Difference between revisions of "User:Cjq"

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(Spring 2020)
(Shows)
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* Rupaul's Drag Race
 
* Rupaul's Drag Race
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===Games===
 
===Games===

Revision as of 12:29, 21 July 2020

CJ Q.
Room Baker 541 / H304 (virtually)
Year 2023
Course Undeclared
Pronouns he/him/his
Other info
Birthday September 1
Nationality Filipino
Classpect Seer of Mind
Alignment Chaotic Evil

Now every single crack, every penny that I pass
Says I should either leave or pick it up
Oh, with every single buck I've made
I'm saddled with bad luck that came


Classes

Fall 2019

  • 6.036: Introduction to Machine Learning. I did not go to any lectures. I think I grok some basic machine learning concepts after taking this class. It's given me enough confidence to pursue my own projects. The real mathematical prereqs are knowing the chain rule and how matrix multiplication works. The class is more code-intensive, with homework every week having a programming problem. Some psets are fun, others tedious. Don't worry too much about the code, as tests are entirely conceptual. I can now read OpenAI papers without looking up every other word.
  • 8.022: Physics II (Harlow). I only took this class because my adviser forced me to take a GIR. I'm in a love-hate relationship with this class. On one hand, the physics is cool, and exciting, and seeing how things are derived fills me with ecstatic joy. The format was probably nicer for my schedule than TEAL, the lecture notes are great, and it actually feels like I solved problems. On the other hand, this was my most time-consuming class this semester. The correct move was to probably test out of the 8.02 requirement, take a different GIR, and shuffle other subjects around to get things to work.
  • 15.000: Explorations in Management. Decent food every Monday night. I found the lectures to be pretty hit or miss in terms of quality; it's probably a good idea to bring a pset to work on if it turns out to be on the bad end. But the good lectures are really good. Try not to miss the nights when you talk to current Course 15 students, alumni night, or the night you play the simulation. Has swayed me to consider taking more 15 classes, since some of them have some good math.
  • 18.701: Algebra I (Artin). I knew some of the material coming in, so I'm not sure if taking this class was the right decision. I pretty much just took the class because everyone I knew was taking it. I should have taken 18.700 instead. I'd probably advise freshmen considering 18.701 to consider whether they really want to. I did meet two of my best friends from the class that I wouldn't have met otherwise (non-MOPpers take the class, who knew?) and it fulfills my 18.06 requirement.
  • 21W.022: Writing and Experience: Reading and Writing Autobiography (Harrison Lepera). My favorite class this semester, because the essays were literally like writing blog posts, except I got graded for them. A CI-HW where you get to write about yourself, which was a good way to get rid of my CI-HW requirement without having to write philosophy essays. Be aware that different sections of the class do vastly different things.
  • 24.93: The Search for Meaning. Dropped. I think I went to the first two lectures, realized it was a class about semantics, and then lost interest in going. I often had better things to do with my Thursday nights. Semantics just isn't my cup of linguistic tea.

IAP 2020

  • 6.148: Web Lab. Despite being a 6-unit IAP class I think I spent more time on it than most people would for 12-unit IAP classes. Expect to spend a lot, if not most, of your time working on your website. Essentially a long hackathon. First week is a really fast crash course through HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Node, and MongoDB. Generous prize money, if you're aiming for that. Plan to take it with friends. I wrote a post about it here.
  • 6.S087: Mathematical Methods for Multidimensional Statistics. "All the math I wish I knew before 6.036 but didn't." Difficulty ramps up fast. Lectures were okay; psets were really good. The class claimed to teach linalg from scratch, but I doubt you can make much progress in the class without knowing some linalg concepts beforehand, unless you spend a lot of time during the class learning linalg.

Spring 2020

due to the coronavirus pandemic, spring 2020 did not proceed as usual, so it's hard to make judgments about how these classes would have been in a normal semester.

