First college application sent

Last night my son got his first set of college applications sent off: University of California, which has its own idiosyncratic deadline and application form. UC does not ask for transcripts and does not want letters of recommendation—students have to enter all their transcript information into web forms.  The lack of letters of recommendation may be a blessing in disguise, as one of his recommenders has still not been able to get the Common App to accept her letter for him. The UC web forms are set up to be fairly easy (though tedious) for students at California high schools, since UC has a list of all UC-approved courses at each high school, but they are really a pain for a home school student.  We were lucky in that his home-schooling was done under a public-school umbrella (Alternative Family Education) that appeared on the drop-down list.  Otherwise, it would have been difficult even to say where he did his high school education.  The instructions for home-schoolers seem to be non-existent and figuring out where to tuck various bits of information was tough.

He ended up applying to 3 of the UCs (UCB, UCSB, and UCSD), though the only campuses he has visited are UCB, UCLA, and UCSC. Why the change?  Well, UCSC is too close to home—he needs to move to more independent living.  Our visit to UCLA made it very clear that undergrads in computer science there got almost no attention from faculty (unless the students were very strong at self-promotion) and acting was mostly restricted to theater arts majors. UCB was better—much better on the acting opportunities, with an attractive acting minor, but undergrads in computer science still had little research opportunity or interaction with the faculty.

We added UCSB primarily because of the College of Creative Studies (CCS) there, an honors college of about 300 students that (the website claims) has close faculty advising and is expected to do graduate-level research as undergrads. The computer science major within CCS looks quite interesting, and (if it lives up to its advertising) may represent a good compromise between the resources of a large university and the attention and nurturing of a small college. Unfortunately, we don’t have an equivalent of the Common Data Set numbers to know how selective CCS is nor does their web site really tell us what they are looking for.

One interesting point is that CCS has a supplementary application that is circulated among the faculty—we regard it as a good sign when the faculty care enough about their program to be involved in choosing who gets in, and when a university allows the faculty to have some say (most UC admissions keep the faculty completely out of freshman admissions—except for coaches at the sports-mad campuses, who seem able to get jocks in even when they don’t come close to being UC-eligible).  Note: transfer admissions at least at UCSC is different, with faculty in the intended department having final say about whether students can be admitted to the major.

UCSD was added as an afterthought, as having a reasonable engineering program while being easier to get into than UCB (38% instead of 17% for male freshmen—UCSB is even higher at 43%).  It is more of a safety school than a careful choice, but the marginal effort of doing an application to it was small—mainly trying to rank the six colleges there based on the very scanty information on the UCSD web site. If he gets in at UCSB or UCSD, but not one of his top three choices, we’ll probably end up doing another visit to southern California, to see how these two campuses feel to him.

The UC applications cost $70 per campus plus another $11.25 each to send SAT scores for a total of $243.75.  He’ll be applying to another 3–7 colleges, so I expect that application fees will end up costing around $1000.  When the cost of college visits and taking the SAT and AP tests in the first place is included, the cost of the application process rises to around $4000–5000.  That seems like a lot, but is dwarfed by the cost of college itself, which for us will be $120,000 to $240,000, depending on which college he goes to—the amount of financial aid that we qualify for seems to vary enormously from school to school.

UPDATE 2013 Dec 1: A reader just pointed out “You can have your official score report sent to one UC campus, and all campuses you apply to will receive it.” http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/freshman/requirements/examination-requirement/ I wish I’d noticed that buried in the instructions.  (I’d looked for it, but must have skipped over the line that said it.)

My son, like many high school seniors, has been struggling with the college application essays.  The two he produced for UC seem pretty good to me—one concentrates on the data logger project and is an adaptation of the essay he wrote for the Common Application prompt, while the other talks about why he chose to home school and what that has done for him.  Both essays managed to pack in a lot of information about him and his education, without sounding like laundry lists.

