Continuation...

MIE100 - This class is not as bad as people make it seem, but don't get me wrong, it is still very very bad. Don't worry if you don't know what the hell the prof is talking about the first week or so. Once you get past normal-tangential and polar coordinate systems (which I never did in high school), it's not too bad up until the midterm. Mostly a "review" of particle physics from high school. The midterm is almost disturbingly easy. Don't second-guess yourself. If the answer seems so obvious that it must be wrong, don't change it! It's probably right. The midterm will test you on the foundations of what you have learned, so know them well. I had the coordinator as a professor for this course, Leslie Sinclair. I thought she was really good but I know some people who didn't like her personality (whatever, she's a good teacher). Be sure do DO ALL OF THE PROBLEMS THAT ARE SHOWN IN CLASS. I can almost guarantee you that one of them (or a variation) will appear on the exam and it will be worth 20-25% of the exam mark. Also, make sure you can do vibrations problems as there will be one on the exam, and it is pretty much free marks.

MAT197 - Continuation of MAT196, but with tons and tons of integrals. How to do well? Do a TON of integrals. Don't stop. No, don't stop now either. Keep doing them and you will develop a sort of gut feeling that you need to possess in order to be able to do tough integrals on tests without having to stare at them for half an hour. I had Prof. Cohen for this course and he was amazing. Very interesting guy and an excellent teacher. He was definitely one of my favourite first year professors. As far as the exam goes, it was pretty tough. Well, mostly it was long. A few tricky questions, but if you know how to integrate well, you shouldn't have too many problems. Just be sure you can do them fast.

ECE110 - The first part of this course is electricity and magnetism. Basically just understand some of the basic concepts and then memorize a ton of formulas. Yes, it's insanity, but you have to know them all. The first quiz is basically formula regurgitation. For the bulk of the course (after electricity and magnetism), you will learn circuit analysis. This might seem stupid, but be sure you really understand basic things such as potential difference, current/voltage dividers, the idea of a ground, etc. This will help you immensely. Other than that, just practice solving circuits. The book questions are pretty good. The quizzes are not too hard but are hard to finish in the given time. The labs are easy easy marks. As long as you show up with the prep work done and finish the lab, you will get 100%. The exam was not too bad. The layout is nearly identical to past exams, so study those. My Prof for the course was Costas Sarris and I thought he was excellent. This guy will do his absolute best to ensure that everybody understands what is going on. Go to his office hours with questions. He is very friendly and approachable.

APS104 - Sort of an odd course that seems like a combination of two quarter courses. For the first half of the class, you do physical chemistry and for the second half, you do materials science. The physical chemistry problems in the book are extremely easy, so be sure to do the supplemental problems when they give them. ALWAYS go to the tutorials and do the problems at the end. Those problems WILL show up on tests. For the Chemistry section, my Prof was Edgar Acosta who was horrendous. I started attending Prof. Cheng's lectures near the end and she was great. For the Materials section, I had Prof. Erb, who was a good teacher, but never seemed to know what was going on in terms of tests or course administration. On the Chemistry tests, some questions will seem like you don't have enough information unless you notice a key word. For example, a popular one seemed to be "adiabatic" which means that q = 0. Once you have that key piece of information, everything falls into place. The exam, which was all materials, was straight forward and as long as you can do the tutorial problems, you should be fine.

APS112 - Continuation of APS111, this course is pretty much all document writing and doing presentations. The two multiple choice quizzes are tough, but not as bad as the APS111 ones. The first few documents are marked really hard, but as you revise, you will find it not too hard to be getting 70's or 80's on them. I think the course average for this course was a B- (insanely high for engineering), so just work hard and you should be fine.

If you have any questions, feel free to PM me.

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U of T Electrical Engineering 1T1

No they don't. You can pick up a for Dummies book and learn that stuff if you want, 2 months should be OK.

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University of Lost Hope, Broken Dreams and Tattered Souls - Sanitational Engineering '08
Self-help: I am taking Engineering, but Engineering isn't taking me.

The coding itself is not very hard. You have to learn how to use the tools at your disposal (C++ or whatever language they will teach) to solve problems.

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U of T Electrical Engineering 1T1

you'll find that out yourself soon enough but I wouldn't say the prof's are super excited about getting into the lab and doing research anyways haha most enjoy their time teaching

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-University of Toronto Electrical Engineering 1T0!

Of the 11 or so Profs I had first year, only two of them were horrible enough for me to try and switch lecture sections. As for programming, I had absolutely no experience going into the class and I got an 80. A friend of mine had no experience and he got a 90. So, it might help to learn over the summer but it's really not needed.

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U of T Electrical Engineering 1T1

first year? pretty much nothing lol you won't even use matlab (that's all 2nd year onwards)

programming is done on the Red Hat Unix labs, they use the gcc compilers but that really doesn't matter whatsoever for your uses

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-University of Toronto Electrical Engineering 1T0!

You're in ECE second year too? Cool, maybe we'll be in some classes together. Who else on this forum is going into ECE second year?

As for your questions, I'm sure bijanv can answer the ones on second year classes. As for the average GPA questions, you can kind of get an idea using the Engineering Ranking thing they have on the registrar site. But, I would guess that the average would probably be in the C range (2.0).

PEY is an optional 12 or 16 month placement you can take after second or third year. So, it really doesn't matter when or if you take it. You need 600 hours of engineering experience to graduate however, so PEY would take care of that.

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U of T Electrical Engineering 1T1

I would say the hardest courses for "me" (I'm sure other people have different opinions based on what their strengths are) were Calc III and Electricity & Magnetism (which is pretty much Calc IV lol) .

Profs that I really enjoyed were Prof. Rose (241) and Moshovos (243). I'm not sure who will be teaching the other courses so I can't really say which prof would be better.

2nd year is pretty tough but it's not that bad. 1st semester average gpa is like 2.7? and second semseter went a little bit higher but only because there was like a 25% bell curve up in 243 lol actually not even a bell curve.. he just added 25% to everyone's marks and a whole bunch of people got 100% or 99% in the course haha

co-op is never necessary (well minus getting the 600 hours) but is always a good idea, otherwise what would you be doing during your summer? You can do you PEY after 2nd or 3rd year but I strongly suggest after 3rd year as most jobs require 3rd year knowledge


oh I also went through a bunch of courses in another thread so you might want to find that one and have a look

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-University of Toronto Electrical Engineering 1T0!

He added 25% to everyone's mark!? What was the final average?

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U of T Electrical Engineering 1T1

The bell curve works so that regardless of percentage mark, the top 2% of the class get an A+, the next 5% get an A, the next 5% get an A-, etc, the bottom 10% fail. So it has more to do with how well you do in relation to how your class is doing. I don't go to U of T so for all I know they have some weird system of bell curving it, but I doubt it. Also in some of my classes last year they would do a combo of bell curving it and taking into account 'historical data' (aka how well other classes in the past have done). I'm not exactly sure how it worked, but it was pretty much the same.

Haha no you don't need to study physics and physics history in your spare time. You're going to need to do a little bit more than just paying attention and doing homework (it's not highschool anymore!). So you will probably have to read the textbook, do practice problems, go get help if necessary. Good time managament and preparation will be all you need to succeed!

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University of Alberta - Mechanical Engineering '11