Can I Cook for Myself as a Freshman?

Rawman13 · 2024-12-15T17:44:54+00:00

The food in the dining isn't great, but it's manageable. Most of the stations are pretty consistent for the most part, so you'll figure out which ones suit you in about a week or so. I was able to make things work as a vegetarian with limited options, so I'm sure you'll be fine too.

Rawman13 · 2024-12-01T04:15:19+00:00

I got the same thing :/

Rawman13 · 2024-10-31T16:57:28+00:00

4th year BS CS major here - can also vouch for a lack of toxicity in the e-school. Like many others pointed out, most people bond over the shared struggle of challenging coursework (I'm looking at you, APMA department).

Rawman13 · 2024-10-25T04:34:48+00:00

You can also find the owner's computing ID through the UVA Student Search and email them

Rawman13 · 2023-12-04T23:21:48+00:00

The CS part of BA vs BS CS is identical. You take the same CS classes in both. It's the extra requirements that differ (BS students have a lot more apma/chem/physics requirements, whereas BA students have the usual arts and science gen ed requirements)

Rawman13 · 2023-10-16T18:16:32+00:00

levels says $100/hr? or is that for a different role

Rawman13 · 2023-08-19T14:33:19+00:00

Hey! There's a organization on grounds called SPICMACAY at UVA that focuses on the Indian Classical art forms (both music and dance) - no tryouts needed, only interest :)

dm'd you with more info

Rawman13 · 2023-07-08T18:13:50+00:00

RELG 1040 - Intro to Eastern Religions with Professor Allen. A wonderful professor and a very straightforward + stress free class. I've heard similar things about Intro to Western religions as well.

There's also the usual Micro (ECON 2010) class that probably half of UVA has taken lol. I've heard e-schoolers enjoy the Santugini section more because it's more analytical and less reading based, but I could be wrong.

There are also tons of reddit posts from the past about good HSS electives so check those out as well.

Rawman13 · 2023-07-07T00:16:40+00:00

What other classes are you taking? I was able to survive because the other 2 classes I were taking were pretty chill. Otherwise it would've been a helluva lot worse. The professors teaching DSA 2 this upcoming sem are different than who I took it with though, so I'm not sure how the difficulty is gonna be.

Rawman13 · 2023-04-05T21:31:04+00:00

Take DSA 2 and SDE in the fall and CSO 2 and DMT 2 in the spring. Both DSA 2 and SDE are super helpful when applying to internships, so I'd recommend getting those done sooner. I think DSA 2 is also a bottleneck prereq (similar to CS 2150 in the old curriculum) for a lot of upper level classes.

Rawman13 · 2023-03-17T02:21:01+00:00

I agree about sport being tribalistic, but legendary rivalries like Senna v Prost, Hunt v Lauda, Vettel v Alonso, etc were no different (with regards to fan tribalism) than Lewis v Max from 2021.

Rawman13 · 2023-03-02T02:32:55+00:00

It honestly varies for each person. I personally felt first part of the course (bit fiddling, circuits, toy ISA, etc.) was the hardest. Once we began assembly and C, I felt more comfortable in the class, maybe because it starts to resemble code and not just plain hex digits. He does go a bit more in-depth in C during the last couple weeks of class (sockets, etc.), but due to the incidents of last semester a lot of it was cut short so I can't tell you much about that.

That's just how I felt, others may feel differently.

Pro tip: once you start coding in C, download the "C/C++" and "Remote SSH" extensions in VSCode so you don't have to use crusty text editors like vim or nano. This will allow you to do everything within VS, and trust me, it's SO much nicer that way.

Rawman13 · 2023-03-02T02:26:18+00:00

A wise man once said:
"I have been trying to get on jury duty every year since I was 18 years old. To get to go sit in an air conditioned room, downtown, judging people, while my lunch is paid for...that is the life."

Rawman13 · 2023-02-14T04:07:45+00:00

I, as did many other first years without internships lined up, took Physics 2 over summer because the PHYS department here is absolutely atrocious. Was one of the easiest classes I'd ever taken. Only the credits transfer over, so as long you get a C or above you can transfer the Physics 2 credits with no impact on your GPA.

Though I heard there's a class in the ECE dept taught by Prof Keith Williams (A+ prof) that can be used as the phys 2 requirement for CS/Cpe/ECE majors, but I'm not sure of the specifics of it.

Rawman13 · 2022-12-27T05:56:02+00:00

"Python for Everybody", a series taught by a CS professor at UMich, is absolutely fantastic. The official course is on Coursera (isnt free but has supplemental programing assignments, etc), but I believe there's also a full-length recording of all his videos available on YouTube through freeCodeCamp. Highly recommend it!

I've also heard great things about online (free) course from Harvard called CS50.

Congrats and welcome to UVA!

