Courses in Year 2 Semester 2

This semester started off like any other with new subjects, classes and professors. The first two months were alright even though there was news about an infectious disease going around. However, by the time recess week came in March around it was already a requirement to wear a mask while travelling and constant sanitisation was a necessity. The rest of the semester after recess hardly had any studying as there was extreme confusion on the assessments and whether or not there would be final exams. Both the students and the university were both not ready for a pandemic so everyone was struggling to cope with the situation.

Eventually the university had to cancel all final exams and make the few quizzes we had given before that count towards our final grade with increased weightage. This decision came after a lot of changes in schedule which caused a lot of confusion among the students at NTU.

Given all this background, suffice it to say that the semester was very chaotic and stressful which impacted the mental state and ability to study of every student, including me. The university was gracious enough to take that into account and allowed us to change any and all courses into pass/fail grading, and were fairly lenient with grading as well.

In this light, the quality of learning in the semester was unfortunately heavily impacted. The subjects I took in this semester were:

Advanced Computer Architecture
It builds upon the concepts taught in Computer Organisation and Architecture from year 1 semester 2. It introduces more detailed concepts of assembly language programming through practical labs and informative lectures.

Digital Systems Design
It builds on Digital Logic taught in year 1 semester 1. The concepts covered deal with adders, multiplexers, LUTs (Look-Up Tables) and other types of circuits. One especially interesting lab was where we were tasked to change the colour and resolution of a camera input using the above concepts.

Microcontroller Programming
One of the harder courses of the semester, this subject dealt with some basic Linux programming as well as programming in C on an Arduino Uno board to perform various

Software Engineering
Given its group project-based curriculum, this subject was not affected much by the pandemic. Refer this article for details.

Marketing for the 21st Century
I took this subject under the General Education Requirements - Prescribed Elective in Business Management (GER-PE BM) at NTU. It dealt with a lot of group work and in-class discussions. It helped me develop my soft skills and on-the-spot thinking. The structure of this class was quite different from other classes I had taken before. It was very vocal and group-discussion based and the professor encouraged us to discuss and find answers among ourselves. Every class, there would be a case study assigned to each group to work on for 15 minutes, followed by a discussion on the reflections by each group. This practice helped me improve my public speaking a little as well as helped with improving my collaboration skills. Additionally, we also had a final group project where we had to analyse any company, present a report on their business practices and come up with a solution to a problem we see with them. I learnt a lot about the business practices of Starbucks Coffee through this project! The experience of researching about something totally outside my usual area of study was also very interesting.

Though the semester ended in a strange way with the sudden cancellation of final exams, it was memorable for whatever I managed to learn through the stressful period. The semester was also followed by a 5-month "circuit breaker" period which was the lockdown in Singapore. The free time allowed me to reflect on my first two years at university, and plan for the next two.