Rote vs. Deep Learning

A fellow exchange student's gchat status:

"Dear Cambridge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning#Rote_learning_vs._actual_thinking"

It seems the course 6 (compsci) kids got a bit shafted ... in CUED (Cambridge's Engineering Dept), the problem is less that rote learning is forced over deep learning, but that the focus is pretty much entirely on theory, rather than appplication/practical use of engineering .. so I have to disagree in this instance and vouch for Cambridge that it does encourage "deep learning" in the understanding-theory-and-principles sense. A little too deep to be practically useful in the real world, though, but fantastic if you want a career as an academic.

Work Culture: On Nights

It is 11:30pm.

I am the only one left at my 6-person table in the library. Extend this to be the average occupancy of the library: currently ~17% full. Give it another 30 minutes and I will feel almost uncomfortably-out-of-place-in-the-library-at-this-"late"-hour enough to leave. (Alternatives being dorm room, the bar, or clubbing .. but for most people on a non-significantly-eventful night, their room.) ... we are at university, right? ... What a culture.

At MIT, any given night, walk into the reading room at 11:30pm and you will not find a single open seat. Wait until maybe 3am and the seats will maybe start freeing up ...




--------------------elaboration.

Thing is, check out my college library or the engineering library here (at Cambridge) during the day ... especially 2-8pm. FULL.
Scope out MIT's reading room or Hayden Library in the early afternoon. Mediocre presence, people sparsely scattered around ... go between 5-7pm (which is King's library high tide) and you'll see the tiny population of people who aren't at varsity sports practice or in one of 29387 extracurricular meetings of that day.

Independent study is a huge focus at Cambridge, since theory > application, and there are many more people majoring in humanities - so, naturally, people camp out in the library during the bulk of the day. It seems there is less priority placed on extracurricular commitments [(a) I'm doing just as many activities here, or actually, even more than I did at MIT; yet the collective time commitment definitely falls short of that in the states. (b) just a general conclusion based on my awareness of other students' extracurricular involvement both here and at MIT], so as a result, people have the time of day to spend in the library. At Cam, lectures are shorter, there's no such thing as office hours, and recitations are limited to once-every-2-to-3-weeks 1-hour meetings ... = more time to spend in the library. At MIT, people are so caught up in the massively diverse whirlwind of activities they do around campus that we rarely start doing work for CLASS (problem sets) until 10pm, maybe 8pm tops. At which point we then crack open Red Bull, stock up on candy, and hammer out our psets til 4, 5, 6am. To be fair, MIT is the night culture if there ever was one, but then again, this isn't an uncommon at American universities.

Yet another culture shock.

"Only at Cambridge ..." & "Only at MIT ..."

The other day in the library, Alexa and I noticed a historian leaned in his chair, relaxed, checking out a magazine - TIME or The Economist or something academic like that.

She wrote to me:

ONLY AT CAMBRIDGE DO PEOPLE TAKE A BREAK FROM READING, TO READ

To which I responded:

ONLY AT MIT DO PEOPLE TAKE A BREAK FROM CODING, TO CODE


... that about sums it up, I think. :P

Academic Comparison [MIT vs. CAM]

Here's an attempt at an objective comparison.

