Recap on AY24/25 Semester 2

Published: June 22, 2025

This is no new content. I found myself yapping a little too much in the closing remarks of my most recent course reviews, so I decided to move that last section to make it standalone.

This semester opened my eyes into the field of information theory and allowed me to dive into computational complexity theory. I am well aware that I am barely scratching the surface of both fields, and I will as much as possible continue to engage with these materials.

I also took an introductory course in economics, simply because I have never learnt the subject formally and I felt very confused every time I see the news. I feel like there is something important going on in the world that I am missing out. Why do people freak out when prices rise by a few cents, the interest rate rises by a few percent, and how does the money system work anyways? Turns out that most of the questions I had was addressed in macroeconomics, and I am glad to have the basics figured out. Microeconomics, on the other hand, gave me a culture shock as I did not expect the lecturer to spend most of the lectures solving exam-type problems. It brought me back to secondary school when everyone is just trying to pass the exams instead of genuinely learning. It’s also funny that this semester coincides with the announcement of Donald Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs so my macroeconomics professor basically got blessed with free (counter)examples.

Following an introductory linguistics course I took last semester, I figured that it would be fun to learn a new language. I needed a language that still uses the Latin alphabet and I wanted to learn about cultures I have never looked into carefully in the past. I eventually settled on Vietnamese for its similarity with Chinese, which is in fact my mother tongue. Together with CS5230, this introductory Vietnamese course allowed me to experience small class sizes. Every week, there were 2 lectures which lasted 2 hours each. It gets a bit tiring but also the class itself isn’t stressful at all. It’s very chill and a temporary escape from the technical stuff I tend to do. I installed Duolingo to accompany the learning and I felt like it has served as a great complement.

Vietnamese has a great number of single vowels and tones and is very heavy on its diacritics

This semester is also my second semester serving as a TeachSG mentor at Hua Yi Secondary School. I continue to experience very light workload as there is very little event planning involved and it’s mostly teaching and chilling with the mentees who are in their secondary 3 or 4. They are at the age during which they are reasonably well-behaved and are still in the process of discovering what they like. It was a very interesting experience seeing how bonds are slowly formed between us and the mentees. Many things happened, and there are stories and photos I would love to share if there were no privacy concerns, but unfortunately there are. Anyways, I truly wished that we have made some sort of difference in the mentees’ life as they move on.

I was also part of the teaching team of CS1231S and CS2040S as usual. The interesting thing about this semester is that both courses had new lecturers who often had to consult the more experienced tutors for advice. CS1231S had a new lecturer and his style is notably different from Prof. Aaron’s. There had been adjustments to the course contents as well as assessment components. Tutorial attendance was made optional. It didn’t take me too long to get used to it, but notably my CS1231S tutorials usually had only 50% attendance as opposed to near 100% in past semesters. Midterm is replaced with two quizzes which I invigilated in addition to one more makeup. The scope of each exam is thus much smaller.

CS2040S, on the other hand, was where I put most of my attention in terms of teaching. As Prof. Seth became the head of department, Dr. Eldon together with Prof. Diptarka became the lecturers. Together with a few other professors and graduate tutors, they have been diligent in conducting interviews for undergraduate tutors. The resulting teaching team is not only larger than in the previous semesters, but is also of higher quality. I especially liked the dynamics between Eldon and the tutors. There isn’t that big of a generational gap, and we had a lot of fun just chatting about random things throughout the semester. I was also in charge of a team of 8 tutors and together we set up problem sets and tutorials as well as did some forum patrolling.

Dr. Eldon with 5 other CS2040S undergraduate tutors attending the last lecture of the semester. He is the third person from the left.

During the last winter break I picked up Beamer and started making tutorial slides for each tutorial but failed to finish all of them by the start of the semester. I only managed to finish up to the 5th tutorial’s slides. I hosted the 6th tutorial using just a whiteboard. After which, I did a poll to decide whether to continue to whiteboard or to use slides from other tutors. It’s interesting to see that most of my students unanimously voted for the former. Ever since then I have been handwriting some notes and using whiteboards for my CS2040S tutorials.

Lastly, our team had the unique experience of substantially rewriting Problem Set 4 on Scapegoat Trees. It was first pointed out by one of the graduate tutors that an enhancement can be made to the problem set which would require efforts on rewriting. Being in charge of the problem set, I decided to give it a go. This was unplanned for in my schedule of the semester, so I had to flexibly allocate time for the rewriting. Issues after issues have been overlooked and surfaced, and I had to conduct fixes several times even when the problem set has been released. It honestly was quite a mess, especially so to my personal schedule. To any student reading this, I apologize for the mess a few months ago. On the brighter side, however, it was truly a unique experience to me and my team, and it opens up further work to finish up the enhancements in the coming academic year, ultimately changing the problem set for the better.

So, overall, this semester has been packed, but very fruitful. I enjoyed it a lot, and I continue to wish that the two remaining semesters of my degree can unfold similarly, with more things to learn and discover, and more brilliant people to meet. As for the uncertainty that lies in the future beyond graduation, that is perhaps the content for another blog.