Three Courses

Yeah, I should have posted by now.  I am terrible and I know it.

School started back this past week so had my first classes of the year.  I honestly think it is going to take a few more before I have any idea what I have gotten myself into.  Per my usual I am taking 3 classes this term - 2 graded courses and a required 1 hour pass/fail seminar course.

The seminar course is a bit of a joke - for half the semester we sit around and professors from different programs at UAB or even from different schools come in and talk about research they are currently conducting.  The second half of the semester consists of the students giving presentations into their research.  I say it is a joke for two reasons - one, since everyone is always in there, we already KNOW what everyone else's research is.  We know Mikey is going to talk about carbon sequestration.  We know Alonzo is going to talk about 3-D training simulators.  We have all been giving almost the exact same presentation since we started.  The second reason I say that is because of the nature of the course itself.  I understand it is designed to educate us on existing research AND to give us experience in presenting out research.  But I have an MBA.  I have spent the last 4 years doing half a dozen presentations a year.  After a while the shock and awe of presenting goes away and it becomes...boring.

The other two classes seem more appealing, both are in the Computer Science department and both will have some benefit to both my job and my research.  In the first one I am taking a class in Shape Design taught by Dr. Johnstone.  The class is basically how to use math to draw smooth objects on the computer.  Bezier and B-Spline curves will probably play a pretty big role in the whole thing.

The second class is a Visualization course taught by Dr. Sloan.  Dr. Sloan is sort of a scary legend at UAB.  I had him last semester for a Computer Graphics course and thought he was a great lecturer with some rough edges.  He reminds me of Dr. Powers from my MBA days - great guy but some definite pet peeves you have to watch out for.  The class is basically just a typical visualization of large datasets course.  The key is to find new ways to show the data that are cool to look at AND informative.  There is no point making a pretty picture from the data, if you can't tell what the data is once you have the picture.  Anyway, Dr. Sloan teaches 4 graduate level courses at UAB on a revolving schedule and Dr. Soni has told me I will be taking all 4.  I am also assuming this means I will be asking Dr. Sloan to sit on my doctoral committee at some point as well.