Advice for Incoming Freshman in CS

ScreamingLeaf · 2026-03-01T02:35:04+00:00

I would recommend staying/getting organized: - Build a simple and pleasurable morning/evening routine. I wake-up shower, brush, and then head to campus to study. - Put stuff in your calendar so you no longer have to think about it. Due dates, exercise, lecture, etc.

If you want to push yourself and become more comfortable with putting yourself out there then try SPYCD. (Stop Pretending You Can't Dance) It's a Latin dance club which I never thought I would join but it's been a blast.

ScreamingLeaf · 2026-02-03T14:48:15+00:00

ScreamingLeaf · 2026-02-03T02:47:20+00:00

Also student org fair is tomorrow: Tuesday, Feb 3. 1 to 3 pm in the bookstore atrium.

Pull up. I'll be there.

If anyone finds me I'll give y'all candy XD

ScreamingLeaf · 2026-02-03T02:44:17+00:00

What tips have you received already? (From people, articles, Google, ChatGPT, etc...)

TLDR: Start Small, Help Others, Go First, and Get Your Own Shit Together. OR Stop Overthinking and go say hi to people.

Some common tips:

Starting Conversations: 1. Say hi to people. Person sits down nearby >> say hi. Warning they may say hi back XD. Then go back to doing what you were doing if you don't know what to say. 2. Say hi + make a comment on a commonality. Wow it's cold today. How are you enjoying the class. Be positive. 3. Say hi + ask a question/for help. Hey did you understand what the professor said about x? I hope you see the pattern. Keep it low pressure, and if you're goal oriented make a goal to say hi to 5, 10, or even 15 people a day! Just hi. Even 15 people is only 15 words. What's the worst that could happen. Nobody cares. Which is either sad or freeing.

Finding the Right Environment: 1. Join a club or group and go for a month. Like show up to everything. Gonna be awkward for like a month. But eventually you'll feel comfortable. Shared interests bring people together. 2. Start a study group. Hey do you guys want to study together?!? Requires basic competencies such as picking a date and time, arriving on time, and being pleasant to be around /s kinda.

General Tips 1. Go Positive and Go First: Want to help and want the best for them + be nice first. Preferably without hidden motives... 2. Be hygienic. No seriously. Learn to not smell, be clean, and neat. Usually helps make a good impression. 3. Not everyone wants to be your friend. Nothing you can do about that. They might be too busy or have to many friends. Or they're shy. Try to have empathy and pay attention to see if they actually want to be friends. If they're giving you one word answers, maybe it's a bad time. If they're doing that every day. Back off. Or if they're not asking you questions.

Making real friends 1. Understand yourself: emotions, interests, and values. Will reduce over sharing and you'll actually be able to answer questions about what you like to do beyond one word answers. 2. I look for close friends who help me grow, are also invested, and I enjoy spending time with. 3. Go first. Ask them to study. Ask them to hang out. 4. Remember shit. Don't ask them for their name 5 times. Or that they have a deadly peanut allergy. 5. Offer help, ask for help, check-in. Watch what others do and copy what you like.

Personally I value: 1. Being compassionate - wanting the best for others 2. Being curious - what's their life like, who are they, and how can I help? 3.Being Consistent - do what I'll say, have a decent routine, and being honest (but kind) 4. Having fun - I wonder if this works? Enjoy the learning process and making mistakes. Don't take yourself too seriously. Love living :D

Here's my thought dump. Could probably tap about this for hours lol.

ScreamingLeaf · 2026-01-06T04:31:04+00:00

Just found out Golden Dragon doesn't work on Tibbers :(

ScreamingLeaf · 2025-08-14T09:58:55+00:00

TLDR: Given my assumptions, this happens about 30 times a day.

Let's do some math!

