Flashes of Panic

When I talked to my mother about course selection, she cautioned me. “Don’t overload,” she said.

Today was department orientation, and for all the relatively low-content speeches of yesterday, today was somewhat more intense. The department faculty gave the high-level overview of the courses they taught and the research they did, and for those few brief moments (before we began connecting the dots between what we knew and what we’d have to learn to reach that level of research,) we were all ready to sign on for several of them. Also, I knew I had some catching up to do, and I wanted to front-load my course work some in order to prepare for a thesis next year.

Then I talked to my advisor, who turns out to have been a grad school acquaintance of one of my undergrad co-workers. His advice: don’t bother trying to catch up. Take a few prerequisite courses you’ll really need, skip the rest, and pick the rest of your courses like an ordinary grad student. “You won’t be able to cover an undergraduate major and still do a proper Masters,” he said.

So, I’m punting. The current plan, should it stand, is Algorithms, which is a basic that I need; Operating Systems, aka “Learning C the Hard Way,” which promises to be a lot of work, but may be a professor I’ll be doing research with; and OOP for GUIs, which is both catch-up and simply an attempt to do something that won’t make my brain explode. (I haven’t done much proper Object Oriented Programming. In fact, some might argue that I haven’t done much proper programming. To those people, I say, can you give proper declensions of irregular Russian verbs? Neither can I.)

Current grad students agree that this plan is not entirely psychotic. I want to run it by a few faculty before I commit to registration, though.