But it took him two weeks to write these essays whose combined length was just shy of the 1000-word limit.  He still has a large number of essays to write (1–3 per college application), and his writer’s block seems to get worse the more important the thing he is writing, so he’s been struggling most with the colleges he cares most about. I have the same problem—I can knock off a blog post like this one in an hour or two, but I have research papers still unfinished that should have been published a decade ago.

The huge amount of time each application takes means that there’s no way that he’ll be applying to the 100s of colleges who send brochures and postcards (most of which are getting recycled unread these days).  Occasionally one of the colleges will send a letter to “the parents of …”, and I sometimes read those for the amusement value, as most of them are so far off target as to be ludicrous.

The main limitation on how many colleges he applies to will probably be how many essays he can get done. I suppose that is why each selective college adds a bunch of essay questions to their application—not so much to find out more about the student as to reduce the flood of applicants to just those who are somewhat serious about attending. This selection process may be counterproductive though, as it would be much easier to churn out acceptable essays for schools he cared nothing about than to try to get a really good essay for a school he cares a lot about.

This weekend, I’m hoping he’ll get the essays done for one of his high-priority colleges (Harvey Mudd or Stanford, for example).

MathTwitterBlogosphere, mission 1

Sam Shah and other math bloggers have started a challenge to encourage more math-teacher blogging Mission #1: The Power of The Blog | Exploring the MathTwitterBlogosphere:

You are going to write a blog post on one of the following two prompts:

• What is one of your favorite open-ended/rich problems? How do you use it in your classroom? (If you have a problem you have been wanting to try, but haven’t had the courage or opportunity to try it out yet, write about how you would or will use the problem in your classroom.)
• What is one thing that happens in your classroom that makes it distinctly yours? It can be something you do that is unique in your school… It can be something more amorphous… However you want to interpret the question! Whatever!

I’m not a math teacher blogger—looking back over my posts for the past couple of years, I only see a few that are really about math education:

• MOOC failures in remedial math
• Hard Math for Elementary School
• In defense of programming for physics and math teachers
• Scientists need math
• Math joke
• Bad question for math classes
• AngryMath reviewed Udacity Statistics 101
• Out In Left Field: Two ways to ensure learning
• Free calculus book
• Santa Cruz Math Circle
• Awesome Math Camp

I use math all the time in my classes (complex numbers, trigonometry, and calculus in the Applied Circuits class; probability and Bayesian statistics in the bioinformatics classes), and I do reteach the math the students need, as I find that few students have retained working knowledge of the math that they need.  But it has been quite a while since I taught a class in which math education was the primary goal (Applied Discrete Math, in winter 1998).

So I fell a little like an imposter participating in this blogging exercise with the math teacher bloggers.

I don’t have any “favorite” open-ended or rich problems.  Most of the problems that I given in my classes have a heavy engineering design component, in either the circuits course or the bioinformatics courses.  Any good engineering design problem is an open-ended, rich problem.  If I had to pick a favorite right now, it would be from my circuits class: either the EKG lab (look for many posts about the design of that lab in the Circuits Course Table of Contents) or the class-D power amplifier (see Class-D power amp lab went smoothly and other posts).  But these are not the sort of “open-ended” problems that the MathTwitterBlogosphere seem to be interested in—the engineering design constraints that make the problems interesting are too restrictive for them, and a lot of them prefer videos to text (for reasons that seem to me to be based mainly on assumptions of the functional illiteracy of their students, though a few times a sounder justification is given). In any event, I doubt that any of the problems that I give to students would be appealing to math teachers, so they are not really germane to the MathTwitterBlogosphere challenge that Sam Shah put out.

It is hard to say what I do as a teacher that is “unique”. It is not a goal for me to be a unique teacher—I’d like to see more teachers doing some of the things I do, like reading student work closely and providing detailed feedback, or designing engineering courses around doing engineering design.

