Computer Organisation and Architecture

The second interaction I had with hardware at NTU was through Computer Organization and Architecture. It introduced concepts on instruction sets, computer arithmetic, CPU/ALU, pipelining and data-transfer. This was the most difficult course for me during my second semester at NTU. Despite the first half being at least doable, the second half was a lot more complex and demanding in terms of understanding as well as practice.

Data-transfer had me worried for a large part of the semester. I found it very difficult to fathom how two devices could "agree" on a transfer rate before starting data transfer between them and not messing anything up. UART was one of the most complex and insane topics for me because none of it made sense! The tutorials were of some help but I found them insufficient and the exam questions were beyond my understanding at that point, which is why I told myself I would attempt them later after I get some concepts cleared. However, till the day before the exam I was not clear on the concept and so unable to solve the questions. I was also worried that the exam will be filled with only questions from this topic.

So I spoke to some people for advice, and they told me to complete the topics I was confident in and just brush through the rest. I followed that, but the problem was that I was confident in probably 3-4 out of around 10 topics, which had me really worried. However, it was already too late then so I decided to just go write whatever I knew. They say luck comes in unexpected places, and this exam was one of them for me. I was so worried that the paper would be filled with UART and not one question came from there! Whatever be the case, even though they never tested us on that topic, I was not well prepared with the other topics either. Considering that, I was proud that I scored above a B- grade.

One of the most important lessons I learnt from my whole first year is from this module: it's okay to not be 100% prepared for an exam! I learnt that not every module will be doable and some of them won't make sense to me till the end and that's fine! What matters is the effort and hard work that goes into preparing. Additionally, I was also aware that I needed to avoid such unpreparedness in the future. This module motivated me to come up with better studying strategies and preparation methods.