The DLSU CS-ST Flowchart Ranked from Worst to Best

Okay, brief prologue: this is a post from my secret blog where I use codenames for everyone so I dunno, if you run into a codename here, have fun figuring out who's who. I'm not giving it away. Also, if you know who's which professor, hush your mouth. I tried to be as constructive as possible but I'm an emotional person so I sometimes speak with passion, not logic. I already edited these feedbacks to be less harsh and blunt than the original publishing which is out there somewhere in neverland. Anyway, this is meant only as entertainment. If any of this offends you, I don't know, um, read something less offensive? Anyway, enjoy...

Back to our regular dose of fun from that depressing last post, I have decided to rank every single goddamn course in the De La Salle University Bachelor of Science Major in Computer Science, with specialization in Software Technology flowchart from worst to best.

A few ground rules:

1. My target audience is mainly people who have gone through these courses, preferably with me.

2. This ranking is based on how much I enjoyed the class. It may have nothing to do with the relevance of the class to my degree or how well the class was taught. A class may have had the worst professor with the worst style and still end up in the top 10. Likewise, a class may have a professor who really knows their stuff and still end up near the bottom.

3. I only considered weekly classes that span the entire term they were in. No IPERSEF, no LASARE1-3.

Without further ado, let us begin with the worst of the worst: the forsaken ones. Allonsy!

73. SCIMATP

What it's about: Material Science, focused on Physics

This course started out great. The prof seemed reasonable and confident in her teaching. We had reasonable seatworks. We had reasonable lessons. Everything about this course seemed reasonable.

And then week 10 hit.

For this course, we had a final project where we had to create an infographic about a certain type of material e.g. Ceramics, Precious Stones, Plants, etc. By week 10, she had each group report their research on these materials. Each report took about 40 minutes. Each report, ours included, was painfully boring and unengaging. I actually spent most of these periods watching Classic Doctor Who on my laptop, GOD, IT WAS BORING. I did notice one group doing really terribly with their presentation, since the guy presenting kept making annoying jokes about the current material. They were reporting on noble metals, y'see, so when he said "Gold", he'd say "Also known as AU" as in an "aw" sound. Silver was "Ag", Platinum was a forced "Pt" sound as in I swear saliva flew from his lip as he forced that fucking Pt out.

I thought it was over, but little did I know, WE WOULD HAVE A MOTHERFUCKING MIDTERM EXAM ABOUT ALL THE REPORTS!

Rule # 1: Don't fucking use student reports as basis for exams unless you monitored the reports beforehand. That's just plain irresponsible. One group, I shit you not, was reporting on precious gems, and they said the moonstone "protects against psychic attacks". WE WERE GONNA GET QUIZZED ON THAT SHIT?!

Rule # 2: Quizzes, as much as possible, should be based on understanding, not stock knowledge. Memorization is the worst way to learn. Jesus H. Christ there was so much shit to memorize.

I nearly flunked that exam. It was terrible. This entire fucking course was terrible. The last half was so bad, it relentlessly infected the first half.

This won't be a thing in this blog series, but if I were to give this course a rating, it would be 0/10. Fuck this course

72. TREDTRI

What it's about: The Bible and its meaning

I had high expectations of this course. I've never read the Bible, so being forced to read, what my best friend Victor calls, "the best stories ever written" was an interesting prospect. Finally understanding this gigantic tome of books was going to be within my reach. I'm not obsessed with Christianity, but the Bible has always interested me relatively to a good extent so I was quite looking forward to this.

Our professor made us read random papers about the Bible and then write a reaction afterward for the entire term. I'm not shitting you. That's what we did. 

I wouldn't mind this if she explained the papers, but no, she'd just tell us to photocopy the 20-80 page behemoths and then come to class, read silently for the entire class period, and then write and submit a reaction paper. No discussion. No argument. No polemics. No debate. No passion. 

She had a fucking Ph. D. on theology.

You know, I had two good theology courses before this one. This was just fucking disappointing.

One time, when she made us read a nigh incomprehensible piece of shit, she was actually considering making us read a theological thesis for the next few weeks, writing a reaction paper for each chapter. I snapped that day and I glued pages together, made blackout poetry, before finally confronting my professor and demanding a better class. She relented and as a response, she made each person or pair of persons report on one book of the Bible. I did Ecclesiastes, AKA the best book in the Bible, and everyone else did theirs. It was better. I was actually learning, but still, this class could have been so much better.

In the end, she gave us all 3.5's. Beatrice, Raven, Arya, Pedro, and all the other elites stormed the castle, and, after the night before of me ranting to my mom, she told me one salient piece of advice: be smart.

"Yes, Jon, what can I do for you?" she said, on the day of grade consultation.

“I..." I said, as the light of the Seven flashed behind me, anticipating my next move, "would like to see a breakdown of my grade."

She never returned our papers, so she had no basis for our grades. That, and all of us got the same grade, meant she was just looking for a grievance.

She then said that our catechetical immersion grades just arrived and we actually get all 4.0's. Morally, I should have still gone for the grievance since she was just a useless instructor. But I was tired and I didn't want to waste another second on her useless existence. 

71-70.NSTPCW1-2

What it's about: Community Service

I'm going to sound like an asshole for these two slots, but disclaimer, I don't mind community service. As long as I'm doing it with people I can work well with, it's a fine venture.

But then again, I am an asshole, so of course I would have rather been doing anything else.

The first phase was the planning phase, but it was a lot of talk about the Lasallian Reflective Framework, which really, in the long run, if I'm being completely honest, doesn't do much in the realm of implementation of plans. We spent one goddamn term on this. That was NSTPCW1.

NSTPCW2 was when we went to the community weekly to do our shit. Unfortunately, I was assigned along with Dodge to teach preschool. PRESCHOOL. Is it assy to claim I'm not qualified for this? That I'm better off teaching, IDK, 4th Grade? I mean teachers have to get a DEGREE to teach preschool. In fact, preschool may be the hardest level to teach, ladies and gentlemen. It is literally teaching kids to read and write. How do preschool teachers do that?! They are gods!

Aside from increasing my appreciation for preschool teachers by a hundredfold, this course did nothing for me. Every time before we left, our facilitator would demand that someone share their learnings. Jesus H. Christ, woman, how much more pretentious are you going to force us to be?

Asshole Moment (hopefully) over. Apologies to everyone offended by this entry.

69. TREDFOR

What it's about: Kingdom of God, Marriage, Single Blessedness, and all that shit

After TREDTRI, I thought nothing could get worse. Well, at least for me, SCIMATP was the only thing. TREDFOR was fine in my book. What really changed my mind about this was Beatrice. Aside from being during the term that we stopped being friends, she was extremely vocal about her vitriol for this subject.

Let me explain: our professor was a cloudcuckoolander. She would go on tangents left and right. She was the personification of the first derivative </calculusjoke>. She never stayed on topic and when she does, it's in this extremely closed way that leaves little room for you to respond. 

She was very vocal of her disapproval of divorce, gay marriage, and a lot of controversial topics, which would be fine if she respected other opinions as a way of being human together, but she once said "just because something is legal, doesn't make it moral" and this was in reference to divorce. This struck Beatrice in an extremely wrong way. I was not as offended as her, but the main thing I hated about this course was just how goddamn boring it was.

