Brian's World

Graduation Status

I am entering my seventh semester at RPI this fall, which is more commonly known as my senior year.  If all goes according to plan, I’ll be graduating at the end of the spring semester.

My theory for selecting courses during college has been to choose courses that interest me, and figure out the rest later.  During my sophomore and junior years I opted to take coures without really considering how they fit into my graduation requirements because they sounded neat or interesting to me.  Unfortunately, since I would like this to be my last year of undergraduate studies at RPI, I have to start figuring out how to massage those courses I took into a degree and figure out what exactly I have left to take to graduate.

The largest area I need additional courses to satisfy is the Humanities and Social Science field.  If I’m understanding the requirements right, I need to take 2 4-credit courses in Humanities and 2 4-credit courses in Social Sciences.  Also, I have to take 2 4-credit courses in the same “field”, where at least one of them has a number greater than 4000.  There’s also this thing about taking 22 credits worth of them but whatever.  Unfortunately, most of the courses I’ve taken haven’t fallen into a “humanities” or “social science” realm.  I was interested in taking an arts course that dealt with TV production or a communication course about communication on the internet, but they all have requirements that I’m not interested in satisfying.  I think the biggest challenge is going to be the “social science” section, because nothing cool is a social science.  I’m not interested in economics, psychology, and any halfway decent cognition course is restricted to Game Design majors.  At least the “humanities” section has enough courses that I am bound to find one (Technical Writing for the WWW) that I don’t mind taking.

There is also the problem of “technical concentration” within my Computer and Systems Engineering major.  None of the “concentrations” they offer are particularly appealing to me.  Even more troubling, half of the classes you can take to establish one of these “concentrations” aren’t offered.  Its too bad they didn’t offer a concentration in the internet, but that would likely require a few more courses to be taught about the web/internet/networking.

I believe I can graduate by doing the following:

Fall 2009 Semester – PD2, PD3, PEA, Intro to Economics, Web Science.

I don’t want to take Intro to Econ, but its classified as a “social science” so I will take it, and it expands my options for the depth requirement I have to meet.  While I’m not in Web Science yet, the professor twittered @ me indicated I can be and it should be a pretty fun class.

Spring 2010 Semester – ECSE Design, Any humanities/social science class in the 4xxx level in ECON, WRIT, PSYC, or IHSS), and something to fulfill my “concentration” requirement.

Hopefully someone at the tetherless web will offer a cool course in the spring I can use to fill out my schedule.

I believe this plan will enable me to successfully graduate, but anything is possible at RPI.

Now time to figure out how to stream live HD video on the cheap for RPI TV….