Matlab For Dummies Pdf Free 63
Nichole Wernett
In this Freshman Seminar, students combine field observations of the natural world with quantitative modeling and interpretation to answer questions like: How have Earth and human histories been recorded in the geology of Princeton, the Catskills, and France/Spain, and what experiments can you do to query such archives of the past? In the classroom, through problem sets, and around campus, students gain practical experience collecting geological and geophysical data in geographic context, and analyzing these data using statistical techniques such as regression and time series analysis, with the programming language Matlab. During the required one-day trip to the Catskills and week-long Fall break trip to France/Spain, you will engage in research projects that focus on the cycles and shifts in Earth's shape, climate, and life that occur now on timescales of days, and have been recorded in rocks over timescales of millions of years. The classroom component of this Freshman Seminar will have graded (bi)weekly assignments built around on-campus data collection, data preparation or analysis, and scientific programming. A significant part of student assessment comes from writing assignments that teach students to communicate scientific results, and culminate in an original research paper and an oral presentation for an audience of peers, Freshman Seminar alumni, and invited guests from the university community.
Student participation in our seminar was pretty limited, often to the same handful of kids. However, this improved after the trip over break and was largely due to our personalities. I do think that the fact that discussion always started with students who understood the material better made it difficult for me to later ask more basic questions, but this is less of a commentary on the professors' outline of the course and more on an issue that arose early on.
It took a while for the class to feel comfortable in asking questions and participating in lively discussion. The professors loved answering questions and if anything, expected more. Participation was encouraged, and discussions really became better after the trip.
Most of the students, including myself, lacked the geosciences knowledge to really engage in class discussions. The topics in the class were also very quantitative, with difficulty going beyond what my classmates and me are capable of. Student participation was most active when we went on the field trip and had to really nail down our research plans. The participation extends well outside of classroom setting, when a lot of us decided to work on labs and projects together. Otherwise, the classroom setting discussion is very minimal.
One of the great things about seminar was the fact that students got the freedom to guess and discuss possible answers to geoscience questions before getting the right answer, if they got any. We were encouraged to ask questions which would benefit our and our peers' research, regardless of whether our fellow students and professors had answers to those Qs. Class discussion was invaluable and absolutely essential to the seminar.
While the professors were very engaged in class and very willing to answer questions, there was minimal student participation during lectures: mostly because the subject matter was outside the scope of our academic experience
Yes, and the methods used in this seminar are especially unique. The trip is well-organized but the research is very self- and team-directed rather than guided by the professors. I wish some of the earlier lectures were a bit more relevant to the team research projects.
Yes, I think the lecture-lab structure worked - even though this is a seminar, all of this material was so new to me that any other format would have felt weird. That said, the lectures often felt incredibly disjointed from the rest of the course. Even when topics did relate to our later research (e.g., dune formation), I feel like the connection was never addressed. Classes felt stressful and a bit overwhelming because I never knew what was coming next. Even just saying "this is what we'll be doing today" before lecture would have helped. As I said, I think there could have been a clearer connection between before the trip, during the trip, and after the trip - it's hard to retain a lot of information when you don't really get why you're learning it. Maybe introducing the research topics sooner would have helped me find the connections on my own?
I enjoyed the first trip around campus to become familiar with the GPS, the hand lens and accurate note-taking (though I think the second and third trips were unnecessary). The keynote presentations during class were amazingly organized, and to the same standards that the professors expect of our own presentations, which was a nice touch. The part I enjoyed most were the writing conferences and learning about how to write an effective essay in the sciences. It felt like a great writing seminar, freshman seminar and field trip rolled into one.
Yes, but I still find that some accessible required readings beforehand would have braced us better for the difficult presentation topics. I'd say a lot of the presentation topics felt very impromptu and I would have appreciated an outline of topics we'll be learning in the course syllabus.
The seminar is very computation and programming intensive, and the material is often taught through MATLAB labs. Though it may be overwhelming at first, I think this is an appropriate way of teaching and studying shifts and cycles of Earth.
The presentation in lecture format was appropriate, but it was difficult to follow each week's lecture and how they related to each other: in other words, it was difficult to comprehend how each lecture topic related to the next.
I would have liked to know the papers we were reading for our field trip earlier, so we weren't presented with about 20 to read in the span of a day and a plane ride. Of course, they were all well chosen, but I would have liked some teaching on how to critically read and analyze a scientific paper, to complement our teaching on how to write one.
This is one of the few times I wished there were assigned readings. Instead jumping straight into geo-papers with a lot of unfamiliar key terms, the course could better prepare us with knowing the basics... hence the need for readings (something like, geosciences-for-dummies, type of reading).
The was not much reading assigned to us in the beginning of the seminar, but I think some additional short readings would help us to digest the material covered in the class better. Also, the amount of reading we had to do right before and during the trip was quite tremendous. While I understand that it was essential for a quality research project, maybe something could be done to distribute that reading over some longer time period.
The criticism in this class is harsh, precise, and everything you could ever ask for. It definitely improved my scientific writing skills. The pacing of the assignments is a little insane, and I definitely regret taking it with the other time-consuming classes I'm in.
The criticism in this course is one of the best things available. Adam and Frederik are genuinely concerned with helping you improve your writing. Their comments helped me to become a better scientific writer. In terms of the pacing of the assignments, I thought it was just fine.
The pace was a lot more difficult post-trip because of the two simultaneous projects. Additionally, by that point I often felt like I was spending nights re-learning Matlab that I had theoretically learned before the trip, and then didn't get to spend as much time on writing. Part of this might have been helped by assignments before the trip forcing me to learn the code better (not being able to copy it verbatim) might have made me not have to do this later. In terms of writing, I definitely improved in scientific writing, which is a useful skill that I'm glad I got to learn thanks to thorough feedback and being constantly challenged.
The pacing was very good, but it was very demanding. I felt like I would always put a lot of effort into these assignments and it was certainly a lot more work than any other freshman sem. We received helpful criticism in abundance, especially when both professors looked over a piece of work. The office hours were well attended and the professors were forthcoming in giving out advice.
The assignments in the first half of the course were MATLAB based lab assignments, and they felt more than foreign. Despite the good intent of cody course-work, I still struggled with learning MATLAB. I think the problem lies with us being given MATLAB codes beforehand. I tried reading the codes but I just felt myself modifying codes instead of writing them. It would be helpful if the labs were projects in which we had to write the codes; start simple and then have us take on harder ones requiring more complicated codes. The research writing assignment towards the end of the semester was especially demanding. Part of it is due to the nature of Princeton's limited spring semester schedule with no breaks throughout April. But a lot of it is the expectation that we need to present a group project (based on data from our trip) AND write an individual paper at the same time. I wonder if it would have been more helpful to have the paper due before the trip (while it is true that many of us are still acquiring MATLAB skill at that stage, I can see the paper as a good motivation to have the students make learning MATLAB more personal and applicable towards a goal being the paper). Lastly, it is no secret that the criticisms from both Adam and Frederik are extremely harsh. We become used to them, but quite surprisingly, I find that my peers and me still care about the class very much. We get bad grades that seem to wash our hard work down the drain, but at the same time, we do seek to do better, and that is reflected in our group presentation. My LATEX and MATLAB skills definitely improved after the individual paper and group presentation; there was no way they wouldn't, given the high expectations of the course in general. In short, the assignments were overwhelming but effective at the end as they are a method to the course's madness.
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