5. Textbooks Quality: B-. I’ve had some great textbooks which the professors used well and still are used by me today. I also had some classes where I was provided only with an electronic copy of a manuscript that the professor was putting together.

4. Encouraging Professors: C+. The WIRED post presented the problem as, “A professor that would rather be tending to his research will walz up to a blackboard or overhead projector and scribble out equations for an hour.” About half of my professors seemed to do this to some degree, and several of which had severe problems with this. There were a few professors who seemed burdened to be having to teach an undergraduate class, they would rather be working on research, and you would never see them attempt to interact with students outside of the three lecture hours a week. However, there were some professors who made every effort to get to know their students by name and do whatever it took to help them succeed.

3. Quality Counseling: B+. I found that there were many great counselors who were very skilled, approachable, and available. I only gave a B+ grade because in my experiences, I found that these counselors did better with course work academic counseling and were not so pro-active at personalized career counseling. I also didn’t give an A grade because those seem to impossible to earn at BYU.

2. Reasonable grades: C-. Engineering classes are just plain harder than classes in other majors. I always found it amusing when taking a class from a different department (not math) and was able to put in less work for a better grade when compared with an engineering class. Anti-grade-inflation tactics are well employed in engineering classes, where students compete harder for lower grades than students in other disciplines.

1. Interesting assignments: C. The complaint being, “Every assignment feels the same.” Homework assignments were often many page, green engineering paper, math problems. Varied labs and coding assignments made things interesting sometimes, but it seemed like the hard work-out problems from the text book were never-ending and downright miserable compared to the homework I saw my non-engineering friends do.

Bonus reason, girls: D. I’ve been in classes where there were no girls at all, and I’ve been in classes where the only girl was my sister. On average, there might be one girl to twenty guys. Without even touching on the limits this puts on dating, having fewer girls around just adds less excitement and variety.

Overall GPA: 2.17. If these grades get any lower, engineering classes would have to be put on academic warning status. These grades aren’t to say that engineering is bad, or to discourage people from entering an engineering field. Its just illustrating that engineering is hard. BYU’s use of student teaching assistants could especially be a source of many problems, especially as these TAs create an inappropriate buffer between the students from the professors.

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The University and Utah and BYU teamed up about a month ago to work collectively on their entry, and now they will compete in October for one of the 20 finalist spots.

I participated with the team up until a month ago, when my classwork and finances dictated a smaller contribution of time to the project.

You can read the slashdot news article about it.

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I wonder, what if these software development tools were to be applied to a different type of project called: life.

We all have issues, although we more commonly call them tasks or to-do items.  We need to renew our drivers license, read a book, or prepare a presentation.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to keep track of these tasks in an issue tracker? Tasks could be assigned priorities, given deadlines, or placed into categories.

We also have major goals in our lives.  For me, some of my goals are graduating, finishing a book, or becoming a better writer.  These life goals all of a sudden seem like software milestones.  

You could even put general notes about life into a wiki.

What other ideas could be integrated into such a life development management suite? 

Of course as a warning to someone who might actually try this: you might want to think about privacy.  Best people out there don’t know that you have “getting married” as one of your “high priority” issues.

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“Software architecture is the set of design decisions which, if made incorrectly, may cause your project to be cancelled.”

Eoin Woods

Incorrect open source software architecture decisions may cause your project to fail.

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