wanna be a doc, nor do I want to study business per se. I think I am liking the stuff I study but then again I am not too sure.

Initially I studied EECS because I wanted dabble in high-tech business. Who knows, maybe I am still into that. But I think I will definitely complete this degree and not switch majors, and perhaps minor in something like Industrial Engin and Operations Research.

I came to Berkeley not to have an easy and chilling time, hence the full-load I am doing. I hope to progress to more interesting courses in the next semesters after clearing all these requirements.

Unlike in Junior College where I had the excuse of not doing superbly in exams due to the many commitments in activities, I have no such excuse here since I am not joining anything in particular besides my church fellowship group. I should be acing it all but anyway.

Somehow I have a more holistic view of this thing called GPA. Some people are totally obsessed with it. They take easy classes so that they can rev-up their GPA to reach the ideal 4.0. I won’t do that. I will take the hard and interesting classes that I can find and toil through it. Much better (I feel) than an undergrad who does 4 courses a semester of which some are just easy breath courses here and there. (But then again I am doing 3 years and most are doing 4.) I came here not to get some two digit number. I want to challenge myself. I came to Berkeley to be kicked and be thrown around, not to have a jolly time (which I inevitably do have also due to my “funner” friends.)

Great. Let’s see how I hold out this semester.

Cheers everyone.

Just had my Physics 7B midterm just now.

The thing is, I did many past midterm papers.

I was comfortable with their level of difficulty.

I felt really ready.

But.

Then I have this Professor named Andrew Charman who killed us all in an absurdly tough exam.

I was laughing in the exam (yes, literally laughing!) because the questions were like so damn tough and nothing like what I have ever seen before.

Everyone was flipping through the pages trying to look for something do-able.

They were lucky if they found one.

I think the exam can be a substitute for some Olympiad test.

Man I feel damn bad now cause I did study for this test.

And I filled it up with crap because it was ridiculously tough, with terms I had never seen before and also with questions about Physics history. (!!!)

Most of the paper was like, blank.

Haha, so funny.