  • 6.009: Fundamentals of Programming. I only went to office hours to get checkoffs. I think the only thing I learned was "how to not accidentally make Dijkstra's O(VE)", as I already had lots of experience writing in Python. Like many programming classes, you write projects from scratch, and then throw away your code after a week, which doesn't really feel like "real-world" programming. I did have fun doing the psets, especially thinking about the nicest possible ways to write things, and constant optimizing silly things. Labs took me two hours on average.
  • 6.046: Design and Analysis of Algorithms. I was familiar with the first half of the course from preparing for the IOI. Lecture and recitation notes are well-written, so I didn't go to anything. I enjoyed thinking about reduction from NP, and probabilistic and approximation algorithms; probably not worth taking just for these topics, though. For this year's tests, it was usually clear what algorithm to apply, making it slightly less "tricky" than a CF round or a 6.006 test. So 6.046 + another algorithms class might actually be easier than 6.006 + 6.046, which could be one reason to take the class. If you do all the psets you can save lots of time preparing for tests; I think psets took me an hour on average.
  • 18.218: Topics in Combinatorics (Postnikov). This year was about polytopes. Tripled my understanding of matroids, which I think will be useful. Postnikov's lectures were locally very organized, but globally disorganized; individual classes were clear and had lots of examples, but as a whole each week felt self-contained, less reading a textbook and more reading papers. There were only two problem sets, you only have to solve a small subset of problems, and there are a mix of easy and hard problems to choose from, so it's a pretty light load. The kind of class where you get as much as you put in.
  • 18.702: Algebra II (Shankar). Felt very fast pre-COVID, and then very slow afterward, so it's hard to give an enduring judgment. As a lecturer, Shankar is dynamic and patient: he's energetic, but will slow down to answer questions. His coverage has a very slight categorical tilt, choosing to think of representations in the abstract, having smaller "toy" examples in the Galois theory part. As a professor, Shankar is very kind and approachable. I was kinda sad we didn't get to talk much about algebraic number theory; I wanted to learn more about quadratic fields.
  • 21G.012: Exploring Globalization through Chinese Food (Teng). For the price of writing page-long essays every two weeks, you get to eat food in class, which is a good deal. The writing isn't that bad, and the coursework was actually interesting; I learned a lot about Chinese food, and thought a lot about globalization. Teng puts in the effort to remember not just everyone's name, but where everyone's from. Fun.
  • 24.900: Introduction to Linguistics (Pesetsky). The least work you can get away with in a CI-H. Pesetsky posts his slides, which can substitute paying attention to lecture. Attendance wasn't checked past the first week. Not worth buying the textbook. Non-syntax psets feel like linguistic olympiad problems. Drawing syntax trees is fun once you get the hang of it. The research critique is the only "hard" writing assignment; the rest are just describing what you've learned in fieldwork. Post-COVID, the Piazza was extremely helpful. Fieldwork is very fun if you pick a language with sounds you can understand.

Clubs

how did i end up being elected on three exec boards?

  • Educational Studies Program (ESP). We run learning programs for middle school and high school students. I'm an admin and help run our programs. The flagship one is Splash, where over two thousand students from around the country come to MIT's campus to learn from classes taught by the MIT community. If you do end up being ESP admin, my advice is to keep careful track of how much commitment you give.
  • Tech Squares. MIT's square dancing club. I'm currently the publicity coordinator. We (usually) dance every Tuesday night; it's one of the only ways I get exercise. Ixa dragged me into it. It's surprisingly mentally taxing. I think the only way to get an idea of what it's like is watching a video, or seeing a dance live.
  • Filipino Students Association (FSA). We run events celebrating Filipino culture. I'm currently the president. We've only recently started doing things, after a four-year hiatus when the club was inactive. We're aiming to run events once or twice a semester; for Fall 2019 we did karaoke, for Spring 2020 we had a dinner and were supposed to do other things but failed.
  • Live-Action Mafia. We play two to three live-action mafia games per semester. During a game, the commitment is roughly an hour a day while alive. Unlike usual mafia games, everyone has a power role and gets to do something. There's a lot of investigative roles; the emphasis is on deducing the mafia through actions rather than psychreading. It's fun to tap on people's shoulders and say "bang".
  • Assassin's Guild. A live-action roleplaying group. I'm currently the vice grandmaster. There's a LARP every other weekend during the semester; I participate in a game around once a month or so.
  • Harvard-MIT Math Tournament (HMMT). A high school math contest. I've submitted problems, helped testsolve, and volunteer day-of. I have many feelings about it, which are probably easier to talk about IRL than on a wiki.
  • MIT Puzzle Club. We do puzzles every two months or so. The executive board also helps run the yearly Mystery Hunt.

Some favorite media

might expand with descriptions later on

Fiction

  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Non-Fiction

  • The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
  • Universal Principles of Design
  • The Art of Calligraphy
  • The Design of Everyday Things
  • Made to Stick
  • Primary Surgery
  • How to Teach Mathematics
  • Educated
  • The Mathematical Experience
  • Human Accomplishment
  • Reality is Plastic
  • The Empathy Exams

Films

  • Short Term 12 (2013)
  • Boyhood (2014)
  • Mommy (2014)
  • X+Y (2014)
  • 2 Cool 2 Be 4gotten (2016)
  • I'm Drunk, I Love You (2017)
  • Love, Simon (2018)

Shows

  • The End of the F***ing World
  • Person of Interest
  • The Last Airbender / The Legend of Korra
  • Rupaul's Drag Race
  • Dark

Games

  • Undertale / Deltarune
  • Ace Attorney
  • Zero Escape
  • Butterfly Soup

Music

  • Fun.
  • Coldplay
  • Imagine Dragons
  • LANY
  • Ed Sheeran
  • Sleeping at Last
  • Christopher Tin
  • Ang Bandang Shirley
  • Autotelic
  • Ben&Ben
  • Munimuni
  • The Ransom Collective
  • Reese Lansangan
  • Rusty Machines

Other

  • The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness
  • Hamilton
  • Dear Evan Hansen
  • MIT Confessions
  • anime, which is in my MyAnimeList
  • and most likely a bunch more im forgetting about right now

External Links