I may be unique in the School of Engineering in how much emphasis I put on students writing well, and how much effort I put into trying to get them to do so.  I created a tech writing course for the computer engineers and scientists back in 1987 and taught it until 2000.  More recently, I have provided many bioengineering students feedback on their senior theses, reading and giving detailed feedback on five drafts from each student in 10 weeks.   In my bioinformatics classes, I read the students’ programs very closely, commenting on programming style and the details of the in-program documentation—these things matter, but students get very little feedback on them in other classes. In the circuits course, I require detailed design reports for each of the 10 weekly assignments (though I encourage students to work in pairs for the labs and reports).  I evaluate the students almost as much on their writing as on their designs—engineers who can’t write up their design decisions clearly is pretty useless in the real world.

I’ve not done much about math writing, though a good class on mathematical writing (using Halmos’s How to Write Mathematics) would be a great thing for the university to teach. I have blogged before about writing in math classes, in my post Out In Left Field: Two ways to ensure learning, which is a response to a post by Katherine Beals: Two ways to ensure learning.  In my post, I distinguished between writing mathematics and the sort of mushy writing about mathematics that many high school teachers favor these days.

Centering engineering courses on doing engineering design is a very important thing, but it is not a unique contribution—I’m not the only professor in the School of Engineering who puts the lab experience at the center of a course design. Gabriel Elkaim’s Mechatronics course is a good example, as are most (all?) of the lab courses that Steve Petersen teaches.  In think that, in general, the Computer Engineering department does a good job of highlighting design in their courses, as does the Game Design major.  I just wish that more of the engineering classes did—especially those where it is much easier just to teach the underlying science and hope that students pick up the engineering later.

At the end of this post, I’m feeling the lack of a good conclusion—I don’t have any open-ended problems to share with math teachers, and I don’t have anything really unique about my teaching that will make math teachers want to emulate me.  I just hope that even a weak contribution to “Mission 1″ is useful, if only to make other participants feel better about their contributions.

 

Disseminating the applied circuits labs

The post I just published about academic conferences lead me to thinking (again) about how I should disseminate my course design (or individual lab designs) for the Applied Circuits course.  I suppose I should write up a paper and submit it to a conference or some journal like the Journal of Engineering Education.

One problem is that my course designs are not education research—they are attempts to solve particular curricular problems by taking advantage of my strengths as a teacher.  Some of the course design generalizes to other teachers and other institutions with somewhat different curricular needs, but there is no controlled experiment to say that my course design is “better” than another is some predefined, measurable way.

I’m not sure where this sort of here-are-some-good-ideas-you-may-be-able-to-use course design work fits in academic publishing.  If I were teaching physics, I would probably submit to The Physics Teacher, but I don’t know what the closest equivalent is in engineering—particularly interdisciplinary stuff like teaching circuits to bioengineers.  There don’t seem to be good journals intended for disseminating instructional labs and curricular design. Maybe Advances in Engineering Education would be a better fit than Journal of Engineering Education, even if I don’t feel that my course design contains “significant, proven innovations in engineering education practice, especially those that are best presented through the creative use of multimedia.”

Of course, distilling down the 200–400 pages of notes on my circuits course that I’ve collected on this blog to a conference presentation or a journal article is a daunting task—one that I’ll probably keep putting off until it is so stale that even I’m not interested in it any more.  It might even be easier to turn the notes into a book than into an article, since I would not have to do 100-to-1 compression.

I’m not sure who the right audience for such a book would be—instructors trying to create a new course, students taking my course, hobbyists wanting to learn the material at home, … ? That is, should I be writing about a case study in course design, should I be trying to create a textbook for the course, or should I be trying to put together a self-study book that could accompany a kit of parts for people to learn electronics at home?

Again, the book project is big enough that I’d probably keep putting off indefinitely.  If I was sure there was an audience, I’d be more inclined to put in the effort to disseminate the material beyond this blog, though.

Another approach for disseminating the course materials would be to put together stand-alone kits for each lab (with detailed tutorials) that could be sold independently.  Releasing one lab at a time would be a more incremental effort than doing all 10 labs in one package, but would require some redesign, both for reduced expectations of lab equipment and to make the kits more modular.

