Year 1 Summer at HKUST

This is the last time that I can call myself year 1. Actually that day probably ended since JUPAS registration. Not sure. Well if the student centre says I’m year 1 (it does), then I guess I still am.

This semester, I took a physics course along with its lab course. The lab course was pretty fun, but the lecture course was less so. I mean, the lecturer taught well, and some of the material was pretty good. However, it was quite boring in general, so I did not pay too much effort.

Of course, the main purpose of staying at HKUST during the summer was for the course on percolation theory. Originally, I had discussed with the professor for an independent study course. But now it has four members and became a little seminar. That was an interesting experience. Each person presents twice, one long 80 minute presentation and another short 40 minute one. I really screwed up my long presentation but had a comeback in the short one. I definitely learned how to better prepare for the presentation. For example, it is quite important to format your notes in a way that you don’t forget to say something important.

I just had my exam yesterday. It went pretty poorly. I basically couldn’t finish any long question. I guess I had the idea though and simply wasn’t really able to work out the details, since I still got a decent score. The professor probably used some ‘American grading’ to make us all A or above. Surprisingly I am still slightly higher than the mean, so at least one person got a worse score than I did. This is my first A+, although it’s not that impressive.

Before the exam, he said that if we followed along with the course we should all be fine. He was right. I tried to memorise those auxilliary tools that were really difficult to come up with, but as it turns out, that was not necessary at all. Very sad.

I definitely did not get a solid understanding of the basics of percolation theory from this course. I got a taste of a little bit of a lot of things and that’s it. Throughout the next term, I guess I will continue to study this stuff and do all the exercises. Maybe I will make a YouTube lecture series about percolation and really just break it down. Idk. Pretty busy next term though. Well, pretty busy every term.