I have nothing much left to say. I don't like being bored. Next.

68. FITWELL

What it's about: A shitload of aerobics

I don't like exercise. I climb stairs. I do a lot of walking. That's it. 

This class taught us to dance, goddammit. And not just dance. Each step had to be proper. The entire first half of this course was to the tune of Nicki Minaj's "Va Va Voom" and boy howdy, is it just annoying to have to repeat the entire routine because one person messed up. Not to fucking mention we were being graded for this shit.

The second half, we had to create our own routine. That was fun coz we could choose our own song. Harry chose "Feel This Moment" and it was a great song to dance to. Also, Butas got lazy during his moment so our professor made him do the routine solo, so that gave rise to what I called "The Butas Supremacy"

This class has some nostalgia for being during the first ever term, but other than that, eh. It can rot. Necessary but should have been a pass/fail subject.

67. SOCTEC2

What it's about: How Science affects Society, how society develops, and policy recommendations

This course is in two parts: lecture, where we have 25 item exams, and tutorial, where we have to create a research paper. The paper was the easy part. This was after our second professor for the tutorial. The first professor grouped us on her own in the most fucked up way I have ever experienced in my 17 years of education. She made us line up by height and then counted off six people at a time, so all the short people are together and so forth. What the fuck?

The lecture is a horse of another color. It was godly boring and barely comprehensible. Our professor loved visual puns and put them in her slides as much as possible, making for distracting presentations. The exams were bullshit. One answer could easily have been another. 

66. CCSALGE

What it's about: Algebra

I'm going to sound like an asshole again. I'm sorry in advance.

I liked algebra in high school. A lot... This class however, was like a 14 week crash course on 3 years of algebra. As such, there was little time for student-professor interaction. There was no "discussion" only lecture, and I found that deathly boring. Like I said, I don't like being bored.

65. FILDLAR

What it's about: Translation and Research in Filipino

I have nothing against gays. I am not the least bit homophobic. So when I say our professor was gay, that's not a personal attack against him. No what really soiled my mood was one session where he pushed the gay agenda as a discussion on language. How did he get evidence of our learning, he paired us up randomly and had us write a food recipe in gay lingo. This was torture. My partner was forced to write "Ilagay ang shet na pasta" in a desperate attempt to put something interesting in our output. What the fuck?

In fact, the first half of this class was just outright terrible. He had a seat plan. He didn't let us choose where to sit for the whole term. And then he gave a series of readings and each meeting, he'd pick five random people to sit in front and be bombarded with questions. If you don't get picked ever, you get a perfect score. If you always get picked, bad luck for you. He let the students pick the index cards. Dodge had a blue index card among all white index cards. Needless to say, Dodge got picked all the time. He wouldn't discuss the readings further after the firing line. He'd just move on to the next. Oh, and this asshole had the balls to give an exam about everything he didn't bother discussing. 

The second half was excellent though. He taught how to research well enough. That is why this isn't as low on the list as you'd have thought.

64. TREDONE

What it's about: Basic Theology Concepts and Religions of the World

In a nutshell, our teacher was kinda boring but he was nice enough. He let us report on the religions, which was deathly boring. I have nothing much to say. Next!

63. ENGLRES

What it's about: Research

This course wasn't bad. I don't actually have much to say about this course. It was fun to make a research paper with Beatrice. Our professor was very good. It's just, this class doesn't do much to stand out. It's a very straightforward class. 

62. PERSEF2

What it's about: Career, Family, and some other shit I don't remember

This is our yearly "homeroom" class. We had one for our first two years. This was the second year class.  This class was mostly boring, but I was with the all-star interesting people. We had Tomoya, Ducky, Pakyu, Pedro, Hapon, 中國人, and Max on one end, Beatrice, Arya, Benjamin, Raven, Ursa, and Glenn on the other. 

Our prof made us set up a game at the beginning of each class. These were usually fun.

61. ENGLCOM

What it's about: Reading, Viewing, Listening, and Writing in English

Half this class was good. Half this class was shit. The good part was the RVLC component, which was a pretty solid class. The bad part was... well...

60. FORMDEV

What it's about: St. La Salle's life and values

A lot of people are ambivalent about this subject. Some think it's a waste of time, others don't mind it. I'm of the latter. This course is mainly handled by students, which is kinda cool. It involves a lot of socialization, since you share your inner thoughts about you relating to St. La Salle's life to your group and you write journals about it. We had a fun farming experience. I didn't mind this subject one bit. I got to meet new people and it was pretty fun in the end.

59. HUMALIT

What it's about: Literature

Superlative: Most Disappointing

I love reading books. In case you didn't notice, I live and breathe books. Despite being best in Math and Science in High School, my favorite class was English, which I was also best in. As a freshman, I was eagerly awaiting this class, longing for my chance to return to my element.

What. A. Fucking. Tease.

Our professor had a TERRIBLE set of readings for this course. Instead of appreciating the literature, you just end up hating it because there's more focus on the analysis of literature rather than the search for its purpose. We studied Confirmation Names, The Little Mermaid, Araby, Shatterday, Marjorie, Bonsai, The Prayer, and the novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles.

Confirmation Names is a six paragraph bit of microfiction. This was for the short story module. We spent three goddamn weeks on these six motherfucking piece of shit paragraphs. This story is not even entertaining. Why would you waste your time analyzing something that doesn't even speak out about the essence or issues of humanity... well okay it does, but not in an interesting way. I mean come on, it's a bunch of girls picking saints for their confirmation. Yes, you could analyze the shit out of it. Yes it makes sense. Yes our professor blew our minds with her interpretations. WOULDN'T IT BE MORE INTERESTING IF SHE WERE BLOWING OUR MINDS WITH AN INTERESTING STORY THOUGH?!

The Little Mermaid was the moment she made us analyze fairy tales. This is where I had a bit of fun with the Grimm brothers' "The Mouse, The Bird, and The Sausage". Go read it. It'll take you a minute. It is a wonderful story. As for The Little Mermaid, it's too long and the ending is weird. I like the author's context, but other than that, meh.

Araby, Jesus Christ, Araby. This story is about a boy with a crush on a girl then he realizes it's a waste. Why is this six pages long? Actually, when she started discussing it, she proceeded to blow our minds again. I was actually getting into it when suddenly she asked us to report on it using three fucking frameworks. Then we had to create a playlist for our report. Does everything have to be reported, for fuck's sake? I was so interested in the discussion, and then I got fucking blue-balled. FUCK!

Shatterday was an amazing story. No complaints here. Plus points when she didn't make us report on it. The only annoying thing is she made us read the entire story out loud in class. Waste of a period, but okay, at least the discussion was great.

Marjorie was barely discussed. The play was fun, but I don't think there's much there. We also had to write a paper on this, like we did Araby. Boring. This was our drama module's only work.

Bonsai was a godawful poem in my opinion. I like poetry. I like imagery. I like clever meters. I like rhymes. Bonsai had little to none of that shit. Yes, this is the poetry module. Why couldn't we have better poems?