I suspect that one could do most of the experiments of the circuits course for about $360 in lab equipment and tools, using something like the Velleman Lab2U unit (which PartsExpress sells for $210), a $40 multimeter,  a $17 soldering station, an Arduino, and the $66 bag of tools and parts I put together for the course.  The Lab2U is only a single power supply, so some of the projects that used a multiple supply would need to be redesigned—most notably the class-D power amp.  Unfortunately, $360 is too big a chunk of money for anyone but a dedicated hobbyist, who quite likely already has most of the needed equipment.

Making the kits more modular might be difficult. For example, many of the labs require students to choose resistors and capacitors from a large set of possibilities, since their lab kit contained 10 each of 112 different resistors and 10 each of 25 different ceramic capacitors.  It is easy to justify the cost of those parts spread over 10 labs, but harder to provide that much selection for a single lab.  Perhaps one would have to sell a core kit (with breadboard, resistors, capacitors, …) to use with the Arduino and add-on kits for each lab.  The core kit would need to have some fundamental experiments (like RC time constants), so that it would be instructional even without add-ons.

I wonder if there is a market for such lab kits, and how I would find out if there were a market (without sinking months of my time and thousands of dollars). I wouldn’t want to assemble or market the resulting lab kits either, but would want to distribute them through a company like Sparkfun electronics, Adafruit Industries, or Seeedstudio, who have already set up the necessary business infrastructure.

I also wonder whether I’m capable of writing the tutorials at an introductory enough level to work for hobbyists, while still covering enough of the theory.  I’ve never cared for kits that have great assembly instructions, but treat the way the things works as too difficult for the purchaser of the kit.

Writing instructions that included the use of an oscilloscope or multimeter, when there are many different ones that the person may be trying to use, would be a very challenging task.  Oscilloscopes in particular have evolved to have many radically different user interfaces, some of which are very complicated.

Also, all my writing has been for well-educated people: college professors, university students chosen from the top 10% of high school students, my loyal blog readers, … .  Can I make my writing intelligible for an average, or slightly above average, high school student, without sounding condescending or patronizing?  From the rather unsuccessful attempts I’ve seen in kit instructions in the past, that is not an easy task.

Essay prompts for college applications

My son will be applying to colleges this fall, so I’ve started gathering the prompts he’ll need to address in his application essays.  Many of the prompts will not be available until 2013 August 1, when the Common Application opens for this year, since the prompts are hidden on the supplemental forms for the college.  Many college admissions offices have not updated their websites for the year, as they are still asking home-schooled applicants to fill out the Common App home-school supplement, which has been discontinued.

Common Application (these are the questions for 2013–14, applying for admission in Fall 2104):

Instructions. The essay demonstrates your ability to write clearly and concisely on a selected topic and helps you distinguish yourself in your own voice. What do you want the readers of your application to know about you apart from courses, grades, and test scores? Choose the option that best helps you answer that question and write an essay of no more than 650 words, using the prompt to inspire and structure your response. Remember: 650 words is your limit, not your goal. Use the full range if you need it, but don’t feel obligated to do so. (The application won’t accept a response shorter than 250 words.)

• Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
• Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn?
• Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?
• Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
• Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.

Harvey Mudd College (uses Common App, plus supplemental essay):

Short Answer Response— Please answer the following. (500 word limit)

What influenced you to apply to Harvey Mudd College? What about the HMC curriculum and community appeals to you?

Essay- Choose any one of the essay topics below. (1000 word limit)

1. “Scientific research is a human endeavor. The choices of topics that we research are based on our biases, our beliefs, and what we bring: our cultures and our families. The kinds of problems that people put their talents to solving depends on their values.” -Dr. Clifton Poodry.  How has your own background influenced the types of problems you want to solve?

2. In a world where technology continually adapts and progresses, Harvey Mudd College expects that our students will be aware of the impact of their work on society. How would you use new advances to improve your life and/or the lives of those around you? Describe your idea and its potential impact. Feel free to be as creative or as practical as you like.

3. What is one thing we won’t know about you after reading your application that you haven’t already reported in the Common Application “Additional Information” section?

