Mike Rundle's Weblog

Grading Hijinks

I'm in a class right now called Internet Marketing, and it's pretty much everything I dislike about college classes about the "Internet". Main points of the class include how important it is to trick search engines into thinking your content is relevant (aka "SEO Optimization", my thoughts mimic Anil's for this so-called profession), analyzing a company's online and offline marketing techniques without any real business cases to look at, and other stuff that makes a joke of my profession.

I'm in the odd position right now of having a failing grade in the class. I say it's an odd position, because when I graduate I will be well into the Magna Cum Laude range, and I'm not really used to getting back work I actually spent time on and seeing a fat D on it. Because of his odd grading procedures, we had an assignment due during our vacation from RIT which nobody thought was actually due then, so the class average for that week was a 40%. I emailed him about it and expressed my concern, and he said I should have just paid better attention to due dates and it was completely my fault.

For our latest assignment, he gave us 8 bulleted points of things to cover in our "up to 1-page" assessment of a company's online marketing strategy. So I hit all 8 points, delved deeper into some of them, and got it back with a D. He said I didn't talk about two additional points, both which were not on the original rubric he gave to us to follow. But the worst part about it is that the class average for that assignment was a 57%, which put my D on the right side of the curve. The class average for the entire course right now is a 55.79%, so it's not as though I'm slacking and everyone else is getting better grades.

I don't know what to do. I need to pass this class to graduate, but my overall grade right now is only slightly higher than the class average. How the hell do I have a failing average in a class that should be a straight-up joke? If anybody has some guidance, I'd really love to hear it, because it seems as though I just can't do anything right for this guy.

RIT To Lower Liberal Arts Standards

I heard from my Economics professor this morning that starting next year, RIT will be decreasing the 54 Liberal Arts credits needed to graduate to a paltry 36. No longer will you be required to have a liberal arts concentration or minor, but now you can minor in anything you want, including topics already in your field of study. "Hi, I'm a Computer Science major with a minor in Software Engineering!" Nothing like destroying the college experience by throwing liberal arts credits out the window.

RIT is trying to compete with the MITs and Cal Techs of the world, and boneheaded moves like this are supposed to make us a better school? Wow, it's good to see that the administration has their heads on straight.

Goodbye RIT, For Now

And so ends another productive year here at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

This year was filled with ups, and even higher ups. No real downs to speak of. The beginning of the year kinda sucked, but then everything started falling into place around Thanksgiving time and never looked back. I met a lot of cool people, worked (and am working on) a ton of amazing projects, and have lots of stuff planned for the upcoming months. I'll be home for a week, then I'm off to Fairfax, Virginia to work as a User Interface designer at Northrop Grumman for the summer. Don't worry, I'll be back here in the fall.

My roommates Joe and Chad are graduating from RIT tomorrow, and I want to wish them the best of luck. They both happen to be continuing on to grad school here, so they won't be going very far :) They're both actually staying in my apartment too, so hell, it's like they're not even graduating!

I'm not really big on graduation ceremonies, even though I know a ton of people are. I don't really see graduating from RIT (or highschool for that matter) such a large accomplishment for me. Obviously I'm not knocking on any recent graduates, not at all, it's just that personally I don't care whether I walk across the stage or not. I'm just not feeling it.

If graduation doesn't bring me a sense of accomplishment, then what does? I'll tell you: landing a $50k project based on a presentation I worked on for months, designing a website that gets international fame from the web community (my peers), discovering a new CSS technique that helps out hundreds of web designers around the globe, or an interviewer finally realizing that I can talk the talk and walk it too.

That is what I'm working for. Graduating from college is just a steppingstone for me to bigger and better things, and I treat it as such. I do just enough work here to keep my grades up where I want them to be, and devote the rest of my time to more worthy efforts. What can I say, it's just my philosophy on life.

On Neglect

My final exam for the class Spatial Visualizations and Pattern Perception is in about a half-hour, and if only for my own edification, I want to write down a little bit about neglect so I can remember it more easily for the test. Here goes.

Neglect

The phenomenon known as neglect usually occurs after direct cranial damage, where unilateral right hemispheric lesions in the temporoparietal juncture render the perception of one half of the visual field unusable for the patient.

The contralesional visual field that would normally be processed in the ipsalesional hemisphere is absent, so the only visual input processed by the brain is in the ipsalesional visual field which corresponds to (in this case) the left hemisphere.

Persons who have right hemispheric lesions cannot process nor attend to objects in their contralesional visual field, so they view the world as right-sided. A person only has half a face. A flower only has petals on the right. A square is only made up of three lines (two of which do not intersect).

