The last week of the course!
First of all, I would like to appreciate Aaron, Kristina, and Danielle for the whole semester!
This week, I talked with my group members and we figured out that we should finalize error diagram. But the problem is many other group members failed to their task before the deadline we set. On Tuesday, I’m not sure that everyone did their work or not but Bonghyun aggregate all the code that we’ve sent, and he compiled it. However, I found there were some bugs in the code and I fixed some of it and Bonghyun finalized it on Thursday.
On Thursday, we’ve talked about how we are going to do on our upcoming ‘big day.’ We’ve talked about specific preparation such as posters and video. I also signed up for the task to produce poster as well.
On Friday, I participated for the video recording and I’ve been interviewed by GSI. Also, I’ve talked with Aaron about this course and I gave him my ideas and my feedback to him. Aaron and I talked about the grade at first. But we ended up with talking about this course. I really enjoyed the conversation with Aaron.
I hope this could boost me to get an A because I remember that I’m in border line of B+/A-.
Moreover, I would like to attach little bit of my view of this course.
I thought this course is more like stat 133, which is statistic programming course. So, at first, I thought the course will be like professor gives lecture about the programming language (something like python or SQL) and we submit homework/projects, and grades were based on the points that each students received. However, the course was heavily based on collaboration/teamwork than individual, and we didn’t have much of programming lecture. I really didn’t expect the course like this, and I’m sure most the stat157 students have similar thoughts.
Different expectation led us to think we didn’t learn anything. I know at least three students who think they didn’t learn anything from this course, while they said that this course help them answer some unexpected or unprepared questions like ‘what is your leadership style’ or ‘what was your greatest challenge when you worked as team?’ . Of course, they didn’t learn anything in terms of programming language that they’ve expected to learn because they didn’t force themselves to learn rather they expect other group members to do their work, but they learned how to collaborate and communicate in order to achieve a goal at least. However, because of different expectation, students think they didn’t learn anything.
I think I can answer the reason why student have different expectation. UC Berkeley offers about 8 UC Berkeley offers about 8 different statistic upper division course and I took 6 of them. From my experience, I could really tell that none of the course is similar like this. In fact, students were never exposed to the course that is based on participation and self-motivation. Even Aaron announced that this course will be very different than other undergraduate course, I/we could not imagine how much the course is different.
In the future, I hope you guys could implement how student should expect for this course because I really think this course has a great potential. Well, in fact, I really learned a lot. For example, before taking this course, I didn’t even know how to force other members to do their work. So I talked with Aaron about this issue and I tried some of the different strategy to force them and it worked. (Oh and also, I learned python!)
I’m graduating this semester and I took 168 units even Berkeley requires 120 units to graduate. From my whole undergraduate experience, I think this course is the only course that taught me about collaboration and self-motivation, which I really want it to learn and experience before I jump into the real world (industry/graduate school).