Course Disappointment

In lieu of my poor performance in one of the courses, I performed some self-analysis and tried to personally spot out my shortcomings. Apart from many of my apparent weaknesses like procrastination, lack of focus, and seriousness, which are themselves big weaknesses on my part, I believe that there were other reasons too that became the causes of these weaknesses.

Those included my demoralization, discouragement, and fear. Right from the beginning of the coursework, I was not able to perform well on the homeworks because of the major fact that I was not fully prepared on the course's content and on top of that, the homework questions assigned each week were basically questions from past exams which would be worth 20 or so points and would be designated 3-4 hours of time in the exam. Moreover, when appearing in the exams, these questions would also assume that an examine would have full knowledge of the complications of the material being tested.

Thus as a natural reaction to such convoluted problem statements, I would first startle upon seeing the homework and then begin to yawn after spending hours of hopeless effort to set up the problem solution. I would naturally get demoralized that I cannot solve them without assistance.

Moreover, this would shatter my courage as I was hardly able to solve a single problem on my own. It would also force me to go to the tutors' office hours and seek help in solving the problems, which would not help me learn much because tutors would completely describe problem solutions rather than interactively providing hints and assisting me in gradually progressing towards the solution.

In any case, I realized that a necessary requirement for me to succeed in learning the course material was to personally solve the problems and for that I had to have mastered the pre-requisites. I also thought that Professors should have increased the level of difficulty of the homeworks gradually, thereby instilling a sense of confidence among the students as the coursework grew in complication.

The pre-requisite for this course included the mastery of undergrduate level Linear Algebra, command over usage of Matlab programming language, and an appreciation of various concepts of Electrical Engineering, including the analog and digital signal processing, and control theory. This was another reason for me to feel overwhelmed at learning the course material because I had to simultaneously catch-up on pre-requisites while learn the new material with appreciation of the strength of its application.