The Prayer was a good poem but we didn't spend much time on that. And then we had this weird session where she played the entirety of Stupid Love in class. What the fuck? And then we had to read all 24 permutations of the Tetris poem thing by some Filipino author who was experimenting, all while making stupid Tetris shapes with our bodies and crouching, while going overtime. And Meta Knight wondered why I hated this class.

Smaller and Smaller Circles was a good book, but again, we didn't discuss it much. Instead, she gave us a quiz bee about trivia questions on the novel. Then she proceeded to grade everyone on a curve. One group would get a high grade but only one group (or however many tied in top place). The rest got lower grades. 

Overall, this class was disappointing. Not bad, but disappointing. With the same professor, but different selections and less reporting, it could have been so much more interesting. Sad.

58. SCIMATC

What it's about: Chemistry Lecture

This class started out good and ended up good, but it was pretty boring. I was expecting more technical chemistry like in high school, but we got more applied chemistry, like drug discovery, biomolecules, and polymers. Also, by the end, she just showed us random videos about chemistry and included it in the finals.

Rule # 3:  Don't spam videos, especially when in lieu of lectures.

57. INOVATE

What it's about: Technopreneurship, Business Model Canvas, and Lean Startup Canvas

Superlative: Most Annoying Major

I really wanted a lot out this subject. I found business interesting in High School and I wanted to try it out in college. Unfortunately, we had a professor with a terrible style. He employed a "flipped classroom" where instead of him discussing during class time, we'd have to watch lecture videos online, write a reflection about each one, and then that would be the extent of our instruction. Props for the effective bullshitting, but let me translate for those of you who are innocent enough to not realize this: "I won't be teaching you. I'll be getting my salary from you, but basically, I'll be resting on the laurels of some guy who made a series of lecture videos that already covers what I would have taught you in the first place so it's completely justifiable that I don't teach a single thing."

So what did we do during each three hour weekly session? We had to create our own startup idea. Each week, we'd have to present our findings about each section of the lean canvas we "learned" about in the lectures. Then we'd have to listen to everyone else's reports as well. This was torture, as most people simply didn't care about everyone else's findings. At one point, he actually asked other groups to repeat what another group had reported, to prove they were listening. He was expecting us to listen to other groups. To be fair, he gave good feedback during these times, which was his biggest contribution to our learning.

Did I mention that at the beginning of each class time, he would give us a quiz? This was about the lecture we watched. The quiz didn't prove your understanding of the material, but rather your memorization of it, because everything was goddamn enumeration.

This class was fucking terrible. The best part was our (forced) self-learning, which I would have done in the first place, but would have been much more enjoyable if it weren't forced.

56. FTDANCE

What it's about: Swing and Cha Cha

This class is one of the Physical Education classes of DLSU. I don't like dancing, so it shocked me how much I enjoyed this class. My professor also appeared to like me a lot as she was consistently complimenting me and my group, so that's plus points.

I was absent one time, and I was forced to teach the cha cha to Beatrice's class (just the boys, thank god) one time to make up for it. So this is one of the few floating subjects that I was able to "tutor" in. Funny. Okay maybe not, but it's funny to me.

55. LBYMATB

What it's about: Biology Lab

This was during the first term of first year, so again, there's a nostalgia factor here. Most of this class was experiments, which were fun. Near the end, we had to do some research on some biotechnology, and we nailed the presentation, Van and I led the entire class to victory. This class was just a solid one, which was pretty fun.

Don't mention it to Pedro though. He abhors this class.

54. LBYMATC

What it's about: Chemistry Lab

Much like the previous class, this is just mainly experiments. The reason this is higher is because this time around, we didn't have midterms or lab reports to write. Also, I was with my best friends this time around. It was a marginally more enjoyable experience.

53. KASPIL1

What it's about: The life and works of the Philippine's national hero, Jose Rizal

I like history when it's taught well. Gladly, my professor in this class was an excellent lecturer. He only talks for the entire 90 minutes but it's not boring at all. He also has a sense of humor. When asked for the format of the final paper, he simply said "There's paper; there's ink. That's the format." The way he started the class, telling us about the Cavite Mutiny, was an extremely fun and engaging lecture, and he was like this for the entire course. Our exams were all oral.

I sound like I enjoyed this course a lot but my one complaint was that he grades pretty low. Other than that, I don't regret taking this class.

52. INTFILO

What it's about: Introduction to Philosophy

I was also eagerly anticipating this class. Gladly, it delivered. The first few days were spent on logical fallacies, a lesson I greatly enjoyed. Our professor claimed that reading the handout on the 60+ fallacies would make us feel smarter, which it did. My complaint though was that the first exam was enumeration type. We'd have to enumerate every single fallacy. Second part was identifying what fallacy the situation had, which was a much better exam. 

We then proceeded to talk about the philosophy of language, of the mind, of science, of religion, of existence, of art, of morality, all of which were very interesting. His exams were all true or false, based on the lectures, and then we'd have a take home essay segment.

For the third exam, I bullshat the entire essay in 10-30 minutes and then turned it in. One week later, our professor said, "You know, when I teach in this college, I usually don't come across great papers, but this one classmate of yours... Pinkman, his paper is truly great." I've been sharing this war story ever since as a funny anecdote and proof of my skill in bullshittery.

Overall, a fun course. It didn't hurt that he gave a 10 point incentive to those who attended a talk of his and wrote a five sentence reaction paper. This guy is awesome.

51. SECURDE

What it's about: Introduction to Web Security

Ahh... our first technical subject in this list. Why is it so low? Well, our professor was just given this subject. He was not knowledgeable in it but he was given it and he chose to accept. He spent most of the first half just reading the slides. Then we had an exam which I almost failed, because I didn't know shit and this was one of those courses with a lot of resource books, that I couldn't just choose one and study, which was a hassle.

The second half got even worse as he just kinda got how-to's from the internet and asked us to follow them. We also had a project. My group was me, Harry, Tomoya, and Beatrice. The task was to make a secure website. How did he check this? Well he didn't check the site itself; he asked everyone to hack another group, round robin style. Ms. Wayne was the other faculty and she had the good sense to check the projects herself. Our prof did not have that good sense, perhaps since he was forced to do it. 

The real kicker came for the final deliverable for the project. He told us that we just had to submit a paper about our security implementations and that "I am not anymore interested in your code."

Rule # 4: Do not tell SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY students, whom you asked to write code for a project, that you are "not anymore interested" in their code.

At least he tried to teach. Also no reflection papers and enumeration quizzes. SECURDE >>>>> INOVATE

50. CSETHIC

What it's about: Information Technology Ethics

This was a weird class. This was during the term of INOVATE, so when I say, "we were required to write a reflection paper every week", it hurts. Other than that though, this class was pretty interesting. We had debates, which were fun. We had lots of activities, like a role playing activity that made us decide who to spare on a Captain Philips kind of situation only on a commercial liner. We also watched "Her" with Joaquin Phoenix, one of the most interesting movies I've ever seen. Overall, this was a pretty good course, considering what it was up against that term.

