Course Notes
- MTE 203 - Advanced Calculus
- MTE 204 - Numerical Methods
- MTE 220 - Sensors and Instrumentation
- MTE 241 - Computer Structures & Real-Time Systems
- SYDE 252 - Signals and Systems
Thoughts
Some of my opinions on the courses and profs.
MTE 203
Final Grade: 90
Taught by Matthew Harris. This is a Calc III course for engineering students; you start from basic vector functions and end with Green’s Theorem and Stokes Theorem. My impression was that they jammed a fairly large amount of surface level content into the course; you are taught a lot of methods for solving different methods but not really why these methods work (difference between Math math courses and Engineering math courses). This is good because it makes the course relatively easy, especially since we were allowed to bring a bound set of handwritten notes to exams, so you could just write down all the lectures and all your practice in a notebook. However, on the final, the problems were quite a bit harder than any of the provided practice problems, so the class struggled. Another thing to note is that we had to do 2 projects for this course that were worth a lot (15% and 25%), which made the exams worth less (midterm 25%, final 30%).
Harris is a decent teacher and a nice guy; my only complaints are that he has terrible handwriting and his notes often have minor errors. Some classmates also complained about him being unresponsive to email/Piazza.
Because of the bound handwritten notes policy, my notes here for this course are a bit sparse - mostly just theorems and definitions. I also stopped taking notes here after the midterm, mostly out of laziness.
MTE 220
Final Grade: 90
Taught by Derek Wright, who is the Director of the Mechatronics Engineering Program. This is a 2nd circuits course after MTE 120 with a focus on sensors. You learn some new components like diodes, and also about filtering. Not very hard but also not easy, as there’s a lot of content to remember, and a lot of different types of problems that can be asked. There are labs every other week; mostly pretty easy, but annoying because there are pre-lab and post-lab components that you have to do. One of the labs involves soldering which may be challenging if you don’t have much experience. Make sure to study well for the final, there’s a big penalty if your grade is between 50 and 60, and if your grade is below 50 it’s just a 0. The course provides a big PDF of practice questions, just do those and it should be fine.
Wright is a good prof and has a strong focus on learning. He really wants you to develop a qualitative understanding of what’s going on. Because he’s the director, he’s VERY busy. As such, he can be very unresponsive (also only uses Microsoft Teams for some reason?) and disorganized; for example, he didn’t have time to cover transistors in class so he threw up a recording on it 4 days before the midterm. Another small criticism is that he tends to get off-track during lectures and just talk about interesting applications, or his wife/kids/divorce, so the material itself is not covered well sometimes.
MTE 204
Final Grade: 70
Taught by Duane Cronin. This course teaches numerical ways of solving various problems, like systems of equations, integrals, and differential equations. I, and many others, found it to be quite boring. The first half of the course is fairly general, as you learn methods to solve various types of problems. The second half of the course gets a bit weirder; essentially, they want to teach you PDEs, but these are too complicated to teach a general method so they just teach you a couple super specific cases (heat conduction across a rod and a plate). I thought this was a bit stupid. There are also two MATLAB projects; not hard but quite annoying. I thought the final for this course was quite hard; even the easy questions used methods that needed a lot of iterations, for example the differentiation question asked us to use RK 2nd order for 5 iterations or something, which is time consuming.
Cronin seems like a generally nice guy…but he’s very old school. I messed up because I forgot to submit Project 1 (10% of final mark), and he wouldn’t let me submit it or shift weight to Project 2, saying that he “must follow the course syllabus”. Obviously, it’s my mistake and he’s not obligated to do anything, but many other profs would have some leniency in this scenario; also, the “must follow the course syllabus” thing seems patently untrue as other profs shift things around all the time. For example, Wright shifts weight from the MTE 220 midterm to the final based on how much he thinks you improved, and Maftoon removed Assignment 5 from SYDE 252 because he thought we were too stressed. Cronin also threw a fit and left the class Discord server after someone made a joke that I thought was fairly harmless; he was basically unreachable after as he didn’t respond to emails much or check Piazza.
MTE 241
Final Grade: 100
Taught by Mike Cooper-Stachowsky. This is an operating systems course, with a focus on real-time OS. Very knowledge heavy course, you need to remember a lot of stuff. I got lazy after a certain point and stopped taking notes because there’s so much stuff. It helps to think about the system as a whole, don’t get too bogged down in the details or you’ll get confused. Good resources:
- Mike’s Textbook
- Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective (Really good! Pirate the book)
- Operating Systems: 3 Easy Pieces (Good but more high level than this course)
There are 5 labs that use the STM32 Cortex M4 chip. I thought they were pretty fun and not too hard, some others struggled. They can definitely be a bit frustrating because it’s hard to debug.
Mike is a nice prof, he has very chill policies. For example, there are no hard deadlines on the labs; you just have to submit Lab 1 and 2 before the midterm and Labs 3, 4, 5 before the last day of class. You can also re-submit the labs to improve your mark and gain a better understanding of the material. Also, Mike’s really into AI; LLMs were used to grade our labs, write exam questions, write the course textbook, etc. He will also let people use his powerful computer with a nice GPU to do AI things.
SYDE 252
Final Grade: 91
Taught by Nima Maftoon. This course teaches you about various types of signals and systems. Pretty math heavy course; make sure you know how imaginary numbers work and Euler’s identity. The content itself is not very interesting unless you think about the applications. There is a group project (building a cochlear implant system), not too hard and kind of interesting.
Maftoon is a very nice guy. He gave everyone 100% for Assignment 5 because people were stressed out, and extended deadlines for the project. His lecturing style is a bit dry, and his notes are a bit messy, but nothing unmanageable. His exams are fair; the midterm was probably a bit too easy, as the class had a really high average (something like 91%). The final was a bit harder but also nothing too challenging; I likely only found it to be harder because I fell behind.