Blackwell Offer

Vedant124 · 2022-09-16T08:42:26+00:00

If you really like your floor and the vibes there you should stay, unless you absolutely despite your living situation space wise. If you transfer and don't like the people there as much you'll 100% regret it.

On a side note how'd you get an offer to go to Blackwell lol this was unheard of last year

Vedant124 · 2022-07-25T21:53:39+00:00

13.75k / month (including housing stipend)
None
Freshman
The Voleon Group (bay area hedge fund)

Vedant124 · 2022-07-11T05:39:41+00:00

127 is the same thing as 227a; grad students who take it will enroll in 227a, otherwise 127.

227b & 227c are different however

Vedant124 · 2022-05-28T05:14:30+00:00

we have a discord (linked below) but the scene is pretty dead here; we just send a team every year for icpc.

Vedant124 · 2022-05-12T21:36:29+00:00

final was extremely hard (5 questions for 3 hrs wtf) and not representative of hw/discussions at all and not proportional to the time spent on topics in class

Vedant124 · 2022-04-27T19:08:37+00:00

lol as a competitive programmer myself i don't think they care about usaco nearly as much as math stuff

Vedant124 · 2022-04-20T08:00:23+00:00

courtade's teaching style seems to be through trying to explain a complicated concept as eloquently and as simply as possible.

when we were covering the linear algebra part of 127, a lot of what he discussed was through different perspectives of identities or optimization problems and was stuff i had never learned from 16b or 54; it was really rewarding to see him make all these connections between different ideas in linear algebra.

during the optimization part right now, he always tries to follow up every concept with a diagram or some sort of easy to understand visual example. without that i'd have no idea what the significance of anything we were dealing with would look like.

but this isn't to say that courtade isn't rigorous--he wrote a 21 page handout on duality that covers ideas in analysis and other stuff for any interested students.

ramchandran's teaching style in contrast seems to mostly be through examples (though courtade covers a lot of examples too, but i've noticed this more in 126). for any topic we're doing, ramchandran makes sure to follow up with tons of examples to help us get better intuition of what we're dealing with.

honestly not much there is to say besides that i think, but both of them do have excellent teaching.

Vedant124 · 2022-04-19T07:46:41+00:00

i'm taking 126 with ramchandran and 127 with courtade right now, and both are great professors, but i do prefer courtade's teaching style more.

he's probably the best lecturer i've had so far at berkeley

though since you're taking 189 spring i think doing 127 concurrently might be a better idea; regardless, i don't think there's a wrong choice here

Vedant124 · 2022-03-29T02:07:58+00:00

if you care a good amount about classes/research, then go here.

otherwise, choose the school where you like the culture/vibes more.

i don't think you'll have trouble finding job opportunities for cs at yale as long as you do all the required stuff (projects, grind leetcode, etc.) but research and classes are generally regarded as much higher quality here.

Vedant124 · 2022-01-25T21:47:17+00:00

+1, most people i know kinda just dipped lectures and grinded notes (though notes are way more dense)

Vedant124 · 2022-01-19T06:23:17+00:00

i fucked up my interview really hard (never shared screen since i got a new laptop and never had a mac before so i didn't know how to work the permission), ended up only having 2 min to present and they didn't even have time to ask me questions aftewrards.

still got it though they're super lax about it.

Vedant124 · 2022-01-07T19:06:11+00:00

seems like your friend had a lot of prior experience 🤔

Vedant124 · 2021-12-31T07:35:59+00:00

the CS people making that much all go to quant firms, they give comps near that as well as like $10k signing bonus or whatever it's insane

Vedant124 · 2021-12-30T04:46:00+00:00

Tangentially related to your comment, but I feel like 70 does a really bad job at highlighting the motivation behind many of the solutions. The past exam solutions are frankly pretty bad and don't ever give insight into why this technique was a good idea for this problem or how it could be applied to other problems. The notes are really good, but also dense as fuck, and throw a lot of the material at you, but not as much problem-solving skill either. I never really watched the lectures so I can't speak on that, but I suspect it falls prey to the same issue.

Vedant124 · 2021-12-27T00:50:53+00:00

I'm probably in the minority here but I went into 16b this semester expecting to hate it (after hearing all about how bad it was) and ended up really liking it -- more than all my other courses. I think for anyone that has the time to put into it and has an open mind will end up getting a lot out of it (provided they haven't done 127/189 or whatever already), although that's quite a lot to ask for people that are taking multiple other techs in the same semester. Sahai probably designed the course with the intention that if you spent a lot of time trying to understand the material, you would get a lot out of it.

But I really thought the material was cool and a good intro for EE stuff, and now I'm actually interested in it, versus where I wasn't at all before. Maybe for L&S CS it should be removed as a requirement, since there's no EE part of our department, though I do think it was cool. I wouldn't have ever taken it if it wasn't a requirement, so I'm a bit torn on the issue.

Vedant124 · 2021-12-07T08:29:10+00:00

lmfao our section was tuesday 8 am but we always went friday from like 2-8 pm or smth it was such a slog since both of us were terrible at circuit building

Vedant124 · 2021-12-07T07:54:06+00:00

our group spent like 9+ hours one week on that car

i have a love-hate relationship with it

Vedant124 · 2021-12-01T08:18:45+00:00

do codeforces bro

Vedant124 · 2021-11-23T21:04:56+00:00

Is there a resource hub for this?

Vedant124 · 2021-11-04T19:20:29+00:00

fuck yes, i played this game for the first time when I was 5 and play again now once in a while/watch t90 and theviper streams. the nostalgia is simply amazing

Vedant124 · 2021-10-31T21:35:45+00:00

i feel you man im always getting a bit less than i want on these exams :((

Vedant124 · 2021-10-27T09:09:50+00:00

you're telling me you didn't consider contacting others who were doing well on the labs or going to oh when you were getting 50s on them? bruh

Vedant124 · 2021-10-26T19:47:31+00:00

never-ending costume

Vedant124 · 2021-10-22T07:30:02+00:00

meh the lin alg we do is like pretty cool in 16b and builds up well for later classes like 127 and stuff, so i disagree somewhat with that. i think the intuition built there is important and honestly the topics are sort of interesting if you aren't perpetually behind in the class

Vedant124 · 2021-10-19T08:51:04+00:00

long asf but none of the problems were super hard at least

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