cmu courses

My page is inspired by Abigale Kim’s courses page.

Typical disclaimer that opinions are mine and do not represent the opinions of my employer/college.

Spring 2025

21-266 Vector Calc for CS (w/ Clive Newstead)
15-251 Great Ideas in Theoretical CS (w/ Anil Ada and Feras Saad)
15-150 Principles of Functional Programming (w/ Dilsun Kaynar)
15-386 Neural Computation (w/ Tai-Sing Lee)
79-281 Intro to Religion (w/ Alexandra Garnhart-Bushakra)

Reflection

• Before starting 21-266, I heard some bad things about it. I was told it was going to be unreasonably hard and that the professor is out to get you. Having finished the class, I strongly disagree. We were pushed to not just solve problems following algorithms we learned but to actually think about things geometrically. It felt like a significant portion of the learning was done through HWs, which I for one really appreciate. That said, I took 3D calc in HS (without any linear algebra which is extensively used in 21-266), which could have helped me see through the struggles.
• My favorite class this year was 15-251. It was as if one took all the good parts of Concepts and put it into a class. We were exposed to a wide range of different “great theoretical ideas” and I found each lecture to be AMAZING and well done. Too much to be said, just take the class!
  I had a rough relationship with 15-150. The professor is really nice and wonderful but I regretfully couldn’t bring myself to pay attention in class. The class generally felt like I was being walked through documentation and not actually fundamentally teaching me new skills, that said, I probably did work on my existing skills and perhaps new ones, but I certainly didn’t feel it. In addition, I felt like the grading was often too pedantic and unreliable which also affected my relationship with this class. I did well, however.
• 15-386 was certainly a very interesting class and if you’re interested in neuroscience and computer science, I highly recommend. At many times, I found the professor to be unengaging, however he’s very nice and very open to feedback (he incorporated my feedback into his lessons which I found very useful). The HWs will often focus on a specific lecture in the past few weeks but the other lectures are a) very interesting to learn about from a biological and cs pov and b) will be useful for the exams. He made it easy to do well in the class and had many chances to get extra credit through further exploring and experimenting with the ideas learned in class which was really fun and pushed me to think about how we can test these tools to better understand them. The textbook we used, Trappenberg, was also well made and explains many more topics if you’re interested in this field.
• I’m really interested in religions and so 79-281 made sense to take as a gen ed. The content was all very interesting and thought provoking, though I often felt lectured without the ability to ask questions in class due to a number of reasons (not being noticed and not finding a good time, for example). I still really enjoyed the class and found the essays fun to write.

Fall 2024

21-241 Matrices and Linear Transformations (w/ Jonathan Simone)
15-151 Concepts / Mathematical Foundations for CS (w/ John Mackey)
15-122 Principles of Imperative Computation (w/ Anne Kohlbrenner)
76-101 Interp. & Argument (w/ Chad Szalkowski-Ference)
07-131 Great Practical Ideas in CS 07-128 Freshman Immigration.

Reflection

• I had an amazing time in 21-241. Dr. Simone is a fantastic teacher and explains things very well. This class also had a final project component where we made something using ideas we learned in class. I made a project about visualizing 4D shapes in 2D (on screens) - it was fun!.
• 15-151 was my favorite class this semester. Dr. Mackey is a beyond amazing teacher and he really cares about each student. This class revolved around proofs which was a bit new to me but I absolutely enjoyed it immensely.
• I found the programming HWs in 15-122 fun and useful even if they seemed long. The weekly checkin/quiz system was also very useful and I found myself less stressed over the semester and didn’t need to study as much for the final. The class taught me principles that are really important, but nothing was really conceptually hard. That said, the class is still pretty hard since there’s a lot to do.
• 76-101 wasn’t a class that took a lot of my time. The professor was nice and very engaging but I don’t feel that I walked away from the class having learned anything, just more practice with writing.
• 07-131 had some content that I found very useful, but a lot of it was something I already knew. I would say that since this class takes very little commitment, if there’s a topic that you don’t know or want a refresher on, it doesn’t hurt to throw this into your schedule.
• 07-128 is the SCS freshman immigration course. There is not much to say here.