@stressin15 Don’t bother reading those types of descriptions on websites and pamphlets. They’re just advertising.
Also based on your original post I’m guessing the seminar uses Matlab since it’s popular for data analysis. In my school engineering students have to take a Matlab class and most of them struggle with it. Even with other languages like R and Python most students would have a lot of difficulty (probably more than with Matlab) picking it up within a semester.
Is the course in question a geology course where students learn data analysis using MATLAB and scientific writing using LaTeX, and which meets for three hours once per week?
Does she have a fellow in her residential college that she can ask for help? I am assuming she attends the same school my son attended and that was one of his duties as a fellow within his residential college. And if she is pre-med then that W could be problematic later when applying to med schools.
And if the fellow she contacts can’t help her then they should be able to put her in contact with someone(s) who can. What about her EC? Are there any upperclassmen that could help her out? Most are super willing to help and will if they are asked. And if they can’t they will know someone who can help. Son was in a single his freshman year and yet years later he is still best friends with many on his floor. Meaning they still talk, EVERY DAY!
Son found many, many to be so helpful and is biggest hurdle was being able to ask his peers for help. Son’s freshman seminar was not his first, second or third, it was literature-based and he is a STEM kiddo. He ended up loving it so much the subject material became a “certificate” subject for him. She really needs to seek out help and will be pleasantly surprised at the friendships she makes along the way!!
Kat
post #35
smh
Forming a peer study group is essential to success at courses like this unless she has some background in the material.
Is this just a computer language she has not used in the past, or does she have no experience with programming? Students come to college with vastly different backgrounds and education. If this is a ‘top’ college I would expect anyone with no experience in the subject matter would be at a great deficit.
If her time consuming EC is a sport she should speak with her coach. Athletic departments usually have some of the best tutors.
I think lots of us have identified the particular seminar involved. What’s a little bit concerning is that the same people have taught some version of the same seminar to freshmen for several years. There can’t be that many freshmen coming into college familiar with MATLAB. So maybe the OP’s daughter is really having a unique kind of problem here. It’s not likely a matter of she has never coded before and everyone else has, or of the course “really” being a CS course, or of women having more trouble coding. (As the OP said, the course description pretty clearly identifies it as a science course that teaches students how to collect data and to use MATLAB to analyze it.) The other thing that’s upsetting is that if the OP’s daughter is having trouble with MATLAB in this course, she may have similar trouble with an awful lot of scientific analysis, if that’s what interests her.
This is more sophisticated than high school, but still pretty basic science technique that she should want to learn, and that she should be able to learn in a course that has taught these skills to freshmen in the past. I think I understand why people have told her to keep working at it.
She would probably feel a lot better now if she withdrew, but she may also want to give it another major try. She HAS to enlist help from other students, though. There will be many, many other students, in her college, in her EC (whatever it is), hanging around in the library who could help her with this. If she begins to get a handle on it, she will be able to get more effective help from the TAs and professors.
very true
There was an interesting report on NPR this morning about compassion.
http://www.npr.org/2015/10/20/450175865/do-we-have-less-sympathy-for-people-facing-things-weve-overcome
“So the key here is if you need sympathy, go to somebody else who’s clueless.”
The professor and TA have solved the kinds of problems your D is facing. They’ve observed many other students solve them. So their bias is to believe that with just a little more effort, she can do it, too.
“[They’re] at the top of the mountain now. It’s very hard to put [themselves] back at the bottom of the mountain and look up at that cliff.”
Look into a paid tutor, say a computer science grad or even undergrad student. Coding will be part of her future, assuming she is in a STEM or business field, so this is a good investment. They won’t write the code for her, but may be able to explain how to layout the code. This is quicker than trying to understand everything about coding, she can work with the tutor to understand only the subset of scientific analysis or whatever. Actually, that may be the issue, she is caught up in thinking she needs to understand coding in general, but really she needs to only understand how to do the analysis assigned. Coding is just logic, data in/out and maybe an algorithm, so in a way it is a manageable thing to learn how to do, in steps.
Stop freaking out (DD and parent), there are still 7 weeks in the semester and most people who work hard will improve their grades. Don’t ever code the night an assignment is due, start the day it is assigned so you can get help with the parts or debug if the dang thing doesn’t work (happens to everyone). And … would the world end if she has one low grade ?
Find out the real procedure for dropping the class and any financial implications (is she taking so few courses that she has not met minimum credits for scholarship or what?). I think the admin probably wants her to continue trying, but may not come down on her as hard as you think with either not allowing a W or having a financial penalty.
And admit that at a top 20 school you should not go looking for trouble in an honors, selective admission class that involves coding, if you have no prior experience. Lay low for a semester or two and do well in all the required classes.
And if she can’t figure out coding, maybe a summer class next summer at a community college or on-line would help.
“She has intensive EC obligations which really limit meeting with other students at times that are convenient for them, and to make it more logistically difficult none of the students live near her.”
To me, this is the key. She will not be the first college Freshman to learn that balancing an intensive EC with a rigorous course load is going to be tough.
Something’s got to give.
Giving up the EC may make more sense, but really there’s got to be someone who can help her with the Matlab issues. I do suspect other students have more coding experience and it is hard to play catch up in those circumstances.
Bottom line-Its ONLY a freshman seminar. The world will not end if she drops it.