--	MIT	Cambridge
Focus	Application	Theory
Lectures	90 minutes	60 minutes
Professor Uses	Chalkboard	Overhead projector
Lecture Notes	Self-taken from board	Professor’s typed handout/packet
Homework	Problem sets, turned in, graded, 1 per week per class	Examples papers, not turned in, not graded (“as long as you tried”), 1 per 2-3 weeks per class
“Recitation”	60 minutes problem-solving in classroom with professor or grad student; ~10 students	No equivalent
“Supervision”	No equivalent	60 minutes going over not-for-grade and as-long-as-you-attempted-it examples paper; 2 students
“Office Hours”	2 hour blocks during week where professor’s undivided attention is devoted to students who come in	No equivalent
Work Style	Two words: “p-set parties” people tool together – collaborative – learn by doing problems/practice	Work together? Huh? Together? Library – independent – learn by reading books/notes
Laboratory	Instructor-guided, clear instructions, conducted in direct relevance to course work, labs vary by class (e.g. 2.007 is extremely-lab-intensive whereas 2.005 doesn’t have lab)	Sign up for slot before term starts, done independently (little help offered), might be doing it without having any lectures (e.g. in 1st week), one lab for every class
Computing Facilities	Athena clusters: you’re rarely more than 50m away from a room of 10-70 computers, all within same (Athena) system using same username/pw	One central room in entire engineering department with ~60 computers; in college, only 2 locations with ~8 computers each; all these run on different systems with different logins!
Printing	Free, unlimited, more printers across campus than you can count	Pay for every page, printers scarce
Internet	Wireless, signal anywhere and everywhere (e.g. dorms, student center, soccer field, classrooms, by the river, at the boathouse, in the gym), unlimited usage	Wireless? What is this wireless of which you speak? Don’t even think about getting it in your room, only in some lecture halls and college bar, restricted use! (2.0 GB/day … WHAT?!)

I did try to stay objective throughout, although I could not resist making a subjective remark here and there. Despite my opinions, facts are facts and the details about how things run are just the way they are; I can't make up or exaggerate how free the printing is at MIT, or how long a supervision is at Cambridge, in order to make things appear better/worse.

While I personally most appreciate the resources/opportunities/system that MIT offers, there are also virtues to the Cambridge system ... for example:

• I really like having typed handouts professors give in lectures. This guarantees my notes are comprehensive and ensures that I don't miss something just because the lawn mower on Killian was too loud for me to hear what the professor just said. This is also how they can keep lectures so short at Cam - because they're not spending ages writing everything out on the board (they use pre-printed overhead projector slides).
  
• Despite hating Cambridge labs at first, I am starting to realize the benefit of them. The major grievances with labs is that (a) you have to sign up before term even starts, (b) you might be doing it the 1st week or the last week - so you shouldn't necessarily need lectures to understand what you're doing, (c) but you do need lectures to understand what you're doing if you want to do it properly, (d) there is almost no help, (e) it is so disjointed from the course/lectures itself as a standalone one-time experiment for each class. But, on the bright side, it forces me to sit down and really analyze theory put into practice, and scramble to teach myself the theory because otherwise (since there is little to no guidance provided during your lab - just several other students who are equally as confused as you) I'd have no idea what to write about in the report. [my first lab at Cambridge, I explained that I was an exchange student, hadn't taken the first two years of classes the engineers took here, and asked the instructor for his email in case I had any questions. His response: "oh .. well, I'm not really supposed to help you ..." and left it at that.]
  
• Super limited contact-time (supervisions/recitations) and the lack of office hours: forces me to do a lot of independent study. Since professors/supervisors are really inaccessible (in comparison) and it's rare to find someone to help you/answer any questions, I find myself often sitting down in the library poring over notes until I finally figure it out on my own.
• Light workload/fewer assignments: MIT always has you scrambling frantically just to get things completed that people never sit down to just read. We're too busy trying to solve problems and apply the theory, that I never, ever read textbooks at MIT, and the only context in which I review lecture notes is when I'm trying to solve a pset problem. At Cam, since classroom + supervision contact hours are so few, you get all the time in the world to just chill in the library and review notes. Inherently in the system of shorter lectures, it is implied that students will do post-study of lecture notes. The fact that we have much fewer assignments/actual work to do just makes you think, well, I better be doing something productive if I have no more problems to solve - guess I'll just study/read.

Updates to this list as I think of them. The aim is to give a comprehensive comparison concerning academics.

Academic Year/Schedule [MIT vs. Cam]

There is a STARK contrast between the MIT and Cambridge "academic year."

This was one of the biggest culture/school shocks I've faced on the exchange - our two extremely intensive 13-week terms at MIT suddenly shrank to three fast-paced, over-before-you-blink-twice 8-week terms at Cambridge.

