crazy course

Almost everybody in our lab (Aerospace Computational Design Laboratory) has been the victim of this crazy course called 16.930 (Advanced Topic in Numerical Method for Partial Differential Equation).

Now is my turn.

Its first assignment is extremely EXHAUSTIVE and INTENSIVE.
I've been spending much more time on it than my own research project.

In the problem set given, there is no formulation at all. It's also an open ended question where there may be many approach and even the professors don't know exactly what the result will be like. As my seniors put it, it's like a research of its own. And it has to be done in one month. Tell me about that.

This assignment has successfully robbed me from all weekends and all spare time that I may have or deserve.

The worst part of it is how time consuming it is. To know whether your code is right or not, you need to wait for at least 3 hours. One time I let it run overnight, and I woke up at almost 5 am just to find that my result has blown up to millions from the supposedly 3 and 2.4 in values. Tell me about that.

I am at the Student Center now, because I just had discussion with one of my classmate. I want to wait until 500 iterations before I go back. It is already 1 am here so I guess I'll be back by 2 am. My friend has left as he has morning classes tomorrow.

I did all my coding alone, but you definitely need someone to cross-check your modification with. They are just too much and it will take even longer time if you want to do it alone. Last saturday, I spent hours to debug and right after midnight I just found that I put multiplication (*) instead of division (/) in my MATLAB code. Tell me about that.

And the least you need is a MORAL SUPPORT.

At least if you know that there's another PDE fighter is also working, you'll feel better.

OK, I guess that's all for now. I am extremely worried with my simulation now...