Important Classes

Today I'm going to write about the most important classes I took at MIT, and what I learned from them. This is inspired by an email I just got from a friend who is currently having trouble deciding what courses to take next term. Of course, these classes are very specific not only to MIT, but to the terms when I took them, but hopefully the lessons learnt will be generally applicable.

Here they are, in no particular order:

16.010/16.020/16.030/16.040: Unified Engineering

Kicking off a list like this without Unified in it would be like listing influential people in my life and neglecting to mention my parents. It would be like making a pizza without the crust. It would be like composing a symphony and forgetting the entire string section.

Unified was a fascinating course, bringing together structures, dynamics, fluid dynamics, electronics, thermodynamics, signals and systems, and several other disciplines of engineering, and combining them to solve complex problems. This was exactly the reason I chose to major in aero/astro, and it was fascinating. It was really hard, too, and I kind of wish I had done a little better in it, except that (a) I have never used my aero/astro knowledge in a real work situation, and (b) I had other things in life to learn about at that time, such as having my first real girlfriend.

This is also where I first learned Matlab and a number of other tools that proved to be invaluable to me in the years to come.

21M.051: Fundamentals of Music

I took this class with George Ruckert, an excellent and inspiring instructor. The reason this class was so formative for me was that each member of the class (a small group of about eight people) was REQUIRED to stand in front of everyone and sing an unaccompanied solo... every day.

This was as terrifying as you imagine it would be, at first... but gradually we became accustomed to it, and eventually, I sang my first a cappella piece with three other students as a final project. One of the songs I learned for that class became my audition song for the Toons (it was "Wayfaring Stranger", for the record), and that, of course, changed my life dramatically, leading to such momentous life events as my dropping out of grad school and my return to Japan after the JET program.

12.006: Chaos and Complexity

This class was important to me because it introduced to me hard mathematical evidence for a philosophical concept I had never understood. The basic idea, without getting too far into details, is that even when the mechanics of fundamental processes are understood, higher-level patterns can arise from them which, though deterministic, are essentially unpredictable due to sensitivity to initial conditions.

I can tell that I've lost 80% of my audience already...

Anyway, it raises all sorts of questions about the role God might play in a deterministic universe, and also inspires thoughts about free will and the validity and value of bottom-up analysis. All starting from the problem of modeling a ball bouncing on an oscillating surface.

I should read that book again...

21M.301: Harmony and Counterpoint I

Simply put, this class taught me invaluable skills that I have used again and again while arranging a cappella music throughout my life. Elena Ruehr was a fantastic and deeply inspiring teacher as well. I still remember her looking at one student's composition, and, on the fly, playing it, first as written, then in the way Bach would have harmonized it, then in 3 or 4 more styles of historical composers... wow. Talk about having a true, deep understanding of what you are teaching.

6.302: Hell

Ok, it was actually "Control Systems", but close enough... This class was irreplaceably valuable for two reasons:

(1) Control systems are a discipline of engineering that cuts across borders, serving aero and comp sci and chemical engineers equally well. The relevance of this class to anything cannot be overstated. I find it fascinating, and it's not only highly important, it's quite difficult to learn on your own.

(2) The Lab Assistant while I was taking the course was one of the most evil, mean human beings I'd ever encountered in my life. Not only would he put down, insult, and discourage students, he would mark entire weeks of work on lab reports as worthless with comments like "You obviously have no idea what you're talking about" and zero points for the assignment. No feedback, no teaching, no encouragement, no love.

In short, he taught me everything a teacher should not do. This was quite instructive, and I like to think that it helped me later in life when I became a teacher myself.

12.411: Astronomy Field Camp

This class taught me once and for all that I do NOT want to be an astronomer. It's a lonely, lonely job, waking up in the afternoons and sleeping in the morning, spending most of the intervening time in a small room next to a telescope, incessantly photographing unfamiliar star fields. I am a social person - I need to interact with people to be happy. I didn't fully realize this until this class took me to the Arizona desert.

On the other hand, the Grand Canyon was fantastic. Actually the whole program was well-run and quite valuable to me. It's simply and unfortunately the case that I'm not a good match for astronomy. I have no complaints whatsoever about the faculty or administration. I've always felt that the warmth and humanity of Course 12 was one of its strong points.

6.004: Computation Structures

This wasn't even in my major, but they taught us, from the bottom up, how a computer works. Starting from the atoms in semiconductors and transistors and going up to the operating system. We even built a computer from scratch using wires and basic chips, such as and gates and flip-flops. Given the significance of the role computers play in our lives, I think having an understanding of how a computer works is quite important, even if only on a philosophical level, in that what we do not understand seems mystical and somehow untouchable. Fascinating class. Lost a lot of sleep over that one.

Other Stuff

Certainly these classes weren't the most useful classes I took, nor were they the most difficult. They were quite fascinating, however, and I believe each one opened my eyes to something in the world they had previously been closed to.

Other classes I wish I had taken:

Linear Algebra
Control Systems (another - better - class, preferably the one in my major)
Artificial Intelligence
Rhetoric (I don't think they even offered a class on this at MIT)
Principles of Software Design
6.270 (the LEGO robot design competition)

I don't know if this is helpful to anyone, for the reasons I already mentioned, but I think it gives an indication of the types of things that I find valuable, looking back after having finished my engineering degree.

Good luck to those of you still struggling through your "education". Remember that graduation doesn't mark the end of your education - it only marks a shift of responsibility: the school is no longer responsible for your education. Now you are.