Many people think that once you get into
MIT
or whatever top college,
you're basically set for life, but having gone through
almost two online semesters at MIT
myself, let me tell you the
sad truth.
As expected, all of the classes are much harder and
it's not like I'm in Harvard where there's grade inflation,
so my grades are kind of screwed.
In just my first semester here, I've
almost failed a lot of the classes that I took.
So I took a total of four classes,
they were Chemistry, Physics,
Computer Science, and Writing,
but before I go deep
into the details about those classes,
what grades I got, and what went wrong with them,
I've been looking for ways
to relieve myself from the stress
of all this of failing, for example,
by gaming, which brings us to
today's sponsor, a sponsor every YouTuber has ever dreamed of,
which is none other than the infamous Raid: Shadow Legends.
So this class is a requirement for graduation,
to be honest I don't really remembered what I learned,
it was just standard Chemistry stuff like
molecules, acids, and bases...
I think that's all I remember
The homework for this class isn't actually graded, and the lectures were all pre-recorded,
so what ended up happening was that like some other people in the class,
I decided to not watch lecture videos and just cram before quizzes and exams
which kind of worked, since I at least got a 64%,
but if this was any other class with a normal grading scheme then
I would've' gotten a D, and that's
actually not considered as a pass, as I'll explain later in this video.
This class is also a requirement for graduation.
Again, I don't really remember which concepts I learned,
I think they were overall pretty similar to AP Physics C,
but the cool thing about this class, which is probably the only thing I remember, was that
they actually got to send us experiment kits for us to play around with.
My favorite experiment was the one where we had to create a working motor using magnets.
I still don't know how it works exactly but I basically just tried a bunch of configurations and got it to work,
kind of like what you do in programming as well.
Unlike 3.091, they actually checked for attendance in the lectures so I couldn't really skip them.
But what went wrong here was that toward the end of the semester I accidentally got lazy and didn't do the homework and
also for my final I got an incredible 42% so that didn't help either.
But anyway, a C is pretty bad so I'll consider this as a fail.
As the class name suggests, I learned advanced algorithms in this class,
and the good thing was that we didn't have any assessments, but the bad thing was that in replacement for that,
they gave us really hard problem sets for homework and we had a research project at the end of the semester
which was also hard because we had to read through a bunch of research papers.
An A- may seem like a pretty good grade, but considering the fact that I spend all my time in my room programming all day,
an A- for any Computer Science class is just unacceptable.
But here's my excuse:
so a lot of the points that were taken off in my homework were because some of my explanations weren't detailed enough.
But if you were to explain an idea to someone in the real world, you don't try to explain every single detail,
because that person would be bored out and you would simply waste a lot more energy.
Instead, you could just give a summary, and if that person has questions about some of the details,
they can ask for only those details to be explained, which is a lot more efficient.
A lot of Computer Science is about efficiency, for example,
how fast your program runs or how much memory it uses,
and it's quite ironic that they don't value students like me who try to be efficient.
Anyway, to summarize, the graders of the problem sets just weren't good enough
to understand my high-quality solutions, so that's why I failed.
This class is also part of a graduation requirement, and I just want to say upfront that
this was the best English class I have taken in my last 5 years,
not only because it was chill, but because the content was actually useful.
Reading Shakespeare or whatever literature written more than a century ago, which was what happened to me in high school English class
is just so much harder than reading machine code, and it's not even as useful as being able to read machine code.
Whereas in this class we were given real-life scenarios involving writing, such as writing a grant proposal,
which is actually useful.
I actually failed before the class even started because during the summer, we had to take this thing called the First-year Essay Evaluation
in which we basically wrote 2 essays that were evaluated.
Sadly, I failed this assessment so by MIT's policy, I have to choose a writing class as my first humanities class,
and this class definitely wasn't a bad choice, but the fact that I failed is still unsatisfying.
Many of you might think that my GPA is screwed right now, but it's actually not, because of Freshman P/NR,
which means that for the first semester, if you get an A, a B, or a C, it appears as a Pass on your transcript, and
if you get a D or an F, there will be no record of the class on your transcript, but you don't get credit for it so you might need to retake it.
Here is my grade report for this semester,
and thankfully, it doesn't look terrible, but I was way too close to getting a D and having to retake Chemistry or Physics.
Also starting from this semester I have to try more to not fail, otherwise I might have to become a dropout.
Of course there was much more to my first semester than just classes, such as personal projects which I spent a lot of time on,
but I don't want to fail my final which is coming up soon so I'll talk about them some other day.
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As always, thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video and I'll see you next time.