49. TREDTWO

What it's about: Christian Morality

Much like the previous course and INTFILO, this course dealt with ethics to some extent. Unlike most other TRED courses, however, this one required critical thinking as we were given endless case studies to analyze and brave through using the multiple ethical frameworks in class. Our professor had a bad reputation of having a deathly course load, but she was a damn good lecturer and I don't regret taking her one bit. She was and still is the best theology professor I've had. It's a shame Pedro dropped this course when he saw the comments about her. Her class really was good.

48. SCIMATB

What it's about: Biology Lecture

We had a really chill professor, who was also quite fun. He gave really high grades, really easy exams, and even began teaching during the final exam. He was also a really good teacher, and despite Biology being my least favorite science, this was the least boring lecture of the three.

47. PERSEF1

What it's about: Getting used to college life and relationships

This was our first year "homeroom" style class in DLSU during our first term, which, again, gives it a nostalgia factor. Our professor was really cool, and he was also quite chill. He usually just screened movies, one of which was a Korean film about a man who falls for a girl who believes in aliens. I will never forget the scene where actual aliens do indeed show up and the entire class went "WHAT THE FUCK?! NO! SERIOUSLY?!" And they were separated forever. Beatrice's block's class was before ours but for some reason, they were delayed a week, so the next week, while waiting outside the classroom, we saw them watching the movie. After a while, we heard loud screams of disbelief inside the room and we knew they had reached this scene. It truly was one of the most memorable moments I've had in my stay at DLSU.

The other movie we watched was a godawful boring movie starring Hayden Christensen that is not called Attack of the Clones, but dear god, I almost wished it was that instead. I spent most of the class ranting to Tomoya about how bad it was, and by bad I mean boring.

Other than those two, discussions were always fun in class and it didn't seem like a waste of time. This is one class I look back on fondly.

46. FILKOMU

What it's about: Communication and Communication Theories in Filipino

This was another freshman course with nostalgia factor to it. Like FILDLAR, we had a lot of readings for this course. Unlike FILDLAR, our professor was excellent, discussing each in tandem with a student group, to great depth and detail. The articles were already interesting, but her discussion made it more interesting. Also, our final project was quite fun. We had to do a lecture-forum. I did one on Philippine media. Naturally, I was the speaker and I was first, and I got my first pseudo-compliment about my public speaking skills from Tomoya when he said "Why'd you have to kick the bar so high so early?"

Overall, fun class.

45. KASPIL2

What it's about: Philippine History

My high school teacher on Philippine history was godawful. In grade school, I wasn't interested in history yet. This class opened my eyes and made me love the subject. Sure, I don't remember much of it anymore, but during that term, I felt like I was actually learning our history and appreciating it. Sure we had 3 really hard exams, but I braved through them all and got a 4.0. This class was just a telling of one big story and it was great.

44. FTTEAMS

What it's about: Volleyball

Like I said, I don't like exercise. I did enjoy this class though. There were cool guys and cute girls, none of which I knew. Every week we'd see each other and I'd be in good company. Our professor was a bit closed-minded, but it was fine. What wasn't fine was how stingy she was with grades, but still, I had a lot of fun with this class. 

Fun-Fact: I was about to ask one of those cute girls on a date if we won the championship, but I found out that

A) She had a boyfriend

B) Her second name was Beatrice. well... another spelling but wew, coincidence

We didn't win anyway. Next.

43. FTSPORT

What it's about: Table Tennis

Now this was a class I really enjoyed. This was during freshman year, and I was with my block. Table Tennis is incredibly fun and I really recommend you learn it. Our professor was also really nice. The only thing I didn't like was that he forced us to go to ADMU to watch the UAAP finals for Table Tennis. That was a hassle. Otherwise, I really enjoyed this class. 

Then again, there was that one time Pakyu brought a ping pong ball and a lighter and almost set the entire seventh floor of the sports center of DLSU on fire. Good times...

42. CCSTRIG

What it's about: Polynomial Functions, Exponential Functions, Logarithms, and well... Trigonometry

This was much more interesting than CCSALGE in my opinion because it was, simply put, harder. I also had a bad time with trig in high school, so I was learning most of this stuff again for real for the first time. Our prof wasn't that good, but at least it wasn't boring.

41. BASICON

What it's about: Basic Computer Concepts

This is the first computer course you take in my degree program, alongside introductory programming. It's a pretty boring course, but we had one of the most insane professors teaching us. Later on, nobody liked him, but as a freshman, getting him almost seemed like a hardening period. He was extremely fair; his exams were really difficult; but he was a good teacher. He usually ended up teaching more than we had to learn, which was good.

Now that stuff alone would only land this course in the 50's. What put it here was that it gave rise to the crash course boys. Converting to different number systems and doing logic circuits was difficult, so me having to teach it began the study group that would become JNM.

40. CSC731M

What it's about: Computational Photography

This course sounded intimidating. Well, gladly, it was easier than I thought. I made friends with one of my professors who is really into research and he taught me the im2col function in MATLAB which made computing for neighborhood functions in the multiple filters all the more easier.

Anyway, CSC731M was a pretty cool subject when you talk about the subject matter. Our projects here ranged from colorizing black and white photos to refocusing sections of an image. The best part was that these weren't so hard. They were doable if you knew the tricks of MATLAB.

This subject ends up pretty low though because our professor was just okay. He obviously prepared for the lectures, as another of our professors told us (he prepares for 9 hours per lecture he says). Sadly, I wasn’t that engaged. He's a very fair grader though, which is good. This was a cool subject.

39. CSC105M

What it's about: Big Data Analytics

I didn't have any expectations coming into this course. I had good experiences with the professor teaching it before and it sounded interesting, so I went in with a balanced disposition. It started out pretty bad. He gave us some readings to read and discuss, so it wasn't as bad as TREDTRI, but still unconventional. He then taught some statistics, which we already went through in previous courses, but okay, we were with some people who were outside our field so that was fine. Then he made everyone report on seven companies that used Big Data, which was a long boring session. Then he made everyone group into threes or pairs and report on machine learning techniques. 

Motherfucker. One group, consisting of people taking up MS or PhD had to report on linear regression, multilinear regression, and nonlinear regression. For the record, these are just a couple of formulae. They took two fucking hours. We couldn't fucking believe it. What the actual fuck. Our prof wanted us to put samples using R or Weka and they did, but they put the fucking code on the slides and asked us to retype it. You'd expect our prof to intervene, but NO! HE LET IT HAPPEN!

The other reports were okay compared to the first one. Beatrice and I were paired up and we rocked as we reported on Decision Trees and Association Rule Mining. I got so paranoid that I actually spent a lot of time that term studying all the reports on my own in my free time. 

This was where I fell in love with machine learning. I was so fascinated by everything I was self-learning. I even helped Van and his group with my personal favorite ML technique, Neural Networks, which is essentially simulating the HUMAN BRAIN!

I even made a pretty comprehensive reviewer, since the finals apparently covers the reports. Well, my reviewer was ultimately about 100x harder than the finals. Waste of effort, but I enjoyed it anyway.

The reason this is pretty high up is because this subject opened a can of worms when it came to my research prospects. It even became related to my eventual thesis topic! I hate how it was taught, but I had a good experience with it anyway, so it's fine.

38. COMPRO1

What it's about: Introductory C Programming

This is where it all began. Well, not really. I had Java and C++ in high school. However, my professor in this course was just so much better than my high school programming teachers that I couldn't help but love it even more in college. 