There is a theory that states a person with neglect can be made "normal" again by lesioning the contralesional hemisphere in order to even out the lesions. Somehow, after bilateral temporoparietal areas are lesioned, other areas of the visual pathway (be it V2, MT, etc.) will take over and all will be right. This theory has yet to be proven.

The test if over with and I probably got some sort of an A on it. All thanks to this post! Yeah!!!!

Adam Chojnacki

My roommate Adam Chojnacki is a very smart guy with a lot of potential. Valedictorian of his high school, international honor societies, high (-er than mine) GPA, common sense, chock full of wit.

After being in the IT program here for two years with a 4.0 GPA, he switched to our College of Business because it offered him a challenge. Now, he needs a co-op (read: advanced internship) position this summer in some type of a business situation. If you need experience, read his résumé (PDF my design) and you'll find out that he's got the goods.

Anyway, if you think you'd be interested in hiring him for the summer (anywhere in the country is fine), email me at mike AT phark DOT net and I'll set you guys up — or just leave a comment.

BTW: That picture was taken by Adam's friend for an upcoming guitar/life/style weblog brought to you by yours truly :)

Also: I updated my About Me page because I felt like adding my picture to the site. Too many sites out there are impersonal, and I don't want this to be one of those.

The Truth About RIT

I feel as though I should use my recent PageRank good fortunes to pontificate on the subject of what RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) is really like. There are lot of good and bad stereotypes associated with my school, and if you're a prospective student it's tough to find good answers to hard questions. So I'm going to give it my best shot.

RIT only accepts smart people

Before I answer this, let's define smart a little bit. Smart is not an SAT/ACT score. Smart is not the ability to get an A+ on a multiple-choice test. To me, smart is the ability to jump into any situation, at any time, with people you don't know, and intelligently discuss whatever topics they bring up. Smart is knowing your Plato from your Aristotle, the difference between affect and effect, the realization that lowering taxes is not always a good thing, etc. So based on my half-assed definition of what makes someone "smart", being smart is not a pre-requisite for being accepted to RIT.

I know people here who got a 1600 on their SATs, and I know people who didn't break 800. I know people here who were C students in high school, and I know people who were the valedictorians of their high school. I know people who play video games all day, and I know people who write video games all day. So bottom-line, you don't have to smart to get into RIT.

The classes are really hard

It totally depends on the major. If you're a design student, expect not to have too much extra-curricular fun your freshman year because you'll have major projects due every week. If you're a CS student or a Software Engineering major, fun for you is coding, so you can bank on having lots of fun all 4 years of college.

The Information Technology program here isn't that hard if you're into the stuff that I'm into — namely web design and UI & usability stuff. If you plan on concentrating in networking & system administration, then your final years here are going to be a lot of work, trust me. So this myth is sort of a toss-up, completely depending on your major.

The girls are nasty and/or there aren't many of them

Ahh, the age-old question about females at RIT. Here's my take on it: there aren't many girls here and you have a ton of guys around to compete with. Fortunately, the vast majority of guys here stay in their rooms all day and play video games, grow beards out to about 7" off their chins, and wear shorts and viking hats during the winter. So if you remove all guys from the pool who won't be going after the girls anyway, it comes down to about a 3:1 ratio, which is a lot better than what it started.

As for the first part of the question — it's tough to say. There are all types of girls here, and if you look you'll have no problem finding ones who meet your predetermined "qualifications". Whether you like the tall blonde Abercrombie model chicks (Edited — they are all currently taken by my roommate Adam, sorry), short-funky-hippy-portly chicks, or anything in between, you'll find someone.

RIT helps you find a job/co-op position

Once again, the myth is a little more all-encompassing than the truth. If you want to find a nice co-op at Kodak, Bausch and Lomb, or any other company around Rochester, then yes RIT can pull some strings and get you in. If you're like me and set your sights on Chicago or another large city, then you're pretty much on your own. RIT only has specific strings they can pull, and those strings usually don't extend past the greater Buffalo-Rochester area.

The professors are really smart

This depends on the college/major. Math and Science departments? They're all geniuses. Design and Photography? World-renowned. IT department? Um...

The difficulty with teaching a subject that is currently in a state of change is that there is a lot of stuff to remember. The professors I respect the most are the ones who state at the beginning of the quarter something like this: "This field changes every single day, and I don't doubt that some of you are more knowledgeable in certain aspects of _______ than I am. My job is to communicate my experience to you in such a way that it provides a solid base for you to build off from... etc. etc. etc." So if I bring up a question and they don't know the answer, please say something that will at least not make me think you're an idiot and shouldn't be teaching. And then there's Professor Henderson in my college who's a freaking genius, but she's the exception to the rule rather than the norm.

Well I could go on forever, but I think that's enough. Questions? Comments?