Fall 2005
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Financial and Managerial Accounting for Decision Making (ACCTG 211)
Credits: 4
Instructor: John Ketz
Registrar’s Description
Introduction to the role of accounting numbers in the process of managing a business and in investor decision making.
My thoughts: Let me preface this by saying that, in the end, I’m glad I forced myself to take this class. Let me conclude this by saying that the class average on the final exam was a 56.
Actually this wasn’t as bad as I make it out to be, and I think an understanding of accounting concepts will come in quite handy in the future. I do take issue, though, with the way in which this class was taught. This was the first class where I really felt that having 350 people in my section was a distinct disadvantage, and the professor didn’t go out of his way to compensate for the lack of a personal touch or individual attention. Still, I learned a lot from our textbooks and I at least know enough to look something up later if I need to do so.
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IST Integration (IST 440W)
Credits: 3
Instructor: David Hall
Registrar’s Description
Problem-based approach to technology integration by focussing on real-life problems faced by an organization.
My thoughts: This class presented a nice review of many of the concepts I learned in my previous three years in IST, from requirements definition to project management. All of the lessons revolved around creating a proposal for a distributed collaborative research system for faculty at Penn State.
Documents
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Colloquium (IST 590)
Credits: 1
Instructor: Lynette Kvasny
Registrar’s Description
Continuing seminars that consist of a series of individual lectures by faculty, students, or outside speakers.
My thoughts: The value of this class was not in what I learned about research going on within IST, but rather in the enhanced understanding that I got about academic and professional life. Each week, different professors from within and outside the department would come in to answer our questions about research methods, looking for a job, getting published, etc. Even for the law school-bound, I think these lessons were equally applicable.
Documents
- A sample topic analysis which I actually ended up using when consulting with one of my committee members (61 KB, PDF)
- My thoughts on a presentation on medical informatics by one of the new faculty members in IST (46 KB, PDF)
- Reaction paper on a reading by Phil Agre describing how to build strong professional networks and niches (51 KB, PDF)
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Advanced Topics in Databases (IST 597C)
Credits: 3
Instructor: James Wang
Registrar’s Description
Formal courses given on a topical or special interest subject which may be offered infrequently; several different topics may be taught in one year or semester.
My thoughts: This was by far the most technical graduate-level IST class I’ve taken, and it all lead up to one huge deliverable: paraSITE, our image search enginge. The entire class of nine people worked together on crawling the Web for images (we have nearly half a million now), developing search algorithms, and creating a useful interface for our visitors. Once a visitor do the site finds an image match, we run the SIMPLIcity algorithm that Dr. Wang developed to find images that are visually similar to that one. My role on this project involved developing the entire interface as well as hooking together the various search programs with the user’s query.
The paraSITE project was being developed during the entire semester. During our weekly class meetings, each students would present a different topic each week; in my case, I talked about Natural Language Processing and how it relates to databases.
Documents
- My final report on what I did for the paraSITE project. Parts of this will be used in our conference paper (143 KB, PDF)
- My presentation on research areas in natural language processing (883 KB, PPT)
- An early mockup of what I thought the interface and user interaction for paraSITE would look like (122 KB, PDF)
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NAUI Basic Scuba (KINES 045)
Credits: 1.5
Instructor: Craig Brown
Registrar’s Description
A course to introduce students to the fundamentals of Scuba diving.
My thoughts: This class was much more physically demanding than I’d imagined. In the classroom we learned about physics and dive tables, but in the pool, we would suit up and then basically swim a bunch of laps until we (or at least I) was exhausted. It was fun for a while. My favorite part was during our “play time” when I could lay on the bottom of the pool and stare up at the surface.
Documents
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Beginning Piano: Non-Music Major (MUSIC 050)
Credits: 1
Instructor: Vagner Silva
Registrar’s Description
Introduction to the keyboard, notation, chord progressions, transposition, improvisation, and simple accompanying techniques for the non-music major.
My thoughts: I loved this class. It was great to have something entirely new to learn and practice every day. The class was very small and we all got a great deal of personalized attention. I actually got pretty nervous for all of our exams, but it all came together nicely in the end. In fact, I liked it so much that I’m taking the intermediate-level class next semester.
Documents