This subject really challenged my mind as we were given harder and harder problems. I was much ahead of the class since I studied everything in advance and it started my habit of studying everything in advance, which had a large contribution to my work ethic and success throughout college. Overall, fun course.

37. SPSWENG

What it's about: Software Engineering

This was a creatively designed course. The class of 20 will be split into two groups of 10. One of those 10 will be the project manager. Three will be analysts: those who analyze project requirements and design the user interface. Three will be developers, those who write the backend logic, including the classes and database. Three will be quality assurance: making sure the documents and code are not shit and bug-free, which is impossible but we made do.

As you might predict, this led to a lot of drama. Pedro and I were project managers and he was so chill while I was so riled up that I started being the source of fear for my groupmates.

My main gripe with this course is that if someone in your group screws up, say goodbye to your 4.0 for the entire group. Almost nobody ever gets a 4.0 in this class, which is kind of weird.

36. DISCTRU

What it's about: Logic, Sets, Relations, Functions, Proving, Number Theory

Our professor for this course was bad. Really bad. So bad, in fact, that I decided to study the entire course on my own over the course of one weekend. I made comprehensive notes and basically, I mastered it in a weekend. That is how I survived.

On balance, the topics themselves are pretty interesting. The project was pretty fun (it was a weird tic tac toe thing). This subject also has the pride of having the one exam that made me sit on ass for the entire three hours due to its difficulty. Bravo... just wow...

35. SPEECOM

What it's about: Speech and Communication

I said before that I liked public speaking. This subject was a dream for me. Sadly, I only made three "speeches". One of them was about the rise of Artificial Intelligence in the world. The second was an impromptu speech about the phrase "Life is what you make it." I just bullshat that with my best public speaking diction and hand gestures and quoted Hitch's "Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take, but by the number of moments that take your breath away," and the Doctor's "life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't ruin the good. You just have to keep adding to your pile of good things." and boom, 4.0.

The shining moment, however, of this class, was the panel discussion. I was the moderator and our topic was "Video Games as an Art". I was with Pedro, Max, Tetsuya, Hapon, Pietro, Ferris, 中國人, and .... We drew the short straw and went first, but we nailed it so well despite only rehearsing once. After our presentation, our professor turned to the class and she said, "This is now your standard." and they all said "FUCK!" internally.

Good times...

34. ADVDISC

What it's about: Linear Algebra, Advanced Proofs

This subject was a very well taught one. That's not to say it was easy. This was also one of the harder subjects. There was just way too much information in this subject. 

The projects were kinda fun though. The first one was drawing geometric figures and transforming them using matrices i.e. rotating, reflecting, shearing, etc. The second one, we could choose our topic, as long as we could use linear algebra, so I went Dan Brownian and chose cryptography. I had a lot of fun encrypting the sentence "I love you, Beatrice" hehe err... where were we? Ignore that. :)

I also did some self-learning in this subject to help other people with their second project, so I studied a bunch of applications of linear algebra myself. I helped Beatrice and Benjamin's group make a Swiss Tournament System planner. I always find I enjoy a subject more when I self-learn so this subject had that in spades.

33. STMETRE

What it's about: Software Technology Research Methods

ahh... thesis. This was us preparing for thesis and for this term, at least, it was pretty fun. We met our adviser for the first time formally (she had not been our professor before, except for Beatrice).  We also tested out our team dynamic and it was pretty good. Overall, this was a pretty good intro to thesis life.

32. ST-STAT

What it's about: Statistics and Probablility

I've always liked statistics. I find it fascinating. We didn't get far in high school; just the basics. This was my opportunity to learn more, and learn more I did. We tackled so much and my professor was just the best. She handled the class so well and I'm so glad we got her and not the professor who eventually replaced her for the people two years below us, who was notorious for being anthropomorphic broth.

Our project was also pretty fun. We had to choose a game and code a statistical adviser for the game. Pedro, and the guy with the same name as Benedick but I forgot his codename and Benedick isn't important to this blog anymore so I'm just going GRRM and giving them the same name coz that totally happens in real life or I can just give him a new nickname like Blanco coz he always wears a white shirt but I'm spending too much time on this so I'm just gonna call him Bob, chose Yahtzee as our game and it was really fun. Pedro must have scared himself shitless when I almost killed myself without doing the UI because designing the UI for Yahtzee is a bitch.

31. NETWORK

What it's about: I Don't Know. Take a Guess

I always wonder what would have happened if I didn't choose Software Tech as my specialization. Every now and then we have subjects that offer a glimpse into the other specs and this was the one that offered a look into network engineering. It was really basic stuff though, so no big deal.

Why this is so high is for three reasons. The first is my self-study habit. I loved learning about a completely alien topic like the network stack on my own. The second was the first project, which was a P2P social network, which was just super fun and Tomoya and I even got bonus points coz we had a user interface. The third reason is the second project. In a nutshell, there are two protocols in the transport layer, UDP: the unreliable protocol, and TCP: the reliable protocol. Our task was to simulate the TCP using UDP. We had to code TCP on our own. The catch is if we got to congestion control, we get 175% out of 100%. I heard Raven got to 125%, so I went overdrive in my competitiveness and coded everything from 85% to 175% in the five hours before the demo. It was such a good experience and a good brain exercise. Plus, I got Tomoya a 4.0. As Dwayne Johnson would so sexily say, "You're Welcome".

30. GREATWK

What it's about: The Great Works

La Salle has this cute course wherein two but more commonly three professors get together and teach three separate great works of art or science that are linked by a theme. Pedro and the others' got the theme "Ideal Society" but Max, Tomoya, the others, and I got the theme "Power" and we were dealt "The Count of Monte Cristo", "Disgrace", and Machiavelli's "The Prince" for our modules. It was fun.

29. SOCTEC1

What it's about: How society affects science

This was the first course we had that was a bit strange. It's all about this central idea that society affects science more than you'd think and as future scientists, we should be aware of that. We discussed the kinds of knowledge, various controversies in the history of science, such as Copernicus not being allowed to say the shit about the heliocentricity of the solar system because it was heresy and stuff like that. This was all very interesting and we had a fun professor to top it all off.

Like SOCTEC2, we also had a tutorial component, and in that class, we had an activity wherein we had to illustrate the relationship between society, science, and technology, and the best per block would present in the larger lecture class. My group (with Pedro) won in our block, while Beatrice's group in their block won and that's how we low key met for the first time, which started the entire mess in the first place, so we have this subject to thank. 

We also had to talk about how science affects fiction and vice versa, so my group decided to talk about Terminator 2. If a course allows you to talk about Terminator 2 in class for a grade, it must be a pretty unique course.

28. CSC755M

What it's about: The Design and Analysis of Algorithms

Algorithms are a step-by-step process of doing something. We had an intro to these in DASALGO, which comes later, but the advanced version of that class is this class, which was upgraded to the master’s version. I was expecting a lot from this class since I got really into competitive programming around the time I took this course. This class would talk about those kinds of problems, which I was excited for.