Like any comparison, there are pros and cons to both ... imagine all the continuous assessment any university could possible give you during term - then amplify that workload x10, and throw in endless hours of extracurriculars: that's MIT for 13 weeks at a time. Now, imagine barely any continuous assessment, but very dense lectures and lots of self-study: that's Cambridge for 8 weeks.

--------

MIT
Fall: September 9 - December 10
Final exam week: December 14-18
IAP: January 7 - January 31
Spring: February 2 - May 13
Final exam week: May 17 - 21

vs.

Cambridge
Michaelmas: October 8 - December 2
--5 week vacation--
Lent: January 14 - March 10
--5 week vacation--
Final exam weekS: April 19 - May 6
Easter: April 22-June 9


Anyway, I just thought it was hilarious when I received an email from the Course 2 department at MIT today, reminding us that it was ADD DATE. Back at MIT, people are approaching the deadline to add courses to their registration (at Cambridge, you must set your course selection in stone by day 3 - after that, you're taking the exam whether you like it or not) ... whereas at CAM, I only have 3 MORE DAYS OF LECTURES LEFT in term. That's right. Three.

I feel like this term has just started, and I blinked, and now it's over. Jesus.


Lori Hyke's email to course 2 reminding us about add date:

Please visit your advisor and obtain their signature today.

Add Date is Friday, March 5, 2010.
* Last day to add subjects to Registration.
* Last day for Juniors & Seniors to change an Elective to or from P/D/F Grading.
* Last day to change a subject from Listener to Credit.
* Last day for Sophomores to change a subject to or from Exploratory.
- Late Fee ($100) and petition required for students completing registration after this date.
* Last day to petition for second S.B. for February 2011 degree candidates.
* Last day for February 2011 degree candidates to apply for double major.
* Last day to drop half-term subjects offered in first-half of term.
* Deadline for completing cross-registration. 
- Late Fee ($40) for petitions approved after this date.

Academic Calendar:
http://web.mit.edu/registrar/calendar/index.html

lol.

Uncharacteristically Busy Cambridge Week

10 hours of lecture
1 Macroeconomics essay
1 Organisational Behaviour essay
1 Human Resource Management essay
1 Engineering lab report
Macroecon supervision
3E6 supervision
3F2 supervision
Valentine's Superformal
Football practice
King's Voices rehearsal
Churchill Spring Ball
Football match
King's Affair meeting
King's Voices Evensong
... within the same week, when Britni also happens to visit for 3 days and Ted for 4.


This is more like it.


(The Friday before this week was uncharacteristically packed too:
10-11am 3D7 Lecture
11-1pm 3D7 Lab
1-2:30pm Pick up/confirm King's Affair hoodie order
3-4pm 3F1 supervision by CMS
4-5pm 3E5 supervision at Trinity Hall
5-6pm 3D7 supervision at CUED
7-9:30pm iCusu formal at Queens
9:30-11:30pm finish King's Affair launch paty decorations)

My workload at Cambridge ...

... is truly pathetic.
I sat in the library today because I felt compelled to do work ... and I realized I had done all of it already.

Perhaps I should just work on the stuff due in 2 weeks' time ...

And Suddenly ...

the workload piles in.

WOW.
So much individual reading and learning. So few problem-set-like assignments. So much working-on-your-own-in-your-own-room-locked-up-by-yourself. No p-set late night parties.
I'm taking a macroeconomics class in place of 14.02 and 14.11 credit, but it's more like I chose a HASS CI-H by taking it here. Lovely.

Spare Time.

I feel like I have lots of it.


I had my 3rd lecture (total) today, the 1st of Signals & Systems (3F1) from 11am-12pm.
Then met up with Caroline Bogdan (MIT), had lunch at King's, walked around, checked out the rooms I potentially will swap into, and then came back. Since our crew outing was in the morning, I'm totally done for the day now. Cambridge people don't really do homework; they have practice exams with problems each week that are reviewed at "supervisions" - basically a one-on-one tutor session, one every two weeks per class. Besides that, it's self-study and April cramming for May exams.

I feel wrong ...