UCI Survival Guide: 2023 Winter (6/24/2023)

 Quarter Summary:

Once again, I have severely slacked off and so my recollection of this quarter may not be the best. Honestly, a lot of it kinda blurs together with spring quarter in my mind. Events that happened this quarter include going to Vibe Dance Competition (very fun), performing at a dance exhibition with LVO, MCIA, and URMO, going to a random track meet with Alan and Brian (would be more fun if I weren't injured), parents and brother visiting and taking me to San Diego, and the SoCal boys (Wei and Darren) visiting.

Coming into the quarter, I got a new laptop and a new speaker! I also decided to start decorating my room a lot more, and I got a few posters throughout the quarter, in addition to making my little manga hall of fame. Physically, my ankle was still hurt for a lot of the quarter, but this quarter I was really able to heal up and I was even able to start tricking and I played IM volleyball for Tomo as well.

Overall, it was a pretty eventful quarter, to be honest. I think around this quarter, BBA started to get a lot more involved, as we started to go out to eat a lot, and having to make a performance also made everyone become a lot more involved. It was here that we started our member system, which is really just based on how many sessions you go to, and we also started to actually form a community. We even had our first BBA party, hosted by me, after our performance!

Looking back at the photos and videos I have, I can tell that BBA was still really small in the beginning of the quarter, but it really began to take off this quarter lol. 

Academically, I did ok. I did still care about my classes, but I definitely could've done a lot more work for them. CBE 110 was an actual class that I had to worry for, and so was CBE 120B. I felt like I mostly understood them though, and they were pretty useful. 

I think ENGR 190W was the class that was the most amount of work this quarter, due to Tateri. It was pretty much hopeless to get an A in that class, but I do think overall it was also pretty useful. I did not care much for MSE 155. Taking MSE 155 made me really start to think that perhaps I should not go into materials, because I found everything in that class to just be soooo boring. I pretty much stopped showing up as much as I probably should've towards the very end of the quarter, and I only went to like two discussions. 

I also joined STMS. I didn't super love this quarter of STMS, mostly because I didn't know what the hell was going on at all, and the people in STMS weren't very good at explaining it either.

Classes Taken:

CBE 120B - Han Li (B+)

Pretty straightforward class. It was about heat transfer, which I found much more intuitive than momentum transfer (which was basically just fluids). I wouldn't say that I super enjoyed this class, but I feel as though this is one of the better Chem E classes. Han Li is a good professor, and the TAs were also good. Historically, only like around 20% get As in the class, and I know a ton of people did not do well in the class, so I'm pretty ok with a B+ here. I remember I thought I completely failed the midterm, but I actually ended up doing way better than I thought. Part of this was due to me just expecting to get a extremely below average score, but I ended up getting a score that was decently above average.

Traditionally, this class has around 20% A, 40% B, 25% C, and 10% D.

CBE 110  - Szu-Wen Wang (B+)

This class was a lot harder for me than heat transfer (CBE 120B). Something about the derivations and just learning how everything fit together was just harder for me. You also had to do a lot of calculus, not only in the solving derivative and integral side but also in the thinking side of how you could apply the derivatives and integrals or whatever. I'm not that good at that stuff. I was very surprised to get a B+ in this class, because although I was above average on the midterm, I wasn't above by that much. I honestly thought I was going to get like B or even a B-. This class had 

Traditionally, this class has around 20% A, 35% B, 30% C, and 10% D.

MSE 155 - Penghui Cao (A-)

I'm a little bit sad that I didn't get an A in this class. I probably didn't deserve it, but this was one of the easier classes. You do need to go to class because there are quizzes sometimes, but Cao will let you know when those are beforehand. Also, his lectures are just a tad hard to follow sometimes (partially due to his accent), so you might also be better off reading the notes, because he pretty much just follows the notes in the lectures anyways. I didn't do super super well on the tests, so it makes sense I got an A-, but not an A. If you take this class, you are pretty much guaranteed an A, because its 90% A and 10% B around.

ENGR 190W - Jon-Erik Tateri (B+)

Tateri's zotistics say that he is around 40% A, 50% B, and 5% C, but that is a fucking lie. Just looking at all the grades in my class, I'm pretty sure that no one even got an A (maybe at most like 1-2 people). Tateri is a very interesting professor and human. He has a dry and sarcastic sense of humor that some people might not like, but I was ok with. The class was also largely online due to various circumstances, which was nice. Writing all the stuff was a pain, and usually you get a group of 5 to do the final project, but two of our group members dropped out so we ended up doing the work of 5 with only 3 people. We actually tried pretty hard on our project, so I think we got a better grade because of that. Tateri's Canvas page is also a complete fucking mess. There is way too much information everywhere. I found it most helpful to just go to the calendar to see what was due, because there is a lot of assignments to keep track of.

That being said, the individual work, for the most part, isn't as bad as it actually seems. It is still work, but a lot of the assignments can just be done during class time, and the actual writing didn't take as long as I thought it would take. I think I just had a lot of work for this class because of the whole group project bullshit.

CBE 199 - STMS research (Advisor: Khalid Rafique) (B+)

I can not believe I got a B+ in this stupid research shit. To be fair, this was my first quarter doing STMS, and I did not understand what the hell was going on for the most part, and I also didn't try too much on the End of Quarter Report (EQR), which is what your grade is based on, for the most part. Since I didn't do much the entire quarter, I pretty much just paraphrased another guy in my groups EQR, which might have also lead to me getting the B+. Doing STMS this quarter was overall kind of a struggle, and I thought that some of the procedures and stuff was pretty sketchy and unorganized, but I think that might also just be a lot of research in general. If everyone knew what they were doing, then there wouldn't be a point to research, I guess.