Unfortunately, our professor was the kind to shove his own interests down our throat. He loved contributing to society and being an altruist, be he demanded that we think about this shit too. It would be fine if the integration of that learning outcome were more seamless, but it came to the point that we went three weeks without discussing anything on the syllabus and just watching TED talks about people who develop apps for the good of humanity.

This was still an enlightening course since we were required to research on a specific problem and implement a solution. Beatrice and I designed an app where you could input activities for organizations and specify restrictions such as possible days, target audience, and restricted dates and times and the app would use evolutionary genetic algorithms (EGA) to schedule all the activities. The EGA, for those who aren't in the know, basically treat existing schedules as sort of genes, with better individuals being better schedules (less conflicts). The algorithm then simulates generations of evolution, with the genes splicing into one another, to form better genepools and thus, better schedules. 

As you'd think though, I spent most of this term self-studying since my professor just wouldn't stop it with the TED talks. 

Rule #5: I already said don't spam videos. As a more specific version of that rule, DON'T SPAM TED TALKS.

27. PROSDEV

What it's about: Professional Software Development

This course is like GREATWK, but for software development. Sir PMP would look for three companies to give lectures about their practices across three different modules. The modules we got were Agile Dev, Quality Assurance, and Security.

Agile Dev was hands-down the best module. We learned about Scrum, which was a really cool way to build software. We also took up advanced Git, which is a version control software for developers. Finally learning how to use Git like the industry uses Git was enlightening.

The QA module was on and off. At first, it was pretty bad, since the speaker was pretty bad at speaking. Later on, a new speaker was teaching Automation Testing with Selenium and another speaker taught Unit Testing with JUnit and that was cool.

The Security module was a mess, but it was still better than our SECURDE. We didn't have the computer lab so we had no practical experience during this module. It was all lecture. At least the speaker was decent.

26-24. THS-ST1/2/3

What it's about: Motherfucking Thesis

We meet biweekly so this counts.

Anyway, I lump these together because, well, it'd be weird not to, but yes, this is our thesis. There are many like it but this one is ours. To give a brief overview of our thesis, basically, we want to group users on Twitter into groups where they have more in common within the group than without. There are multiple ways to do this, called clustering algorithms, multiple features on Twitter to test similarity on, like following or common hashtags, and multiple similarity measures, which are too complicated to explain in layman's terms. We want to see which combinations of algorithms, features, and measures, produce what kind of communities.

At first, working with my group was a dream since I was with my best friends. Thesis got a whole of a lot harder after my fallout with Beatrice. I downright hated working with Beatrice being there and not being my friend. This was supposed to be the best time of my life and it was ruined. Pedro was a magnificent carry though and our adviser was a tremendous support. It was still fulfilling to look at the finished product, despite me having hated working with one disposition even if I could have been working with a completely better one.

Also, no course on this list was as satisfying to finish as this one so *mic drop*.

23. ADVSTAT

What it's about: Classical Statistical Inference and Bayesian Statistics

I had gotten in contact with my professor for this course long before the course even started and he started talking to me a lot about how easy it should be for me and he gave me the syllabus and textbook early so I spent the few weeks before that term studying and, boy, it was fascinating.

Inferential Statistics is essentially making statements about the population from a sample, which is usually all we can get. There are a ton of applications for these lessons and it was really fun to learn and experiment with. 

Unfortunately, my prof's teaching style didn't work with most of the others, so I spent a lot of time before the first exam giving legit crash courses for the entire course, which, as usual, made me feel good about myself and cemented my career choice to become a prof. 

The second half of the course was Bayesian Statistics which was just a wholly unique view of statistics which was different from frequentist statistics, which we discussed in the first half. I won't go too much into it, but it just tickled my brain cells so much. 

Also, this subject gave me one of the coolest projects, which was to create a spam filter for emails. Unfortunately, I was with Harry (yay!) and Beatrice (aw :( ) and the project was after the fallout so I didn't put that much effort into it. At that point in the term, Beatrice barely even cared. Well, to be fair, neither did I. I'm so fucking sorry, Harry. 

22. FRENCH1

What it's about: Basic French

Ah, francais. J'apprendais francais en premiere ans mais je ne continues pas. This was a fun course, despite being at 7:30 in the morning. We had a legit French guy as a professor and he was so chill and considerate. His focus was on us appreciating the language and learning to speak it. No pressure from endless quizzes or the like. Just a lot of speaking exercises and listening exercises and sure, one or two written quizzes, but that's fine. 

I don't have much more to say about this, but it was just pure fun to learn French.

21. INTESYS

What it's about: Artificial Intelligence

This subject was one I had been anticipating for a while. It came in during second year, but I'd known about it since first year, and it has attracted me since then for obvious reasons. This subject is split into three parts: static space search, expert systems, and machine learning. 

For static space search, we learned about basic search algorithms, with and without heuristics, adversarial search with minimax and alpha-beta pruning, and local search, with hill-climbing and simulated annealing (and the previously mentioned genetic algorithms). Our project was to create a bot for a game.

For expert systems, we had to create an expert on a certain field. We used Beatrice's dad's knowledge to create an expert on dizziness. Basically, tell our program why you're dizzy and it'll tell you what kind of dizziness you have. It was a pretty cool project.

We didn't have a project on machine learning, but it introduced me to the wonders of decision trees and neural networks. 

Our professor for this class was also really cool and good. He made us write a final paper about an AI to brave through a zombie apocalypse, so how bad could he be? (Answer: not at all :) )

20. CCSCAL1

What it's about: Differential Calculus

This was the first math course where I had no formal training beforehand. Sure, I got bored of trig back in high school so I learned Calculus on Khan Academy to compensate, but this was my first formal education on Calculus and it was fascinating. My professor was so good, I can't even describe why. She was godsend, especially to Tetsuya, who usually has a hard time with math subjects, but was so surprised that for this one, he only need 21/100 in the final exam to pass. 

This was one 8 AM class I didn't mind going to. 

19. COMPRO2

What it's about: Advanced C Programming

Our professor for this class was amazing, which was even more surprising since he was a new graduate. It didn't show at all and he still serves as one of my greatest inspirations to be a lecturer in the future. 

Unlike COMPRO1, which I had some kind of background on from high school, I had zero background on the topics of this course beforehand. Advanced studying was my friend again but even that got had when I got to linked lists. Gladly, our professor was good enough to clear that up. What resulted was a legitimate challenge for my intellect which was fair. I love a fair challenge, which will be a pattern in the remaining eighteen courses I will be talking about. 

This course was in my second term in first year, and it was and still is one of the most challenging. Our project was fun though. We had to create a Wheel of Fortune game where you can add words/phrases and store them in files. That was so fun to test afterwards. 

Overall, a fun course.

18. ARCHORG

What it's about: Computer Architecture and Organization

I really enjoyed this course, perhaps mainly for the challenge. This course is really hard. You need to drop your thinking to a very low level by computer standards. Almost everything is in binary in this course. 

The first part is all converting integers and decimal floating points to binary representations, which is your first dip into this hell. Then you get to assembly programming, which is programming the processor almost directly. It's an ultra-low level way of programming which has a steep learning curve. Then the last part is even lower, which could be summarized as programming the program, as you microprogram the separate instructions, find out how to add binary numbers quickly, find out how to multiply and divide, and then there's the cache. 

