Pet Projects

Projects are a part of school. You can't get away from it. Whether it be papers, research, lab... you'll always be doing some sort of project. So far, i've had to do a project in every class here at grad school. Projects which are time consuming, difficult, yet interesting. The whole point of the project has been to demonstrate to the professor that you have been able to tie together everything you learned and put it into a coherent and well thought out solution to a problem that's more in depth than a midterm or hw. Nothing is wrong with doing projects. Sure, i don't necessarily enjoy staying up for days on end staring at something i've worked on for weeks, but when it works, somehow it makes it all worth it.

But this semester is a different story. This one class i'm taking (which i think is an utter and total waste of time) we're required to do a project. No big deal. I didn't expect any less. What totally rubs me the wrong way is that the goal of these projects is to make something for which the professor has been meaning to do, but hasn't gotten around to doing it. I.e. we're his manual labor. What's that you say? The prof is blantantly using a class of 20 some odd students to do some projects which he's been meaning to do. He even admitted it.

Just so you get an idea of what kind of prof this is, he's a "wee" man in his late 50's probably. He's worked at Bell Labs (before they went through the tubes) for pretty much his whole life. Now for some reason, he's a guest lecturer at columbia. He's still single, and let me explain why. He's married to his test equipment. Not obsessed, but take it one step further. He reads the catalogues from the manufactures of this equipment for night reading. ??? What? Who in the right mind reads this stuff for fun? He says we should also know how much everything costs. Good. So he wants us to spend our free time reading the manuals and catalogues for all kinds of manufacturers of test equipment. Exactly what i've been wanting to do all my life. Hooray. I can't believe i'm paying money for this nut job to teach this class. All he talks about in class is his test equipment and how expensive they are, but he found them at a surplus sale for like 10% of the real cost. I don't care if you got the stuff at the surplus sale. Teach us real tools and tricks, on current equipment. I don't care about your 20+ year old crap you got for 50 bucks.

Anyways, back to the project, he already has a list of things he wants us to build. He continually shows off what projects the last year's class built, so i'm assuming that he keeps all the projects once we're done. That really irks me, since the students last year also paid for their own part and had to order it themselves. He then goes around touting how great these things are, but didn't do anything to help build them. Just for kicks, i'm going to go in and say i'm going to build something i already made over the summer. See if he's going to confiscate it and try to pass how he came up with the idea and what not. That should be interesting.

What a waste of time.....