Winter is coming; or at least the Winter 2013 Session at the University of Toronto. With a new semester ahead, there awaits many challenges and opportunities that are presented to us. One of those challenges include the course CSC165 (Mathematical Expression and Reasoning for Computer Science).

    Coming into this course, I was actually very scared. I have heard the many stories of how difficult this course was and how my friend almost failed. So far my first impression of this course is that it seems fairly different but for me I find that this course is more frustrating than enjoying for me. That is because a little different than the MAT135 (Calculus I) course, the CSC165 uses certain claims about statements and decide whether they are universal or whether there exists such a claim. This style of thinking is a lot similar to the MAT135 stuff, in terms of the certain mathematics claims like whether a function is continuous function is a differentiable. However, I was never very good at these kinds of mathematical concepts and theories instead I was stronger at the computing aspect of calculus than its theorems. And this is probably the reason why this course has been nothing but pain and frustration for me so far.

    In specific what has been challenging for me in this course is adapting to understand what the correlation the Venn diagrams had with a claim and how the quantifiers functioned. The Venn diagrams in specific was most troubling to me. The reason being was and are things that were placed within the Venn diagram. I didn't understand what the question mark, circle, X symbols mean and how these symbols proved a certain claim false or true. However, having spent 1-2 hours a day reviewing over my notes again and having gotten help in tutorial, the content began to become clear and made more sense. Another one of my frustrations included how a list comprehension functioned and how it is used in a certain claim. The idea of whether one list of elements is a subset of another list of element had me confused for several days as well as the symbols that are associated with them. Having said that, my first intention was to try and test out these quantifiers function and see what the outcome would produce. At first, I didn't understand why the outcome were what they were but sooner or later, some of the code started to make sense. I started to understand what code did and this helped me greatly towards understanding how it is used in the claim. And having learned how the code functioned did this course really start to make a little bit more sense.

   Though I have expressed many negative reactions to the course material, I feel a little confident about the course material so far. For example, some of the things that I've learn this week includes how to verify or falsify a claim using both universal and existential quantifiers, how claims can be represented in Venn diagrams, what certain symbols meant in a claim, and what a list comprehension is. As to my achievements this week, I would consider writing the quiz with rather great confidence an achievement in itself. The reason being is that before I had written the quiz, I was completely lost as to what we were doing in class. I even almost cried as I began leaving the classroom. Strangely enough, the night before the quiz, the content started to make sense to make after hours of reviewing the course notes. Not only did that help me but the exercise we did in tutorial was a great confidence booster as it left many doubts I had about the content behind.

    As you can tell by now this course has been rather troublesome but in a way still somewhat doable. Although, I feel a little bit more confident with the course material so far, I have already prepare for the worst and intend on seeking office hours sometime in the near future until all this sense makes sense. But until then all I can do is Dream On.