It's just a low level nightmare from beginning to end, but our professor was so good, it turned into a fun challenge.

17. ADVANDB

What it's about: Query Optimization, Online Analytical Processing, Concurrency Control and Transaction Processing

Our professor here sucked. She taught okay, but I learned more through self-studying. Not to mention the prerequisite of this course was one of my and Tomoya's favorite subjects, so lo and behold our disappointment when our professor ended up the way she did and handled this less than stellarly.

She also handled project demos terribly. She'd add specs on the fly and relentlessly compare your project to previous projects as if that were a valid basis of your grade. 

The reason this is so high is mainly because she inspired me to be better when I finally become a prof. I loved self-learning this subject so much, I'm going to go for teaching it when I get my master’s degree. I already taught this course to Kelsier and his crew, so it should be smooth sailing from here on out.

16. MOBAPDE

What it's about: Mobile App Development

Our professor for this course was freaking amazing. She handled everything expertly and taught everything practically. We had a lot of exercises, and we hardly felt the difficulty of this course since it was so fun to finally be able to make apps on our phones after 2.3 years in this degree program.

Harry, Tomoya, and I ended up making Shuffle, that game we used to play with Pedro and Arya, into an app. If you search Shuffle on the Google Play Store, it should be there.

15. CSC611M

What it's about: Parallel Programming and Distributed Systems

This course was another challenge. The projects in this course were hella difficult to do. Max, Beatrice, Pedro, and I nearly failed in the final project because of one stupid line of code we missed. This class made most of the people who took up the ladderized ms program to hate sheep because the final project was a sort of multiplayer online sheep simulator where we had to implement a server that can handle multiple users and all the updates had to be live. Needless to say it was hell, but it was fun hell.

14. HUMAART

What it's about: Introduction to Art

Superlative: Best Non-Major Subject

HUMAART class is a lottery. Sometimes you get a prof who's cool. Sometimes you don't. Max and I won the lottery. Most professors who teach this focus on paintings and architecture but not our prof. He spread out and also went to music and, my favorite, film.

This class was a wonderful journey. I got to experience so much beauty within the fourteen weeks I spent here. My professor and I would talk for hours after class every meeting and it was always an excellent conversation. Most fun of all, our final paper was an analysis of a filmmaker's style. I chose Stanley Kubrick and went on to watch all thirteen of his films. I even turned my paper in early and got a 4.0. 

This class was so fun. It offset the disappointment of HUMALIT that same term, especially since this came after it. After the boring shit of HUMALIT, I would experience the sublime class that was HUMAART.

13. SOFENGG

What it's about: User Experience Design and Human-Computer Interfaces

When I first took this subject, I thought it was weird. It needed those skills you normally wouldn't find in a computer science major. It needed creativity and a certain way of divergent thinking. The best part of the course was that I was working with Beatrice (and Ed and Benjamin too) and we ended up nailing both our presentations.

I found out I loved this course almost a year after I took it. I became one of the Subject Matter Experts at the COMET lab for User Experience since I led a team to try it out through one whole term and it worked fantastically. I even held a seminar on UX design and was asked to give another seminar and basically, I started living and breathing this course, to a certain extent almost more than the more logic heavy aspects of my area of expertise. Hopefully, when I become a professor, this could be one of the subjects I teach.

12. CSC617M

What it's about: Theory of Programming Languages

This subject was one of the master’s subjects that replaced an undergraduate subject called "Compiler Theory". As such, this subject had to be two subjects in one, advanced compiler theory and theory of programming languages. The latter part was cool and all but the advanced compiler theory was the true stand out part of this course.

We were asked to create a programming language for a specific purpose. Max, Beatrice, Pedro, and I all agreed to make a music language. Basically, you just need to encode the music (octave, duration, and note (optional chord type)) and the interpreter will play it for you. It was so satisfying, mainly because I made my own parser generator (which is really hard but satisfying to do). I even shared it with Harry and Tomoya and they used my parser generator for their undergrad project.

Overall, this was a challenging course but a very satisfying one in terms of projects.

11. GAMEDES

What it's about: Game Design

This was my first and last undergraduate elective before masters took over and boy, do I not regret it. I enjoyed the hell out of this class. I may not be a hardcore gamer, but hearing all the theories and principles behind game design was really interesting. My favorite session from this class is either the story session where we just discussed what makes a game story good, or the pitch session. 

Our project was to pitch a game to the class. Tomoya and I had a crazy pitch about a game where an investigator investigates a murder that ends up being a summoning of a seven demons of hell and he has to find the key items of the demons and bless them with holy water. The catch is he's stuck in a time loop and the key items are the only items that carry over. 

The big twist happens when he gets to the final stage where he gathers all seven items, presumably to banish the demons. Then it turns out that summoning the demons is done by gathering all seven items in that very location and the protagonist was tricked into doing so and that's the ending of the game. The class went crazy and we got mad accolades from our professor. No other subject inspired this much creativity from me and Tomoya, probably. This was the most fun and twisted we had ever been and it was amazing.

10. DIGIDES

What it's about: Digital Design

I feel odd placing this above GAMEDES, but I'm a nerd. Deal with it. Alternate Canon is GAMEDES is #1 so accept that and move on. Anyway, Digital Design is essentially designing circuits to represent some function. This is harder than it sounds and it can get pretty complicated. 

At first, our professor had me worried. Her first day teaching ever was our first day in this course and she was nervous as hell and I didn't get anything, so I got worried and studied in advance. I apparently didn't need to because she got her shit together in an AMAZING way and she turned into one of THE BEST professors I had ever had. She handled the class expertly, almost as if it wasn't her first time teaching, and even managed to outclass her fellow professor, who had a PhD, according to my batchmates, who couldn't understand anything their professor taught, but my class was doing really well.

Also, this class' exams were just a nice challenge, especially the first exam, which was extended from 3 hours to 5 because of how hard it was. Good times... Good times...

9. DASALGO

What it's about: Data Structures and Algorithms

Fun topics. Fun challenge. Fun professor. Fun quizzes. This was a fun subject in a fun term. 

This is also very crucial which is probably why they put this subject in the first year and have all specialization take it. This is all about how to best represent your data given a specific situation and how to manipulate that data using algorithms. 

One really fun part about this course was the final project, where we had to solve problems about data structures on UVA online judge, which is admittedly where I started on contest programming. 

Also this course gave me a lot to do during the term in terms of tutorials. I had once held nine hours of tutorials in a week just for this course. Overall a fun experience.

P.S. I will forever pride myself on getting 104.5/105 in the second exam which was fucking difficult. 

8. CSC615M

What it's about: Automata, Computability, and Formal Languages

This was the only course in the flowchart I had to take twice. Oh no, I didn't fail it. I took the ladderized masters program so for some reason, they make you take the harder version of this course in the masters level, so there you go. Why I love this course is simply how fascinating it is to me. I'll try to explain it to someone who will probably never use automata theory in their life. Here I go.

