I Finally Graduated!

Me presenting my thesis in my bedroom

I finally finished my four years of undergraduate, and now I’m out in the real world at least for a while (until I find some place that will accept me for grad school).

For those who doesn’t know (or you haven’t read the About Me section), I graduate with an Bachelor’s of Science in Physics, with minors in Computer Science and Mathematics. There is a very long story behind why I chose to do physics (and it wasn’t simply because it was my most preferred major).

I want to write some stuff out about the experience, but rather than doing one long essay about it, I’ll break the text into sections, based on some leading questions. Just a weird way of organising this article I guess.

What were your favourite classes?

Interestingly, I have an entire playlist talking about classes from university I enjoy. So I guess this list is a good list of classes I enjoyed. From this, list, I particularly enjoyed Statistical Mechanics, Optimisation, Numerical Methods and Data Structures. They were classes with very interesting content, and I thought the class itself was also conducted very well. To be honest though, this could have been said for all of the classes in that list.

The playlist was made back in December, and since then, I also took a class in Contemporary Algorithms which was also quite a lot of fun. Most of us left lectures feeling like we were listening to gibberish, but the homework were quite a lot of fun. Mostly a theoretical class where we discussed some of the newer ideas from the field of algorithms.

Outside the more technical classes, I also took some General Education classes, and some of them I also really enjoyed. One highlight for me was Introduction to Political Science, where the content was very interesting (all about how the systems of government developed over time from the ancient Greeks to the present day). The professor is also this great guy who knows his stuff and very familiar with Thai politics, and gives interesting insights about it.

What were your least favourite classes?

Amongst my physics classes, definitely Nuclear Physics. I didn’t really like the content of the class (as in it wasn’t really that interesting to me). It all seemed like a whole bunch of maths and theories about the subatomic particles and their behaviours, and it just never clicked in my head.

Outside the physics classes, I also took a couple of classes where the contents were somewhat interesting, but studying for their exams was a painful experience. Two that came to mind for me were Science of Food (which just boiled down to remembering a lot of chemistry and biology facts), and Introduction to Geology (partially because I took this class in my last term when I already had a lot of other things I had to do already).

Any regrets with your choices of classes?

One regret I had about my electives was picking Astrophysics over the other physics electives. Don’t get me wrong, Astrophysics is a perfectly good class (it teaches you space stuff which of course is interesting), but it isn’t as interesting as pop science would make it out to be. I very soon realise that there were much more interesting electives on offer which came later on, including Differential Geometry (which I would have loved), and even Plasma Physics.

Outside that, I really wanted to take Introduction to Philosophy. Every semester since I had the idea to take this class, I either had too many other classes I had to take already, or the class was not open. Most terms I just went, “eh, I’ll try again next term”. And then my last term came and I never took the class. Had to take Logic instead to fulfil the required credits which was okay but still wasn’t really my preferred choice.

Also not really a regret, but I wished I majored in Maths instead. For reasons that wasn’t possible when I attended university, but I still have a big “what if” at the back of my mind about how it would have turned out if I wasn’t a physics major. Surprisingly though, I would probably still choose not to major in computer science despite knowing what I want to do now (although I probably should have considered taking something like OS or Database too).

What was your thesis about?

I would like to direct you here.

What things outside class did you enjoy?

Early days of the Meme Board (when the memes weren't that dank yet)

I did quite a few things during my time at university. Most of my first year was spent as a member of the university Debate team, which was where I made my first group of friends at university. After a year or so I left the team since it wasn’t something I wanted to dedicate my time towards (with me having more interests focusing on classes and stuff), but I would still be hanging out with a lot of those people anyway outside club meetings.

I also made quite a lot of friends from the classes I took. The physics major was quite small (there were no more than 15 of us in the program), and we all knew each other quite well. A lot of us also took classes in computer science, and I made a lot of friends there as well.

Computer science students here have a common room referred to as Room 1409 (since it was the actual room number), and I would hang out there quite a lot. I spend a lot of time in there doing work, but I also play quite a bit of games in there. Someone will usually have a Nintendo Switch in the room, and I spend many hours playing Puyo Puyo Tetris with my friends (I was probably the second best Tetris player in that room), and also occasionally beat the juniors at FIFA. We also have a Meme Board in there, where we put very dank memes on display.

Moments from university you remember?

One I want to share was my first day at university, when I had a Mathematical Methods class at 8am. I went to class, and the professor was late (after a while we realise that he was always late). The class itself was okay though, since we mostly did calculus review on the first class. It was on the second class, when he introduced partial derivatives, that I absolutely lost it. It was the same day that I went to my Mechanics class and I saw calculus being used in physics (big shock isn’t it). This was like my third day at college, and my first time seeing the rest of what calculus had to offer. So that was quite a bit of a shock, but it all turned out okay in the end.

There were also some minor moments of messing up. Once, in a coding exam (a Mastery to be more precise), I lost marks because I had a variable as an int instead of as a long, even though the logic was all correct. Once I torrented Rick and Morty while having someone else’s VPN on (and they found out). Once I forgot one of the routes in American Football which eventually costed me an A. I mean, not big mess ups, but still were fun. Not everything can go your way I guess.

How was it compared to high school?

Well, the physics got harder.

Okay, but other than the things I learnt in class. I think back in high school, because how A-Levels were structured (the most important thing were the couple of exams you had to do at the end of Years 12 and 13), the strategy of studying then was to go through all of the contents you had to go through, then just grind out a lot of past papers to get familiar with the questions that will appear on the final exam. It allowed us to somewhat learn the content, but at the end of the day, it was still just studying for an exam. Once I got to university however, the exams weren’t the big focus anymore. Since each classes were evaluated individually, and often they weren’t just based on just the single final exam, there was less pressure to nail down the exam taking technique. We were able to spend more time just diving into the content and making sure we know the stuff, and that we will get the grades we deserve by the end of it.

Other than that I thought A-Levels made the jump from high school to university quite a bit smaller. Not only was I already more familiar with some of the contents that I had to do (basically could skip a lot of the chemistry and biology classes I would have needed to do otherwise), but I was also more familiar with the ideas of self-studying. In my last years of high school, most of us had plenty of free time during the day, since we only had to do about six hours of each classes a week. That left me about 2-3 hours each school day to do whatever I wanted. It gave me quite some time to study for the classes, but also go play music or whatever. The ability to do self-studying and be disciplined enough to keep the schedule was quite important into transitioning into university life, where you spend little time in lectures and be expected to do the work outside the classroom yourself.

How did you change before and after university (apart from knowing more physics/maths)?

I was a more awkward person back in school. I had a couple of friends, but overall I was still not that social and not that good with people. I think that improved quite a bit when I got to university. In a way, it was like a blank slate since a lot of us just came in not knowing anyone, so we had a chance to make new friends. It was also a bit easier as well since you have more people to choose from, many of who were interested in similar things. It was only at university did I find people also interested in maths, or physics, or debating, or not going out at night, or listen to the same music I do. I became a bit more outgoing, and more social. It was great.

How would you rate your university experience?

9/10 - not a perfect score because nothing is perfect.

What now?

I’ll be working for a bit now, at least a year. Hopefully by the time 2021 rolls around, some grad school will accept me and I can continue with my studies (of course, unless Covid-19 decides to strike again or something). If not, I’ll just keep waiting for another year or something.