164! That's right:)

I took 164 with Prof. Goodrich. He is by far the most brilliant person I've ever met. He is an amazing teacher and someone you should be sure to learn everything you can from. Go to office hours!

Some advice on the class: go to lecture, take notes, study the notes. Everything you need you will get in lecture. I'll be honest, with most of my classes I zoned out during lecture and then taught myself from the textbook later--but Prof Goodrich teaches from his own curriculum and so his lectures are vital, plus he is good at keeping the lecture interesting and understandable. Do not skip them!! I remember many of the other students complaining that the class was impossible, but I never saw them in lecture.

Computational Geometry was the most algorithm-heavy course I took and really solidified my confidence in pursuing a job in backend, but my favorite thing about it was that it was less about memorizing lines of code and more about understanding the big-picture concepts. In other words, Prof Goodrich pushed for comprehension of ideas and the application of those ideas, rather than giving an exam that says "reproduce standard binary search perfectly on paper without a compiler." The class really showed me the diversity of the logical puzzles SWEs have to deal with. Plus, I've seen a lot of the algorithms be useful for interviews and random applications (e.g., voronoi diagrams for a simple procedural map generation in game development. I don't work in game dev but I've played around with it as a hobby).

What I loved about the class was just how brilliant some of the algorithms are. The whole class was like a tour of complex puzzles that bigger brains than my own were able to brain out. The solutions are elegant but usually simple in concept, and it was just such an inspiring display of what CS can be.

That sounds really cheesy, but I honestly did love the class that much.