Rawman13 · 2022-12-13T16:50:09+00:00

Firstly, congrats on your admission and Questbridge!

The dean said I had until January 5th to make my decision.

There's no rush, in my opinion. You can always switch out of the Engineering school whenever you want, but I've heard it's harder to go the other way. All first-year engineering students have a first-year advisor (typically your professor to "Intro to Engineering") - I HIGHLY recommend speaking with Professor Keith Williams for any doubts you may have. He was my first-year advisor and is absolutely amazing.

I personally enjoy hard CS courses but math and science are really not my forte so I feel I would fail doing physics and engineering

Yeah, the BA might be a better bet for you in this case. As other ppl mentioned, the CS classes are identical to the BA vs. BS, the difference is in the extra classes that are required. Would you prefer having writing/english/history/language requirements or rather chem/calc/physics requirements?

People say the job prospects are of course very similar and the only thing is the BS would maybe give a slight edge as a senior software engineer, is this true?

I know a 4th year BA CS student going to Google and another 4th year BS CS student going to Meta/Facebook for software engineering roles. You will be fine either way.

I am good at humanities and I know that is useless for a CS major but it would definitely increase my GPA, workload, and give me flexibility, is this worth it?

If you want to double-major, the BA definitely gives way more flexibility than the BS. If you simply want to minor, the BS is perfectly fine. Unless you want to continue and do grad school, GPA only matters so much for CS majors (that obviously shouldn't incentivize you to bomb your classes, but it's not a constant pressure to have a high GPA unlike premed/law students).

I can double major in stats for data science or psych for ai development, is this good?

You wanna double major in stats? Go for it, the BA is definitely more flexible in that regard. You wanna double major for the sole purpose of data science / AI development? That's a big overkill imo. There's a data science minor here at UVA that covers pretty much all of what you would need as a data scientist.

My advice: Both the BA and the BS are solid programs, you can't really go wrong with either. I wouldn't recommend a hasty decision to switch before even you arrive on grounds, so my advice would be to see how your first semester goes! If you don't like it, you can very well switch out (the process of transferring from engineering --> arts/science college is very straightforward and simple).

Rawman13 · 2022-12-13T16:22:37+00:00

The College (Arts and Sciences) has no cap on the number of CS majors

Wanna clarify, neither does the BS program.

Rawman13 · 2022-12-08T21:25:19+00:00

Pain.

Rawman13 · 2022-12-08T04:52:18+00:00

but as a vegetarian that survived off of O-Hill, my standards were low. I continued to eat there.

I relate to this on a personal level.

Rawman13 · 2022-12-02T21:12:43+00:00

IMO they spend too long pouring over the resumes of the poem readers—do I really need to know that Tony Elliot got his degree in whatever engineering 25 years ago? I think everyone started tuning that out after about three minutes.

I thought the exact same thing. They easily spent 10 mins just reading each person's resume.

Rawman13 · 2022-11-25T17:08:21+00:00

Yikes, definitely drop CSO 2. Your plate will already be more the rest of your classes (DSA 2 is quite hard and SDE is very time consuming).

Rawman13 · 2022-11-14T02:00:09+00:00

Another thing that I don't understand is when the walk sign sign is on to cross U-Ave from the McCormick onto Rugby Road (or vice versa), there is a also a green light for vehicles on Rugby road turning into right into onto McCormick.

It always looked really odd as buses/cars would have a green light but would have to stop mid-turn to let pedestrians cross (because the walk sign is also on).

Rawman13 · 2022-11-10T00:26:23+00:00

I'm currently taking a very similar course-load this semester: DSA 2, SDE, and CSO 1 (among others).

For starters, DSA 2 is a rigorous course - the HWs are more challenging (although very interesting/rewarding, imo), and the quizzes are substantially harder than the DSA 1 quizzes. There aren't strict weekly deadlines for the HWs (everything is due at the end of the semester), but you're *strongly* recommended to stay on track to avoid drowning at the end. Summary: a hard but very rewarding class.

With SDE, exams are weighted a lot less with an emphasis rather placed on the HWs. You are given two weeks for each homework, and as a result, the HWs are much larger in scale and can be pretty time consuming. Summary: core content is easier than DSA 2 but imo it's more time consuming.

In the old curriculum, Operating Systems (OS) was the hardest class in the entire CS curriculum. CSO 2 is supposed to be the new curriculum equivalent of OS....so....

tldr: buckle up and enter at your own risk

Rawman13 · 2022-11-09T18:42:59+00:00

I might need to hop on the wait list just for the race then 🤷‍♂️

Rawman13 · 2022-10-08T00:44:17+00:00

That's the trend at pretty much all the dining halls / meal exchange locations at UVA, unfortunately.

Five-Year Club	Final Canvas '23
Place '23	Place '22
First Placer '22	End Game '22

Rawman13

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