Something really cool happened this semester: I like all of my classes.

33-211 Physics III: Modern Essentials

It’s all the theory of quantum mechanics without much of that annoying “calculation” stuff. This is the physics I’ve suffered through four years of Newtonian physics to get to. The professor works for NIST and is just teaching here for a semester. He’s very German… seems like an interesting/cool guy.

21-484 Graph Theory

Ever since I was introduced to it a few years ago, I’ve had a special place in my heart for graph theory. Facebook needs people who are good at it. (A social graph with connections between everyone, finding shortest paths from one person to another, stuff like that.) The professor looks like an overweight, slightly Spanish Einstein. And he’s really cool… quite a character.

98-085 Ruby on Rails

A student-taught course on Ruby on Rails. Yes, I’ve already worked some with Ruby on Rails, but it’ll be a fun class, and I’ll formally learn the language. (This blog runs on Ruby on Rails.) Plus it’s going to be muy facil, and hey it’s worth some credits.

15-451 Algorithm Design and Analysis

This is probably going to be my toughest course. Still, I like theory, and this class has a lot of it. Like “can you find a really efficient way to multiply two matrices together?” The professor handles the large class size well – it doesn’t feel like a large lecture hall (even though there are close to 100 students). (And yes I know that’s not “large” in some universities… but it is relatively so for CMU.)

15-441 Computer Networks

Aside from being easy, because I’ve studied it a lot in my free time over the years, we get to program an IRC client and a BitTorrent client.

11-411 Natural Language Processing

I think this will be my favorite class. The professor is smart as hell, fairly young (29), passionate about his work, and funny to boot. It’s a combination of computer science (my major) and linguistics (something I’m really interested in). This is the final project:

Build a program whose input is a web page P and whose output is a set of questions about the content in P (that a human could answer if she read P), and can also, if given a question Q about the content of P, answer the question intelligently. Projects will be pitted against each other in a competition at the end of the course.

Here’s hoping I wake up and attend classes this semester.