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by oretoz
2437 days ago
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Such a detailed answer. Thank you. Unlike you, I registered for an MRes. (Masters in Research) degree at a UK but found that due to lack of taught courses I couldn’t plug the holes in my mathematical foundations. For the very few courses that were taught, quality of teaching was also an issue which presumably wouldn’t be the case at a university like Cambridge. Even though I finished with honours, I am still left with the nagging feeling that I didn’t get what I wanted out of my effort. |
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I recall sitting through a denotational semantics course and the students (all of 18 years old) were asking apparently relevant questions, and the prof (Glynn Wynskel) would say, 'that's a good question'. And I'm sitting at the back of the class awed at this spectacle! I'm wondering what was in this kid's background that prepared him better than me for this course. I have written a compiler, dammit, and I have 20 years of experience. The odds are that I should have heard something in those 20 years that left me marginally better prepared. But no. Here I am, understanding neither the question nor the answer!
It is only in my third year that it clicked. It was just a resistance to formal math, a resistance I had no idea I had. Once I got over it, and I was able to treat math notation as a compact way of writing it out, I started having a good time.
I have a suspicion that quality teaching alone would not have solved your nagging feeling. You need soak time. I am convinced that the 1-year masters programs in the UK (and increasingly so in the US) are a scam. They are only good for the uni to make money, but the students are shafted.