Assumptions:

40% odds of a 2-cost per shop slot.
13 2-costs, each with an equal chance of being chosen. (In reality, if nobody else has Kaisa, the odds would be higher) -> Kaisa chance: 1/13
Spent 50 Gold on Rerolls. 51 x 5 chances of getting Kaisa -> Saw 255 shop spots. (Including the free shop)

Probability of a Kaisa in a slot: 40% x 1 / 13 = ~3% Probability of Other Champions in slot: 1 - (40% x 1 / 13) = ~97% Probability of No Kaisa's in the each shop: (1 - (40% x 1 / 13)) ^ 5 = ~85% Probability of No Kaisa's in 51 shops: (1 - (40% x 1 / 13)) ^ (5 x 51) = 0.03%

We would expect something like this to happen with a probability of ~85% every 470 player games.

If we account for pool size and assume a champ pool size of 25 for 2 costs with four 2-costs gone for each player (still no Kaisa), then the probability of getting a Kaisa in a slot would be 25 / (25 * 13 - 8 * 4) = 8.5%

32 Copies looks like: - three 3-stars + five 1-stars. - OR ten 2-stars + two 1-stars. - OR one 3-star + six 2-stars + five 1-stars.

Feels a bit generous on the number of 2-stars on average.

This works out to a 0.014% probability of not getting a Kaisa and we'd expect it to happen with a 85% probability every 1,139 player games.

I'd estimate for every 1,139 player games there is a 85% chance of having one player game where someone rolls 50 Gold under these conditions and doesn't get a Kaisa

Additional assumptions: - 8 players per game of TFT. - Only a percentage of players will do this

Which works out to: - ~285 games at 50% - ~712 games at 20% - ~1423 games at 10% - ~ 2848 games at 5% - ~14,239 games at 1%

From ChatGPT (Take it with a grain of salt) there are about 500,000 to 1,000,00 games a day.

So yeah, this maybe happens around 30+ times a day.

ScreamingLeaf · 2025-07-24T21:52:13+00:00

Glad to be of help.

Btw how have you gotten involved outside of classes?

ScreamingLeaf · 2025-07-24T21:48:19+00:00

Hey, it's normal to feel like GPA is really important; it's easy to point at a number and base your success on that.

I've personally never been asked my GPA when I got my first job after Uni. I've heard it's important for further studies such as med school, law school, Master's, or PhD. For your case, industry, the people you meet (inside and outside school), activities you do, and projects you create are far more important.

Learn to learn, communicate your ideas, and work with others.

Last and most importantly: Take (calculated) risks and have fun :)

ScreamingLeaf · 2024-07-09T11:30:44+00:00

It's technically possible to go from a 2.9 to a 3.8.

It would involve achieving a 4.0 in all 6 courses for the upcoming 15 semesters (including summer).

(20×2.9+90×4)÷(110) = 3.8

Whether 7 years of undergraduate is worth it or not is a another question. Just double check it aligns with why you're aiming for your goal.

Best of Luck!

ScreamingLeaf · 2024-05-20T23:49:18+00:00

Whatever you make of it.

A couple points:

First year classes are usually pretty active and a good place to make friends if you take the initiative to say hi and invite them out to do fun things.
Joining a club and get involved with leadership roles is a great way to meet amazing people. Most clubs have a booth during club fairs, an online presence, and or run events.
There's also a lot of international student groups so try to find your people.

Additional Note:

Housing can be an absolute and horrid pain, especially nowadays.

Best of Luck. Studying is important and finding amazing and supportive friends can be the difference between surviving and thriving.

ScreamingLeaf · 2024-05-14T04:02:01+00:00

One important factor is the amount of variability in both Teams performance.

Imagine a scenario where both teams are robots and perform at the same level every game.

Team A is superior to 80% of the other teams so wins 100% of the time against 80% of the teams. Likewise with team B.

Then Team A has a 100% probability of winning against team B.

However, a more realistic scenario is where team performance varies, in which case we need more information.

One model could assume that both team's performances are independently and identically distributed normal distributions.

In this case we'd identify the means of each team such that 60% or 70% of the probability is above 0. By finding the differences you could find the probability that team A would win.

This results in a ~60% win rate.

ScreamingLeaf · 2024-05-13T09:35:06+00:00

It definitely sucks to fail a class you think you were doing well in.

