Summer 2005 is here!

Heh so my last summer was spent slumming around in China, eating lots of cheap food and buying souvenirs for family and friends. This year, I'll be continuing my part as a grunt worker in the initial phase of the Aquanode project.

Even though I passed my Ph.D. Screening Exam this past April, a last hurdle before being considered an actual Ph.D. student and not just a potential flake, I will apparently not be able to get my masters degree for Summer 2005 due to one last annoyance: the engineering writing requirement for CCSP students in the ECE Department.

CCSP stands for Communications, Control, and Signal Processing, and apparently only students in this division of the ECE Department are required to take an engineering writing class. I tried to petition out of the requirement using a 15-week class I took as an undergrad at UCB (E190), but was shot down; apparently I still have to take the Engr 103/203 10-week class to prove to the department that I'm not illiterate after immersing myself in ECE the past 2 years. The administration told me that if I had not taken the class before my B.S. degree, it would have counted; however, since I took the class while I was an undergrad it can't fulfill the engineering writing requirement. It is interesting that only a technicality, and not whether I have developed good writing or presentation skills, is what matters.

Now I wouldn't mind taking the course here at UCSB so much, except for the fact that they do not offer this class in the summer. At UCB, because many engineering students were required to take E190 (Technical Communications) in order to graduate, they always offered many sections in the summer since the course was so impacted. As a grad student, I don't want to waste precious time during the regular school year when I could be taking classes more helpful to my research, or doing research itself.

I don't blame the department entirely, since I can see how it could be a nightmare if they allowed grad students to petition to allow their undergrad classes to fulfill grad school requirements, but I do think in the case of this engineering writing requirement the situation is a little absurd.