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Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

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Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#251

Post by lr4444lr »

michaelsbradley wrote: post #174
don-code wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college. The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless of your grade. The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a transistor in…

I was in honors freshman chemistry at university. Tough class, all homework (lots of it) graded rigorously, but only the midterm and final counted toward the course grade. So if you wanted an A you had to get an A on both exams. After midterm, during every other lecture at least, the professor would sound a refrain: “An orbital is not a house! An electron does not live in a house!” Final exam had a small number of co…

Having gone both to a liberal arts institution and a large public university, it is not clear to me what the professors in the latter were actually doing vis a vis their teaching responsibilities that actually provided value.

Lectures that came straight from the book I could have read, recitations and problem reviews done by grad students, and tests that were little more than variations on homework problems of varying difficulty.

Maybe they were getting paid for research, but I dunno. At the liberal arts college, I actually received an education instead of bootstrapping it myself from a syllabus.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#252

Post by ethbr1 »

don-code wrote: post #152
potato3732842 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened. This sentence could have also ended "my gpa dipped below the threshold for some bullshit mark it up to mark it down exercise masquerading as a scholarship and I had to re-take the class for a better grade anyway"

Indeed it could have. I was on a fairly prestigious scholarship; luckily, my marks were good enough that this was a low-risk decision. That said... I graduated with a 3.2 GPA, after being the stereotypical "gifted" student up through high school. A 3.2 is, apparently, still decent. However, I did feel a bit of a twinge seeing my peers walk at graduation with with cords, bents, and other regalia, where I just had my s…

Message for engineering undergraduates: when you have an opportunity to trade great grades for good grades and increased immediate career prospects, take it.

Your internship / prospective employer cares way more about the job you're doing for them than +0.5 GPA.

(If you're heading right to grad school, obviously different weighting)

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#253

Post by kelnos »

don-code wrote: post #152
potato3732842 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened. This sentence could have also ended "my gpa dipped below the threshold for some bullshit mark it up to mark it down exercise masquerading as a scholarship and I had to re-take the class for a better grade anyway"

Indeed it could have. I was on a fairly prestigious scholarship; luckily, my marks were good enough that this was a low-risk decision. That said... I graduated with a 3.2 GPA, after being the stereotypical "gifted" student up through high school. A 3.2 is, apparently, still decent. However, I did feel a bit of a twinge seeing my peers walk at graduation with with cords, bents, and other regalia, where I just had my s…

Yeah, I'm not going to say that undergrad doesn't matter, but your grades are not exactly an indication of whether or not you're getting useful life and professional skills out of it. I was a straight-A high school student, but finished university a semester late with a 2.975 GPA. I've since had a wildly successful career in software development (my degree is in electrical engineering), and my college years toiling about in labs are but a dim memory.

Certainly the name of the school on my resume helped me interview for my first job, and I did learn a bunch about how computers worked and how to design CPUs, and that was useful early in my career when I worked on embedded software (like actually embedded, weak-ass MIPS machines with a handful of MB of RAM, and no MMU or memory protection[0]; not the tiny supercomputers that count as "embedded" these days). But my grades, and most of the getting-my-coursework-done drama? Irrelevant.

[0] And I'm sure some folks here will consider what I had to work with a luxury.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#254

Post by klysm »

dragonwriter wrote: post #164
BeetleB wrote: post #85

Oh, BTW, the whole "Friction is directly proportional to the normal force": My Ass! I could never reproduce it well in the lab, because it's really not true. Take a heavy cube the shape of a book. Orient it so that the spine is on the floor. It's a lot more friction to move it in one direction than in the transverse direction. Yet the normal force is the same. Any kid knows this, and I feel dumb it never occurred to…

Friction is proportional to the normal force, more specifically, it is the normal force times the coefficient of friction. What you are describing (if the normal force is actually the same) is a contact situation where the coefficient of friction is different in different directions (anisotropic friction.)

Not true in practice for a lot of materials

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#255

Post by klysm »

credit_guy wrote: post #60

But that so-called best fit line is not an exponential. Exponential functions are convex, that line is concave. I’m afraid you’ll have to repeat the experiment.

It’s not literally a pure exponential function but it might have exponential terms as opposed to polynomial or linear terms

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#256

Post by jiggawatts »

I'll repeat the same comment I made to the same article when it posted here about a year ago:

As an odd coincidence, I did the same experiment on a shoestring budget with substandard equipment also. I too used a fancy computer algorithm to get a best fit. Except that I managed to get four significant decimal places in the result — an improvement over the (also outdated) textbook.

The author of the angry rant had a life-defining experience of overwhelming frustration.

The same scenario resulted in a positive life-defining experience for me

It’s funny how unpredictably things pan out even in identical circumstances…

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#257

Post by jiggawatts »

don-code wrote: post #87
jerf wrote: post #27

One of my Core Memories when it comes to science, science education, and education in general was in my high school physics class, where we had to do an experiment to determine the gravitational acceleration of Earth. This was done via the following mechanism: Roll a ball off of a standard classroom table. Use a 1990s wristwatch's stopwatch mechanism to start the clock when the ball rolls of the table. Stop the stopw…

This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college. The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless of your grade. The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a transistor in…

This makes me incredibly grateful for my physics lecturers, all of whom would bend over backwards to assist their students' journeys towards learning any time any stumbled or showed a spark of curiosity that needed fanning into a raging fire.

I had lecturers give me bonus marks above 100% because I noticed issues like this and thanked me for helping to improve the course material!

These lecturers, when merely overhearing a curious "huh?" conversation between students would spend hours of their own time scouring the library for relevant information and just "leave" photocopies for students to find the next day.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#259

Post by djmips »

ALLTaken wrote: post #20
mr_mitm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/cv.html Looks like he went on get a PhD in CS and is now a staff SWE at Google, according to his LinkedIn. Guess he's rolling in cash after all.

You're right, I looked up and he seems to work at Google as a SWE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-kovar-185a3531 Happy he made the leap and at least get's paid well now (I hope).

Fear not, he's being paid well.

Re: Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)

#260

Post by poincaredisk »

zdragnar wrote: post #215
poincaredisk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That would be a very valuable lab, IF students hadn't been explicitly trained in opposite behaviour for a decade by then. I teach students sometimes. I briefly considered whenever I should give them such important lesson. Very briefly: my job is to teach students my specialty, not give them life lessons. Why would I deal with potentially angry students for doing something that's not obvious I'm allowed to do? Hell,…

Being in a professional field means being the expert in the room for your area of responsibility. That means being able to translate information into, and out of, the terms of art in your profession. This is generally considered a "soft skill", but it really should be a recurring part of any technical curriculum. There are generalizations of the concept- tailoring your message to your audience in public speaking, or…

I agree, that's a valuable skill. But do I, an expert in a narrow (very far removed from any soft skills) field, am the person who should teach it? When some students raise a complaint, how will I explain to the University management that this twist, even though completely unrelated to what I am supposed to teach, was actually a good idea?

I just say, even with good intentions, the incentives are not aligned with teachers going too far out of line.

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