Right. Part of becoming an adult is also learning to reach out to other people in the class. Who knows. Maybe they don’t see it as a bother. She can also negotiate a mutually beneficial relationship (tutoring for cookies?) Maybe just a promise to do something good for them in the future.
BTW, while MatLab might have some concepts that really require a basic stats background, a lot of it is not that involved (logic, basic math, etc.) Can she break down her difficulties? Like, what specifically is she struggling with? Profs may not be helpful because they probably are so far above her level that they can’t comprehend why she has trouble. For instance, if someone in grade school is struggling with (55+11)/6, a math prof may not be the best tutor because she may not even know how to begin to make that problem simpler.
I can’t tell without a syllabus and indications on grading but this class could be pretty advanced, depending on what regression and time series analysis is expected. You could debate whether this is acceptable for a freshman seminar, but at this school they may believe in challenging students this way. If it is too much, a W is better than an F.
This class sounds like nightmares I used to have.
The class actually sounds completely cool. I understand why the OP’s daughter wanted to take it, and why so many others did, too. It’s really an amazing opportunity – two professors, one tenured the other ladder-tracked, and two TAs, with 15 students, and essentially about the research that the professors are doing right now, with a week-long field trip in Europe thrown in. That’s why the student is so upset about her problems in the class, and so reluctant to withdraw.
It’s silly and dangerous to draw definitive conclusions from online discussions like this. But my instinct is in line with Purple Titan’s in #52: It’s not that the OP’s daughter doesn’t have enough programming background, but more like she is making some missteps on basic concepts that could easily be corrected, and panicking about it. And she hasn’t been effective in asking for help, perhaps in large part because whatever it is she’s not understanding is really fundamental and simple, which is the hardest kind of problem to diagnose. The two professors taught some version of the same course the past three years at least. If it were really inappropriate for first year students with no programming background, they would have figured that out a while ago.
Four instructors for fifteen students seems like the kind of student to instructor ratio that most here would like…
Regression and time based analysis are quite easy to do with the Excel Data Analysis pack (there are some if not a ton of materials on line with sample problems), here the idea is to do the analysis itself, write papers, etc, and plead for forgiveness for not using Matlab for everything. Matlab is also a high level tool set type software package, so finding a similar analysis in an on-line tutorial, and then putting in her unique data, may short circuit the problem. Find on-line basic tutorials and work from easy to harder, sticking as close to the actual use for this class as possible (you can self-teach yourself the rest of Matlab say over the summer).
Regression is a curve fit and time analysis might be as simple as a plot of Y vs. t or maybe be something more complex. Graphics could be difficult, but there are likely lots of tools that tell you how to scale and all that.
The actual data set does not actually matter, so a comparison of a friendly classmates code with her versions might work fine. I don’t think this is cheating, but the TAs might also give out sample code from already turned-in assignments (taking a zero does not solve the issue … at all).
And given that Matlab is a tool, assuming it is the baseline at that school, like many others, many people could offer help for regression and time plots, including people at the EC or people in the dorm. I think the inconvenient time thing may be overblown, all students have weird schedules and many would be up late at night or available at noon on Tuesday. You need to ask early (NOT the night before) and often (find many people who will have patience for say an hour to find a bug or tell you, no you need to name that file rock.dat, not rock.txt …). As freshman, likely everyone is friendly since they want friends and study mates and project mates, etc. Those contacts are next years study partners and if you can find ones that can help you in ways that work for you, and maybe who need help elsewhere, then this is a great result of this maybe not so fun experience.
Stop asking, the school thinks she can succeed (what percentage of the class is the actual programming part and is there some way to get credit elsewhere), and if she does not, the world will not end, she will not be asked to leave, etc. In a way, this is wasting time that could be spent doing a sample regression analysis from an on-line tutorial.
Also, 20 hours a week is not really drop dead shocking for an honors type course at a top school. Personally spent 40 hours a week on thermodynamics at a not-public-ivy state flagship … as long as you don’t have 3 or 4 of these, you just grin and bear it (and maybe ask around before picking a hard seminar class next time). College is hard, and some are even harder than average …
I mentioned in another thread that everyone will have a class where they stare at the board or the handouts and just realize, I have no idea what this is. The response is important, figure out how to figure out what you don’t know (I think google is best don’t leave your chair response), figure out who or what can help, etc.
My son frequently has meetings at 10 PM. Don’t worry about inconvenient times. There is a peer that can help her and they will find a mutually available time.
I can sympathize with the OP’s frustration: that much instructor coverage, and yet her daughter is left twisting in the wind with no effective help.
There was a moving personal essay in the New York Times last month – an Hispanic woman, now a college professor, talking about her first few weeks at Cornell. No one in her family or community had any comparable experience with college, or college-level work. She didn’t understand the social and administrative structures, and she didn’t understand the assignments. In essence, she owes her career to an assistant professor who was teaching her mandatory English seminar. He didn’t give her the F she probably deserved on her first assignment, and he directed her to a host of resources (not him) to help her learn what writing a college paper entailed. Note: notwithstanding that he was her English teacher, he didn’t take it upon himself to teach her paragraph structure, use of evidence, citations, etc. He just made certain that she knew where to go for help with those things. One wishes that someone had done something similar with the OP’s daughter, but maybe it’s less obvious what specific help she needs.