First Year Advice ?

implosion · **Posted:** Mon Jul 13, 2009 1:52 pm

Hey, so I'm going to UTSC for Computer Science (co-op). I made a rough schedule of the courses i wanted and i was wondering if the way i set it up if i am screwed or not ? I start to actually pick the courses tomorrow (july 14) at 11:40am.

My elective courses are...
1) Political Sciences
2) Canadian Literary Traditions
3) Introduction to Management 1
4) Intro to Statistics 1

i wasn't keen on taking the English course, but i had to fill the English requirement. Also i don't know anything about statistics, i just picked it to fill up a space since any other compsci elective was a 3rd / 4th year course and had prerequisites. I was wondering if i'll be able to handle the math for my second semester (adv. func / calc. was 77% ), i already have 2 maths there and then on top of that a statistics class... the description for it said it wasn't math heavy... but i'm still not sure.

i'm attached the spreadsheet i made on excel

implosion · **Posted:** Wed Jul 15, 2009 12:31 pm

okay. so my schedule above did not go according to plan.... i've attached what my schedule looks like now... and as you can see on tuesday and friday i have STAB22H3 (statistics 1)... if i take an economics course i can get rid of those STAB tutorials and lectures and then have my 2 days off, keeping in mind that its about a 45 minute drive from my house to UTSC and whats the point of driving almost an hour for an hour class ? -- or would that class help me ? i plan on doing something majoring in compsci and then either in mathematics or business. or should i just suck it up and take statistics ?
also could anyone explain more to me about this course, i really don't know much about economics

ECMA04H3 Introduction to Microeconomics: A Mathematical Approach

Economic theory of the firm and the consumer. Calculus, algebra and graphs are used extensively. The course is oriented towards students interested in the Specialist Program in Management, the Specialist program in Economics for Management Studies, and the Major Program in Economics for Management Studies.

nike52 · **Posted:** Wed Jul 15, 2009 9:37 pm

sure take the econ, knowing econ/business is useful for a programmer/business major

yoursecretninja · **Posted:** Fri Jul 17, 2009 9:24 am

In response to your query about the economics class... I have not taken that specific one but I have taken a few economics classes and would recommend that you take it. Microeconomics covers some very good to know topics, such as market structures (monopolies, oligopolies, perfect competition), supply and demand, price elasticity, production possibilities, marginal costs, opportunity costs, and more. All this knowledge is very useful and will help your understanding of business, markets, politics/governance and current events.

endless · **Posted:** Fri Jul 17, 2009 9:41 am

"This class will be the most beneficial of any of your first year classes" approximate quotation from Larry Smith(UW) on ECON 102.

jbking · **Posted:** Fri Jul 17, 2009 10:57 am

I remember taking ECON 102... my suggestion is to work on the practice exams as those multiple choice exams can be very tricky if you aren't used to that style. The style being that a few different choices may make sense if there weren't the other answers down there so that you are choosing the best answer.

hotwire · **Posted:** Sat Jul 18, 2009 11:47 pm

I'd say go for the Econ, it's really nice to only go to school for 3 days. If you'll end up taking 2 math courses and 2 business related courses (management + econ) you'll probably be equally qualified to go either route. Does the stats course have a calc prereq? If not I don't think you should be too worried based on your HS calc mark.

Your econ course seems better than ECON101 (the intro micro course) at Waterloo. It's actually math-based and uses calculus. I wish they used more math in my course, it would've been more interesting.

implosion · **Posted:** Wed Aug 19, 2009 7:11 pm

hey sorry i haven't replied in a while. been on vacation. thing is from what i've heard statistics is a completely different side of math that i haven't touched. i never took data management in highschool and i thought it'd be better to take statistics going into compsci ?

Tony · **Posted:** Wed Aug 19, 2009 8:40 pm

I don't know about UTSC, but UW requires two STATs courses for CS. It's good to have some basic understanding of the subject. Recently, I've actually got a chance to apply some of that material to figuring out the abnormal results in Analytics. It's not something you would typically encounter as a developer in a large team, but it's a definite asset if you are in a position to make sense out of numbers.

At the very least, you might learn how to measure better benchmarks for performance comparison.

jbking · **Posted:** Thu Aug 20, 2009 3:50 pm

implosion @ Wed Aug 19, 2009 5:11 pm wrote:

hey sorry i haven't replied in a while. been on vacation. thing is from what i've heard statistics is a completely different side of math that i haven't touched. i never took data management in highschool and i thought it'd be better to take statistics going into compsci ?

If I may make a suggestion. Assuming you will study least squares from a couple different perspectives, don't take both courses in the same semester. In my case this was taking Advanced Statistics(Stat 241) along with Numerical Analysis(CS 370), that was probably a little rougher than I'd like. The Stats course covers it from a Math perspective of this being a part of Linear Regression while the CS course examines the actual work that Matlab does which is an implementation of what was in the Stats course. I can contrast that to encryption material I got to experience in first year Algebra(Math 145) and Symbolic Computation(CS 487) that with the courses being so far apart it was neat to revisit the material again.

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