My Thirteenth semester at Ivy Tech Community College (Spring 2014)

My Thirteenth semester at Ivy Tech Community College (Spring 2014)

I was really not looking forward to this semester. Maybe it was because the last one was so stressful. I ordered my books the Friday before classes were due to start.

I noticed there were different book requirements for the different CINS 279 classes; of course the class I was signed up for required the most books. Also some of the classes only went 8 weeks instead of 16 weeks. I tried to contact my advisor to change classes, but he never contacted me back, and of course you need an advisors approval to sign up for these classes. I really do not see the point in that, if you have taken the prerequisite classes and passed them, you should be able to sign up for a class. I am not even sure my advisor checked anything before filling out the paper work. Well as luck would have it, I was able to sign up for the CINS 279 class out of Warsaw, without needing an advisors approval. So I dropped the CINS I was signed up for and returen the books to Amazon, and had to pay a return charge, but I still came out way ahead.

I have tried to sign up for classes as soon as I can and they do not always have all the classes listed and certainly do not have the required material listed. And who would have thought there was that much of a difference in classes between locations, some locations required no books, and fewer weeks. I think it is ridicules that the books are not standard between locations, but a difference in the time period is really not right and should be looked into. Note: after taking the class I can see why eight weeks would have been enough. The Capstone test only goes for part of the semester and the work could be done in eight weeks, at least for the CINS 279 class I took.  

I signed up for an Advance C++ class out of Elkhart, but it was canceled.

Classes:

CINS 203          Systems Analysis and Design (Wednesday 7:00-9:45 (Elkhart))

This was an advisor approved class.  But when I meet with the advisor he was surprised the paper said that about the class. From the post I saw online it looked like it was advisor approved. I did not care for this class at all. It touched on a lot of stuff very briefly. And it was just power points.

CINS 279          Capstone Course (Online (Warsaw))

I switched to this class from the one I originally signed up for at the Anderson campus. So start from the end of the alphabet when just randomly picking an online class. I switched when I saw the amount of work Anderson campus expected for a two credit hour course. I have taken other classes out of the Anderson campus and they are great professors at that campus. And the CINS 279 class at Anderson would have been great if I was at the beginning of my career, instead of nearing the end. 

EECT 209        Industrial Computer Control I (Thursday 7:00-9:45 (South Bend))

I was disappointed when I found out Rahim Negahban was not teaching the class, he was original listed to teach the class. Professor Thomas Holwerda turned out to be a great professor. 

I knew nothing about PLC’s so I did not know what to expect from this class. And it turns out you use ladder logic to program PLC’s. I guess it is called ladder logic because your program looks like a ladder and the call each statement a rung. Well I understand the logic part very well, but putting that in ladder format is not as easy as it sounds. I think part of it was I was afraid I was forcing normal program logic into the program to make it easier for me to program and understand.