So automata theory starts out by talking about languages. There are simple languages, called regular languages, that can be recognized using only states and transitions. Then things get more complex. You have context-free languages, which needs additional memory in order to recognize. In fact, most languages are context-free... as in spoken languages like English or Filipino. Sometimes you have slightly more complicated languages that are known as context sensitive languages and then you have unrestricted languages where anything goes when it comes to writing rules. So the highest level of machines that can be used and is needed for unrestricted languages is called a Turing machine and more complex Turing machines can be formed out of smaller Turing machines.

The real beauty comes in the main crux of the course which is determining if a problem is computable or not. Whether you can write a program that will solve the problem or not. And that is connected to Turing machines. Essentially, if you can make a Turing machine for something, it is computable by some algorithm and that is the computer science equivalent to saying all who believe and accept Jesus as their savior will be granted eternal life.

I probably did a bad job explaining that but this is the CS equivalent of philosophy and theology in some sense, so it's just fascinating to me.

7. INTRODB

What it's about: Introduction to Databases

My professor for this course was a really nice lady who taught fine, but I heard from my classmates that she actually wasn't that good a prof. I didn't notice, as usual, since I self-study, but Tomoya and I loved the shit out of this subject because we are nerds and we have a ton of fandoms. Why is this relevant? Let me tell you why.

So the first half of the course is pretty boring compared to the second half, even though it is ridiculously applicable and that is writing SQL queries to process databases. It's a lot of special logic which is fun but compared to the second half, it's actually kinda boring.

The second half is data modelling. So you start with an external model, which are your business rules. You then turn this into a conceptual model which is entities in your data and their relationships with one another. You convert this to a logical model, which are the tables themselves and their foreign keys. Then finally you convert to physical model, which is the actual bytes on the disk as you code your model and import it into your SQL server.

So what do fandoms have to do with this? Well... We made databases for everything.

What do I mean "everything"?

EEEEVVVEEEERRYYYYYTHIIIING. 

It was a lot of fun and needless to say, all the practice led to us acing this subject.

6. OBJECTP

What it's about: Object-Oriented Programming in Java

Did I mention I loved modelling things? Because this is where it all started. When you do object oriented programming, you usually model the entire system before coding anything. This led to us modelling Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and all that jazz.

Actually, when we took this course, our machine project was Pokemon. For the first half, we had to do a command line Pokemon battle, but for the second half, we had to do actual graphical user interface so it was an actual game programmed in Java and it was our proudest achievement so far.

Also, I have a fond memory. You see the only requirements for the project were we have a 2d map and we have 4 Pokemon who evolve at some point. They can battle with moves and shit. I actually added Pokeballs and catching, boxes, and switching.

Now on the day of submission, our prof said we can add last minute additions. Harry said "Hey, Jon. Can you do save and load?"

"No. Why would I do that?"

"For Beatrice."

Ladies and gentlemen, I finished save and load and it worked and we got beyond perfect grades. Thanks for the inspiration, Beatrice. Thanks for egging me on, Harry, my partner in this project.

5. WEBAPDE

What it's about: Web Application Development

This was probably the intermediate subject matter I used the most in my stay in DLSU. It was so fun to finally learn this shit. Yes, I love backend development. Yes, we were back to using databases. No, I wasn't good at designing webpages with HTML/CSS/JS. Yes, I had people do that for me later on.

I had cramlord moments in the past, but this subject made me and Tomoya best friends if we weren't yet at that point. You see, we decided at one point that in my group of me, Tomoya, and Dexter, I would do frontend (What the fuck, right?), Dexter would do design, and Tomoya would do backend. The first deadline had no backend. I had been working four weeks in advance and I only finished three out of 21 screens with three days to spare. I finished two more screens until it was one day before the deadline. I admitted to Tomoya that I couldn't do this alone and asked if we could stay the night at his place and finish the job.

It was an amazing night of pain, suffering, and torture as we wrestled with CSS to make the site look the way we wanted and all that shit. We cried. We mourned our sanity. We begged for the sweet release of death. We eventually finished all 21 screens and we slept for ninety minutes before I had to go to class.

The rest of the subject was smooth sailing because it was backend so yeah, I'm good at that. Overall, fun subject. Very applicable and very entertaining.

4. AUTOMAT

What it's about: Automata, Computability, and Formal Languages

Okay, this is just the same as CSC615M so why is it a bit higher.

Well, you know how they say the first time you love someone, you feel it stronger since it's the first time? They don't say that? Shit.

Anyway, I fell for this subject matter for the first time in this subject so I gotta give it to this, even though I prefer the textbook we used in masters, if only because converting DFAs to Regexes in Hopcroft requires a Floyd-Warshall-esque Dynamic Programming approach that takes forever (O(n^3)) while Denning's approach takes linear time (O(n)) .

But this was my first time and nothing's as good as the first time.

I'm conflicted okay?

Stop... :(

3. OPERSYS

What it's about: Operating Systems

Operating Systems have been a mystery to me since forever, so when I went in class the first day for this and Sir Linux said we were going to code our own OS, I was psyched up to shit. 

I feel bad for taking most of the work from Beatrice, Dexter, and Harry because the work is so much fun and so satisfying, but I couldn't resist because it was so much fun and satisfying. I walked them through my thought process and they still benefited I guess so maybe it's okay. I'm sorry okay. I just loved this subject so damn much.

Sir Linux's subjects always made me feel satisfied with my effort, but probably none moreso than this because I was able to say in a job interview that I coded a rudimentary OS kernel running on Linux and it can sing lyrics from Frozen coz that was a thing. I love this shit.

2. CCSCAL2

What it's about: Integral Calculus and Advanced Differential Calculus

In DLSU, we have the legendary terrors of math that echo through the halls of history. They're excellent professors who give terrifying exams. I had the intense honor to be under two of them. One of them was for this subject. He taught in a clinical and precise manner and it was so satisfying to understand how all this integral calculus shit worked. I studied it on my own before but man, taking it under this guy was so much better.

Also, I guess it's been a pattern that I love challenges because they give me satisfaction. I was one of the demigods to have perfected all three of his quizzes and get exempted from the finals. This was not effortless.  I practiced five hours a day five days a week to be as good as I was and it paid off big time. This was so satisfying and on the last day, I went to the professor, thanked him for everything, and said that it was an honor and I made him smile. Definitely a highlight in my college stay... making a legend smile like that.

---

And the number one course... my absolute favorite in my stay in DLSU is

1. SWDESPA

What it's about: Software Design Patterns

This is the point in your flowchart where you have no choice but to realize how shitty a programmer you have been for the past year. You look at your OBJECTP code and wonder how you made it work at all, your code was so bad. This was SWDESPA.

Sir PMP taught us up front about the SOLID principles in software design and that just stayed with me. They just reverberate through the entire course.

And the design patterns themselves? It's like software engineers have 22 infinity stones for use in their projects. Your implementation doesn't match the interface? Adapter that shit. You wanna abstract a complicated interaction? Facade that shit. You wanna build multiple types of objects with special components you want to customize? Builder that shit. It was an exercise of the mind to determine which pattern suited your needs.

And this wouldn't be number one without a challenge. This subject remains the only one where I didn't finish the project. We got a 2.5 for the final project, despite pulling an all nighter. It taught me things I needed to know for when I took software engineering the next term and had to be project manager.

And that is my ranking of all the courses in the ST flowchart. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did writing it. Cheers!