Lots of Pain
from 06/10/2025, by uni — 5m read
I signed up for this course because of its flipped structure. I'd taken a couple classes with this professor before and really liked his style: watch lectures on your own time, then use class time to work on projects and ask questions. It worked for me. But this time? This time was different.
The course aimed to go beyond CSCI 320 (Principles of Data Management) and have us implement our own database system, read from and write to hardware, accept SQL-like queries, and execute them efficiently. That's a tall order. What made it worse? None of the lectures taught you how to actually do that. We were expected to figure it out ourselves. The syllabus said "implementation," but there was no walkthrough, no scaffolding. Just us.
Group work was a disaster. Three of our five members were apparently 4.0 GPA students, and I have no idea how. They were all writing Java as if they were still in their first year. Their code was incomprehensible, so I had to rewrite large chunks just to make the project viable. One other teammate and I carried the entire thing until the final two weeks, when we hit a wall: B+ Trees. No one else could help. No one else tried. We got ghosted.
On the last day of class, only three of us showed up. My partner and I waited for the other guy to leave so we could speak to the professor privately. But I had another meeting to run to: another class, another group conflict. I left the conversation in my partner's hands.
Later that evening, I checked my phone. His message was short but relieving: "He said, 'I know. I've been watching.'" Our project passed. Our complaints were heard. And I like to think the illusion of their 4.0s didn't survive that semester.
If Cryptography felt like a field that had already peaked, Information Retrieval felt like the opposite. The professor, a charismatic orator, guided us through cutting-edge research on a field changing faster than we could keep up. LLMs, search models, paper after paper. It was challenging, overwhelming, but genuinely fascinating.
And yet, I fell behind. I stopped showing up to class. The group project didn't help. We had to pick an IR model not covered in class, implement it, and present it in lieu of a final. My group? One guy was fully remote, the other a ghost. When we finally submitted our first proposal, after a 14-hour grind, we got a 40%.
The professor asked us: "Do you guys even attend class?"
I came clean. Scheduled a meeting, brought proof of my solo effort through the Google Doc history, and explained the situation. To my surprise, the professor dropped his usual smug tone and gave me real feedback and a bit of grace. One teammate (the remote one) actually stepped up after that. The ghost stayed invisible.
The final presentation day arrived, and I realized there was a real chance I'd be presenting alone. I stood anxiously in a room packed with students I'd never seen before. Five minutes before presentations started, a guy I didn't recognize sat beside me with a notepad full of our group's points - the ghost, apparently. He said nothing.
When we were called up, I presented like my life depended on it. I spoke with no notes, bullshitted through the Q&A, and gave everything I had left in the tank. Afterward, I updated the professor on who contributed what. He said he noticed me scanning the room before the presentations, clearly looking for someone I had never even met before. Then he looked at me and said, "You can sleep well tonight."
My last CS course. And somehow, the most fun.
The professor was funny, relatable, and unorganized in a good way. Lectures were entertaining, not dry. The material was practical: classification, clustering, building actual models with real-world data. Every assignment built off the last, and I found myself engaged in ways I hadn't felt in forever.
But of course, things had to end with one more trial: the final exam. It was open-note, but only handwritten notes were allowed, and all of mine were digital. I had just come back from Texas after bombing out at a collegiate Counter-Strike LAN event and had six hours to rewrite everything into a notebook. I gave up halfway through.
The exam was brutal. The kind of test where the prof might throw in a question like "What quote did I mention at 5:45pm on Friday the 13th?" Still, I did my best. Guessed on a few sections. Left others partially blank.
Then I waited. All my other grades came in. But this one stayed locked until five minutes before the midnight deadline. After refreshing the page 100 times, there it was: 98.8%.
I laughed. I didn't deserve that grade. I basically missed an entire section. Then I remembered the deal we made: write a genuine course evaluation, and the professor would "be lenient." Guess he kept his word.