Stanford (uses Common App, plus supplemental essays):

Candidates respond to all three essay topics using at least 250 words, but not exceeding the space provided.

1. Stanford students possess intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.
2. Virtually all of Stanford’s undergraduates live on campus. Write a note to your future roommate that reveals something about you or that will help your roommate—and us—know you better.
3. What matters to you, and why?

University of California (I think these are valid for 2013–14, but the web site doesn’t actually say, and the only date is a 2010 copyright.  They don’t use the Common App):

Directions

All applicants must respond to two essay prompts — the general prompt and either the freshman or transfer prompt, depending on your status.

• Responses to your two prompts must be a maximum of 1,000 words total.
• Allocate the word count as you wish. If you choose to respond to one prompt at greater length, we suggest your shorter answer be no less than 250 words.

Freshman applicant prompt

Describe the world you come from — for example, your family, community or school — and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.

Prompt for all applicants

Tell us about a personal quality, talent, accomplishment, contribution or experience that is important to you. What about this quality or accomplishment makes you proud and how does it relate to the person you are?

MIT (see also their description of what they are looking for in an applicant). They don’t use the Common App and you have to register on my.mit.edu to see the actual questions, so I haven’t—I’ll ask my son to do that:

Rather than asking you to write one long essay, the MIT application consists of several short response questions and essays designed to help us get to know you. Remember that this is not a writing test. These are the places in the application where we look for your voice – who you are, what drives you, what’s important to you, what makes you tick. Be honest, be open, be authentic – this is your opportunity to connect with us.

Caltech (uses Common App, plus a supplement, this is last year’s, so prompts need to be checked after Aug 1):

Short Answers

We are interested in learning more about your personality, values and interests. Limiting yourself to the space provided, please answer the following questions.

1. What keywords would your friends use to describe you?
2. Please list three books, along with their authors, that have been particularly meaningful to you. For each book, please include a sentence explaining their influence upon you. Please note that your response is not limited to math, science or school-assigned texts.
3. Members of the Caltech community live, learn and work within an Honor System with one simple guideline; “No member shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community.” While seemingly simple, questions of ethics, honesty and integrity are sometimes challenging. Share an ethical dilemma that has challenged you. How did you respond? Your response is not limited to academic situations.
4. Caltech students have long been known for their quirky sense of humor and creative pranks. Please describe an unusual way in which you have fun.

Essay

Scientific exploration clearly excites you (otherwise you wouldn’t be applying to Caltech). What is it about Caltech’s opportunities and resources that will best fuel your intellectual curiosity and develop your passion for science, technology, math or engineering?

Brown University (uses Common App plus a supplement—this is last year’s but they haven’t got a newer one up yet):

2. Why are you drawn to the area(s) of study you indicated?
3. A distinctive feature of the Brown Curriculum is the opportunity to be the “architect of your education.” Why does this academic environment appeal to you?
4. Tell us where you have lived—and for how long—since you were born; whether you’ve always lived in the same place, or perhaps in a variety of places.
5. Complete ONE of the following thoughts:

A. If I could do something with no risk of failing, I would ______________________
B. I felt like I truly belonged when ____________________

6. What is something you created that makes you especially proud, and why?
7. We all exist within communities or groups of various sizes, origins, and purposes; pick one and tell us why it is important to you, and how it has shaped you.
8. Please respond to one of the following questions: A, B, or C.

A. Why are you going to college?
B. Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz once said, “Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view.” With this in mind, describe a moment when your perspective changed.
C. What question could we ask to gain the most insight into you? What is your answer?

Olin College of Engineering (uses Common App, essay questions not available on their web site yet):

How strict are the 500 and 300 word limits on the essays?
In the past, we have not been too strict about the essay length but we do expect students to abide to those guidelines as closely as possible. If you go over by a few words, no worries – we do not sit around counting the number of words in each essay. However, they exist so that we don’t get bogged down in really long essays and are able to actually read everything in everyone’s application files.

Carnegie Mellon (uses Common App, essay prompts not available on their web site yet).

