An update about no update
Remember this last time I wrote that I am mostly studying? Well, I am still doing exactly this, because Erasmus, because computer science, because reasons. I have managed to accomplish several things. On one side I am done with 2 out of 3 projects, on the flip side my eyes are so red and puffy from sitting at a computer the whole day that my flatmate Amanda asked me yesterday if I was crying (I wasn’t). The workload growth, lack of feedback from the teachers and the concept of teamwork, specially on tasks that are impossible to split between group members, are the three pillars of dissatisfaction and stress at the university.
In march I started asking people who have been in Lisbon during the previous semester how hard are the subjects at Técnico. The most typical answer was “oh, you have to study a lot”, though nobody could explain to me what does this “a lot” mean exactly. Now I understand what they meant. I cannot say that studying at IST is very hard, but it is very time consuming. During the semester one has 2 theoretical classes a week 2 hours each along with about 2 hour long practical for every subject every week. Both examinations and practical exercises (they call them labs here) are organized in various ways. I have to write an exam in one subject (it’s on Saturday at 8 a.m.), in another subject we had 2 tests during the semester and the third subject doesn’t have any exams/tests at all. For practicals there is also a variety of possibilities. My friends had to do tasks every week, read papers, prepare presentations, but I didn’t have to do something like this. I wrote an essay, programmed in Matlab and Python.
What I particularly enjoy about my classes is that for the final big project at the end of the semester we were free to choose the topic and the language in which we implement our solution. Good news is that there is no framework. Frameworks you get from the teaching assistants are supposed to help you, but from my experience in reality what they do is causing students hours of frustration and contribute to bad karma of the framework creators. Bad news is that there is no framework, so you have to invest more time to write the code from scratch.
A quirky thing about my Erasmus university is their grading system and the number of points (values they call them here) a student gets for the submission or a test. Maximum number of points is 20, while at the same time it is enough to have 10 or 9.5 to pass the course. Theoretically I could have passed one of my courses after the first submission as it was worth 10 points, but practically it is virtually impossible to get those out of 2 reasons: a) the maximum students are going to get is 8 points and lower or b) the first homework will not be corrected at the time you have to start with the second one. For example the deadline for the essay I was writing about above was the 13th of April, yet we have no idea how many points did we get for it. Now I am working hard because better safe than pay the EU Erasmus scholarship back.
Speaking of money, Padaria Portuguesa is one of my biggest investment places in Lisbon at the moment as it unintentionally became my study room. Today I spent there about 7 hours writing a report and making a video for the Agents and Multi-agent systems with Aram, my team member from Armenia. I had pão de deus (sweet bread with coconut powder on the top) and galão (coffee with a lot of milk) instead of lunch. For once in a while I am happy it is cloudy and not hot (16 to 20 degrees), so the heat doesn’t keep me back from studying.