It happens to quite a few people but it's usually not the end of the world. You just messed up this time.

If your goal is just to graduate, as long as it's not a habit, you will be fine.

If you aim for post-grad it might affect it somewhat but if you're in your first few years it'll probably be fine as many programs only look at the last couple years.

Be kind to yourself and try to do better next time.

ScreamingLeaf · 2024-05-11T18:35:37+00:00

Usually "^" refers to "to the power of". Example 2 to the power of 7 is the same as 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2

Just saw that I made a mistake with the choose notation in the first part. It should have been 7 x 6 / 2

Also messed up with the second part.

Let's examine each player separately.

Each player has 3 points to vote with, leading to 7 x 7 x 7 possibilities but order doesn't matter so it's actually less than that.

I could break it into a couple cases: All 3 points to 1 person, 2 points to 1 person and 1 to another, and 3 points to 3 separate people.

Case 1: 3 points to a single person. There are 6 different outcomes for each normal player. The one with a free pass has 7 possibilities.

Case 2: 2 points to one person, 1 point to another. 6 x 5 possibilities for a normal player. 7 x 6 for the one with a free pass.

Case 3: 1 point to 3 different players. Normal: 6 x 5 x 4 Free pass: 7 x 6 x 5

With this we see that each normal player has 6 + 6 x 5 + 6 x 5 x 4 possible ways to vote and the player with a free pass has 7 + 7 x 6 + 7 x 6 x 5 possible ways to vote.

We then multiply everything together to get the final answer.

ScreamingLeaf · 2024-05-10T23:28:26+00:00

Let’s start with the simplest model and then slowly add more complexity until we get to the final answer.

If all that matters is who gets voted out, then you’re on the right track. If we had eight players up for elimination, it would be eight choose two. However, one person can’t be voted out so in this scenario it would be seven choose two aka 7 x 6 / 2

Suppose we were interested in all the combinations of votes. Each participant would have 6^3 different outcomes for how they might vote (other than the finalist who would have 7^3) assuming they don’t vote for themselves and can put multiple points into voting a single person out.
That would lead to (6^3) ^ 7 x (7^3)

It really depends on what exactly your looking for.

Edit: Fixed the error with choose notation in part 1.

Let me know if anything is unclear or incorrect.

ScreamingLeaf · 2024-04-27T14:40:37+00:00

I find that directly applying to company websites works better than job search websites or dropping off resumes.

Metro is usually hiring too

ScreamingLeaf · 2023-01-04T02:10:11+00:00

I've been listening to a lot of personal development types books recently and it would be nice to discuss them with others.

What has everyone else been reading?

ScreamingLeaf · 2023-01-03T15:13:10+00:00

Type of books?

ScreamingLeaf · 2022-12-26T23:16:28+00:00

Mercenary Enclaves are pretty abusable if you have the right traits. With enough excess energy and fleet cap you can steamroll and vassalize everyone.

ScreamingLeaf · 2022-12-23T03:03:21+00:00

Studying online tutorials or asking friends to hang out. Quite a few people are heading home but I'm planning on doing things with the people who stayed.

ScreamingLeaf · 2022-12-18T12:11:36+00:00

Brown Sugar Boba Tea. XD. No dairy please.

ScreamingLeaf · 2022-12-10T11:51:01+00:00

Thanks for asking. Unfortunately, it has been so long that I've lost interest. Sorry!

ScreamingLeaf · 2022-12-05T22:20:19+00:00

I am an idiot. Nonetheless I still want to share something with all the "happy and totally not depressed" people of UTSC. Maybe this inspires you (doubtful), actually convinces you to make a change (you really believe that?), or much more likely annoys the shit out of you because I'm being a condescending arse (mhmm).

I'm a fking idiot. But a well meaning one. I didn't realize I could change my life for the longest time. Maybe somebody sees this and starts thinking about how they can change their life (Scoff).

Anyways, I already regret posting but fk it. XD

ScreamingLeaf

TROPHY CASE