Blogoversary 3

I got a notification from WordPress.com today that my blog is now three years old.  In that time, I’ve posted 1070 posts and gotten 235,600 views and almost 3000 comments (about 40% of which are mine, though, so only about 1800 comments from readers). My comment-to-post ratio is 2.80, nearly the same as previous years, and Bonnie and Mylène are still the top two commenters.  I offered them a prize last year of a suggesting a blog topic, but I don’t remember either of them claiming the prize—the offer is still good.

For my other blogoversaries, I did some analysis of which posts were the most popular (1 year, 2 year), so I suppose I should do that again. Here are the posts with 1000 or more views:

Home page / Archives	63,539
2011 AP Exam Score Distribution	17,482
West Point Bridge Designer 2011	5,480
Installing gnuplot—a nightmare	5,118
Why no digital oscilloscope for Macbooks and iPads?	3,542
How many AP courses are too many?	3,408
Bring back the mammoth!	2,769
West Point Bridge Design Contest 2012	2,010
Computer languages for kids	1,993
2012 AP Exam Score Distribution	1,937
Instrumentation amp lab	1,707
County Fair with Pictures	1,614
Why Discrete Math Is Important and The Calculus Trap	1,613
Resources for bioinformatics in AP Bio	1,356
Google Scholar vs. Scopus and SciFinder	1,330
Waterproofing cameras for underwater ROVs	1,294
Soda-bottle rockets	1,273
Adding bioinformatics to AP Bio	1,237
A use for an Ion Torrent	1,108
Teaching voice projection	1,106
Should high schools and colleges teach sentence diagramming?	1,098
Underwater ROV contest	1,049
What is giftedness?	1,037

No single post gets more hits than the home page, which is viewed by those people who read the blog on a regular basis, but overall I get over 41%  of my views from people referred by search engines.  People are reading my stuff for the content, not because the posts are by me.  I’m not sure whether that is good or bad.

Some of the popular posts are artifacts of search engines: like the mammoth post, the pointers to AP score distributions, or the pictures from the County Fair. Some are from middle-school students trying to cheat on homework (the West Point Bridge Designer posts), and some are just weird choices (why the instrumentation amp lab post out of the 173 posts for the circuits course?). A lot of the posts are coming up because of useful content, though (like how to install gnuplot, bioinformatics resources, or soda-bottle rockets).

Only two of those most-popular hits are from the last year, so perhaps I should list the posts with over 300 views that were written in the last year:

2012 AP Exam Score Distribution	1,937
Instrumentation amp lab	1,707
Soda-bottle rocket simulation: take 2	750
EMG and EKG works	732
Physics posts in forward order	714
College tours around LA	670
Coursera Course Catalog	648
Circuits course: Table of Contents	562
Better electrode placement for EKG blinky	519
Medical Instrumentation, Chapter 6	510
UC Berkeley college tour	448
EKG blinky parts list and assembly instructions	421
Temperature lab, part 3: voltage divider	401
Where you get your BS in CS matters	397
Homemade super pulley	372
Weird problem in Coursera course	366
FET threshold tests with Bitscope	361
A critique of CS textbooks	347
Capacitive sensing	323
NSF “clarifies” Broader Impacts	314
Possible textbook, Horowitz and Hill	313

Of these, only the 2012 AP score distribution is embarrassing (it is just a pointer to a post where someone else collected the stats from a third person’s tweets, so it is really 3rd-hand info). Interestingly, the pages that serve as tables of contents for the home school physics and the circuits course have both been fairly popular. I would not have pulled out the instrumentation lab post nor the Chapter 6 summary out of the circuits-course posts as being particularly valuable, though.

I’ve not been pushing my posts on mailing lists much this year—of the new posts, probably only the two tables of contents and the two college-visit posts have been boosted by my telling people on mailing lists about them.

I’ve been averaging about 10,000 views a month lately (though the stupid AP score posts cause a spike in May each year, and December, August, and June were slow months—a lot of my readers are students or academics, so vacation times result in lower numbers of viewers).