Kev

This past Monday, I moved into my new room at Bromley Hall at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign for my sophomore year in computer science. I lived in Bromley last year with Andrew Leman and Brett Dunnam, and we decided to room together again. But instead of being in room 901 like last year, we requested 1101. Same room, just two floors higher. To our surprise, however, when we opened up the room, we realized that it certainly is not the same room. In fact, it is a much better room!The size of the room is about the same, but the walls have been repainted (to an off-yellow instead of white), the closet doors are all new, the furniture is new, the windows are new, and the bathroom (tile, shower, toilet, and sink) are all new. It’s a much better room, in terms of condition, than last year, and we are really excited to be in it.This semester has classes which are not the most directed towards my major. The following is the list of classes I am taking, and their respective descriptions from our course catalog:

• Ethical and Professional Issues in Computer Science: Ethics for the computing profession. Ethical decision-making; licensing; intellectual property, freedom of information, and privacy. Includes oral presentations.
• Computer Architecture I: ntroduction to computer architecture, working up from the logic gate level: combinational and sequential networks; computer arithmetic; arithmetic/logic units; memory organization; control unit design.
• Introduction to Japanese Culture: Topical introduction to Japanese cultural and aesthetic life with attention to cultural and aesthetic patterns as they are reflected in literature, language, and the arts.
• Universal Physics, Electricity and Magnetism: Coulomb’s Law, electric fields, Gauss’ Law, electric potential, capacitance, circuits, magnetic forces and fields, Ampere’s law, induction, electromagnetic waves, polarization, and geometrical optics. Lectures with demonstrations, discussions, and laboratory. For students in engineering, mathematics, physics, and chemistry.
• Linear Transformations and Matrices: Introductory course emphasizing techniques of linear algebra; topics include matrix operations, determinants, linear equations, vector spaces, linear transformations, eigenvalues, and eigenvectors.