Spring 2005
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Introduction to Finance (FIN 100)
Credits: 3
Instructor: Greg Pierce
Registrar’s Description
The nature, scope, and interdependence of the institutional and individual participants in the financial system.
My thoughts: I took this class as an option for my business minor. A lot of the concepts we covered were fairly basic; I would have much rather taken the Honors version of this class, but scheduling conflicts prevented this from happening. Nevertheless, I did learn a lot about financial statements, time value of money, discounted cash flow valuation, interest rates, bonds, stocks, and capital investment decisions.
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Professional Development Theory and Practice (IST 397B)
Credits: 1
Instructor: Jan Mahar
Registrar’s Description
397B IT Professional Development: Theory and Practice explores every avenue of your job search and professional development questions and concerns! This course will cover these topics and more:
- Discovering the ’secret weapons’ for career fairs (2-minute infomercial, branding)
- Strategic Comeback Questions at job interview
- Handling multiple offers… acceptable stalling’ techniques
- Negotiating the best salary & benefit package
- Identifying ‘dead men walking’ (10 top signs of getting fired)
- Managing your manager
- Optimizing meetings to lead or attend (Meeting Management)
My thoughts: I took this class to help hone my career skills. It was a fairly light overview of a number of career topics as described above. A typical class would consist of a short lecture followed by some group activities, usually a trivia game or role-playing exercise. Our main project for the semester was a corporate culture project where we visited a local company, Blue Mountain Quality Resources, and interviewed them on ten different aspects of their business. This interview and field visit served as the basis for a report and presentation.
Documents
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Human-Computer Interaction: The User and Technology (IST 521)
Credits: 3
Instructor: Michael McNeese
Registrar’s Description
Users, models of users, developing the models, technology for creating interfaces; examples of good research and implications for Human-Computer Interface (HCI) design.
My thoughts: Although the description of this class may make it seem like just another version of IST 331, it really grew beyond the bounds of the latter. We spent a lot of time talking about psychology, the brain, attention, and “cogminutia fragmentosa.” Dr. McNeese draws a lot of his experience from his work as an Air Force researcher, so it’s no surprise that the majority of our projects dealt with pilot and driver performance. The files below give much more detail about these projects. Suffice it to say that I found this class so interesting that I am now working with Mike on my thesis project.
Documents
- An evaluation of the factors that contribute to unsafe driving (167 KB, PDF)
- A description of the mental model behind the driving task (929 KB, PDF)
- My design of an experiment to test driver performance while operating an iPod (70 KB, PDF)
- A description of the cognitive task analysis we conducted (720 KB, PDF)
- Paper summaries and HCI guidelines (117 KB, PDF)
- Combating Fatigue and Information Overload: A Smart Car Solution (617 KB, PDF)
- The poster that accompanied our final assignment (833 KB, JPG)
- An online textbook about information overload
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Human Information Behavior: Information and the User (IST 531)
Credits: 3
Instructor: Eileen Trauth
Registrar’s Description
Introduction to research into the nature of human information and communication processes at the individual, social, and organizational levels.
My thoughts: This class took over where IST 501 left off, going into much more detail on the “people” side of IST. Those interested in technology often spend so much time using ever computing power, and expanding the use of computing into so many new areas, that we rarely stop to see both what effects those changes are having and if those effects are being felt equally among the global population. The purpose of this class was to draw attention to those questions. The first half of the class was conducted in a discussion format, while the latter half consisted primarily of pairs of students giving presentations on selected chapters from our textbooks. Each student was also responsible for a fairly substantial research paper on a subject of their choice. Although most of the topics in the class were somewhat familiar to me, I was forced to look at them from an academic’s point of view, and to validate my claims with research rather than simply appeal to emotion. It is likely that the material covered in this class will eventually become part of my (possible) legal career which I hope to place at the nexus of law, society, and technology.
Documents
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Golf I (KINES 029)
Credits: 1
Instructor: Greg Nye
Registrar’s Description
A course designed to give students an understanding of and a proficiency in golf skills, rules, and etiquette.
My thoughts: I had been saving up my GHA (Health and Physical Activity general education) credits for over two years for exactly this class. What a great way to ned the year! Starting in March, when the weather slowly started to get nice, I would learn how to golf for 75 minutes each morning. We covered putting, chipping, full swings, and some basic rules and etiquette. Coach Nye clearly wanted us to just get an appreciation for the game, and it definitely worked for me. I highly recommend this class (especially this, the half-semester version) for any current Penn State students. God bless you, General Education.
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Applied Statistics (STAT 500)
Credits: 3
Instructor: Andrew Wiesner
Registrar’s Description
Descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing, power, estimation, confidence intervals, regression, one- and 2-way ANOVA, Chi-square tests, diagnostics.
My thoughts: This class served as a quantitative methods course for the Master’s degree. It was tremendously helpful because it was designed as a statistics course for non-statistics students at the graduate level. It was very much tuned towards helping us prepare for the statistical portions of our respective theses and dissertations. The instructor did a great job of giving us examples with direct application to the types of work we would be doing, no matter what field we were in, and we covered quite a bit of material. Although we used Minitab a fair amount, this class was unlike STAT 200 in that knowing formulas and higher-level concepts proved quite helpful on the exams and homeworks. I would recommend this class for undergraduates who have a higher-than-average interest in statistics (but aren’t willing to commit to that as a major,) though I’m not sure if the stat. department would allow this.
Documents