As a computer scientist and a musician studying at the University of Connecticut, I’ve taken quite a few courses over these past few years. Not all courses are created equal, however; some are an easy A, and others rip the soul straight from your body and beat it to an unrecognizable pulp. This article is a glimpse into what was, for me, the toughest courses: which ones tested my mind, body, and spirit in ways that no courses ever had before.
5. Philosophy and Social Ethics
An easier one to start, I feel, philosophy is a course that you can tell varies by who teaches it. Specifically, the first time I took philosophy, there was so much reading I had to do that I couldn’t keep up with it all. Since then, I’ve had an easier time with reading a lot of things, and clearly, I got the upper hand on philosophy when I got an A in it last semester, but man, it’s a rough course with dense readings. If you’re not ready to tackle the density of Aristotle, Plato, Marx, and Rousseau, this course isn’t going to be smooth sailing. With tons of time spent coding already in my third semester, I was not ready to plunge myself into the deep end.
4. Wind Ensemble
Surprisingly enough, a music ensemble makes one of these top spots for me, and the most challenging of those for sure was the wind ensemble. Out of all of the ensembles I’ve been a part of at UConn, wind ensemble has a balance of some of the hardest pieces of music I’ve ever played at a collegiate level, with the least amount of time to learn notes out of any ensemble. Wind ensemble puts on two concerts every semester; one typically around week seven and the other around week 11. With each cycle of music having about an hour of music, that’s two hours of intensive music to learn and perfect in 11 weeks on top of your other courses. This course won’t lower your GPA directly; it just might make your other time fewer and far between.
3. Computer Architecture
Now we’re getting into the real heavy hitters! Computer architecture is a course that sees you explore the inner workings of a computer, getting all the way down to the very low level assembly coding language. With other languages, you have nice abstractions that simplify a lot of what you do, like calling functions or allocating memory, but assembly rips all of that abstraction away for the benefit of giving you precise control over what the computer exactly does. You have to know the ins and outs of the binary and hexadecimal number systems, translating human-readable code into binary that the computer can execute, how programs access memory and speed up the process of reading it, and even how computers can run multiple instructions at the same time with pipelining. This is really the first class that requires you to know exactly what’s going on with your program, making it a very tough one for people who don’t have background knowledge in Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) or Central Processing Units (CPUs).
2. Systems Programming
This is the first weed-out class for computer scientists in my eyes, and one you’ll have to spend hours looking at and trying to understand what’s happening. Systems programming is a course that’s two courses in a trench coat: a C essentials course and a multiprocessing course. The first third of the semester up until exam one is all about learning the basics of the C programming language. C isn’t much higher level of a language than assembly, which makes it both easier to write and understand while keeping the programmer in charge of what happens with their code. After exam one is what really gives this course the reputation it has: multiprocessing! You better have gotten the basics of C down, because once you throw multiple processes in, you have so many more problems like synchronization, process lifetimes, and different algorithms, since you can have multiple processes running at a time. Like my teaching assistant said on the first day of this course, “You either pass this course your first time, or you fail it on your third.”
Honorable Mention: Marching Band
Before getting to my number one pick, I feel an honorable mention is more than due for marching band. Marching band alone is absolutely not a hard course to get an A in; the problem comes when you take marching band added to a full-time schedule, and you realize how big of a time commitment this course actually is. Typically, at UConn, one credit courses meet for one hour every week and have the expectation that you spend a total of three hours outside of class studying and preparing for them. Marching band, however, meets for a grand total of six hours every week (plus another two if you’re a part of the percussion, color guard, or drum majors) along with an additional 11 hours spent at home football games and various events most Saturdays. These 17-19 hours haven’t even accounted for any time you need to spend outside of rehearsal practicing your music or your marching! Marching band isn’t a hard course, but it makes the other courses so much harder by taking up this extensive chunk of your time.
1. Programming Language Translation
For the top spot, there’s no other course I could pick besides the one that emailed the students before the semester began, warning them about the dragons that lie ahead. Have you ever thought about how exactly your code turns into something the machine can execute? Well, in programming language translation, you get to learn every detail about how that happens. Programming language translation taps into every class you’ve ever had to take during your time at college and walks you through the process of creating a compiler for a new language, C–, which is both a limited and hugely expansive set of features. In order to succeed, you have to tap into every single class you’ve taken in your time at UConn: knowledge of assembly from computer architecture, deterministic finite automata from theory of computing, C++ coding prowess from C++ essentials, and so much more. There’s no course I’ve ever been scared of when a homework dropped, or an exam date was coming up, nearly as much as programming language translation.
Now that we’ve gone through hell unscathed together and bested the dragons that came along the way, hopefully you either have a sigh of relief, thanking every god out there that you don’t have to take these classes, or you’ve just spent the last five minutes venting your frustrations about these classes into your screen. Wherever you fall in those two camps, hopefully you’ve gained the strength to best the dragons in your own life and will fight to see another day, no matter the challenge!