An Intro to ECE 155 & Sanjay How does one even begin to describe the utter piece of trash that is ECE 155? In case you don't already know about it, ECE 155 "Engineering Design with Embedded Systems," is a course that is supposed to help you improve your programming skills developed in ECE 150, as well as teach you the fundamentals of working with hardware in embedded systems through the use of Android. It fails massively at both of these. Not only are the lectures taught by this guy, the labs honestly have little to no relevance to the lecture material, and are poorly designed in general. Perhaps the labs wouldn't be so bad if we actually had useful TAs, but they barely know android too, making them virtually useless. Lab partners are assigned using an algorithm that matches people who performed well in ECE 150 with those who are weaker, which results in actually competent programmers being forced to work with deadweight. But just who is the mastermind behind this monstrosity? You guessed it, Sanjay Singh. Look very closely upon that face. It is the face of pure idiocy.

Lab 0: First Encounter My first encounter with Sanjay was during our first 155 lab session. This lab involved setting up the Android programming environment as well as setting up Subversion, a way to submit completed labs from outside the physical lab space. A lot of students, including myself, were downloading the android packages at the same time, which slowed download speeds to a crawl. I was pretty bored, so I decided to chat with Sanjay, just to see what he was like. This is honestly one of my biggest regrets in 1B. I simply said "Hello, I'm AM" and that set off his verbal diarrhea. He started talking about himself, the labs, his ASIC team (which he randomly invited me to join), android, ECE 155, ECE 150, his beloved Jeff Zarnett, and several other topics until my subconcious started to tune him out. I don't think I spoke more than 10 words in the entire conversation. I casually glanced at my watch and realized that he had been talking for about an hour, and my laptop was asleep. I was about to excuse myself, but then he started talking about his personal project. I should've just left. I should've just made up some excuse about my laptop battery dying, or the download being done. I should've done a lot of things, but I suddenly became intrigued by the idea of his personal project, and I will never forgive myself. He pulls me over and started talking in a hushed voice- "I have been working on a project for quite a while now. Something revolutionary, that to my knowledge, has never been done before." Needless to say, I was kind of impressed. Up until this point, I thought he was simply a ranting lunatic, but it never occurred to me that he might be lab instructor for a reason. Perhaps he is actually a brilliant researcher, or designer, or a master of electronics. "I made a reversible wheel." Nope, guess not. "It is as aerodynamic and grippy rolling forwards, as it is rolling backwards. I initially thought that it would take about 6 months or so to build, but things happen and 3 years later I am finally done." My face instantly dropped, and my brain started to hurt. I could simply not wrap my head around the concept. A REVERSIBLE WHEEL. How does that even work? Wouldn't it just be flat? Why would you even need to reverse the wheel? Can't you just turn it around? Why would you spend 3 years of your life making it? I was stuck pondering these questions as he kept speaking to me until the end of the lab session, and to this very day, it still makes no sense.

Lab 1, 2 & 3: Recounting our steps Before we dive into Labs 1, 2 and 3, I'd like to tell you a bit more about Sanjay. Not only is he our lab instructor for ECE 155, he is taking the course with us as well. Yes, he is a lab instructor and student at the SAME TIME. I am not quite sure what his motives are, other than his raging hard-on for Zarnett, but every lecture and tutorial he shows up and takes notes. Being a student, he also takes the tests, which makes no sense because he would know the material best since he is the lab instructor. Lab 1 was simple, just getting data from sensors and adding textviews to display them. Lab 2 was a big jump up from lab 1. We had to design a step-counter based off our acceleration sensor readings. Lab 3 required being able to track displacement and direction. I didn't have much of a chance to interact with him personally, but a few of my friends did. Siddharth also had the misfortune of having to deal with Sanjay in the labs. Siddharth was doing pretty well in the labs so far, however, his partner made a small mistake before one of the labs was due. It was simply a small syntax error, changing a character in a variable name from lower to uppercase. This was apparently an unholy sin to Sanjay Singh when he noticed that this one change was made within 12 hours of the lab session. He decided that this small change was worthy of a 5% mark deduction, and argued with Siddharth during the session. Refusing to budge, Siddharth also brought up the issue of lateness. Apparently, none of his lab marks had been uploaded, so he didn't even know how well he was doing, or get any feedback. Sanjay then uttered the most half-assed excuse ever. "My internet was down." His internet was down so he couldn't upload marks that he has had for more than two weeks. I honestly lost the remaining shreds of respect I had for him after I heard that. Recently, Siddharth got his marks back. He had to miss one of the labs because of the snowstorm in February, and his street wasn't cleaned in time. Siddharth made sure to tell Sanjay about his situation, but had his mark cut in half anyways.

Lab 4: Meltdown If you haven't already been baffled by Sanjay, I really think that my final experience with him will be the final nail in the coffin. To preface, Lab 4 was utterly ridiculous, expecting people to make a complex 'indoors mapping' app, due a week after midterms. During Lab 4, my group and I were running into some issues because the laptop would not recognize my phone. Instead we had to use the nexus device, however, the step counter didn't work properly. The TA decided to ask for Sanjay's advice on how to mark us, and I was soon sucked into another conversation with him. The TA handed him the demo marking sheet, so I knew there was no backing out. At first we were actually talking about my lab, but the conversation quickly devolved into talking about ECE 155 labs in general, and his beloved wheel. "These labs are kind of like my wheel project, they take a lot of time but you learn a lot. I am actually considering quitting this job to focus more on the wheel. Who knows, I might become the next millionaire." This is when Sanjay revealed how partners were selected for the course. Basically, they take someone with a high ECE 150 mark and pair them with two lower marked partners so that the sum of their marks is within a range. There are obviously exceptions, but in essence, the labs were designed so that one person would end up carrying the group. One of the TAs asked him why we couldn't just pick our own partners. Sanjay didn't agree for some reason, and asked me what I thought. I suggested that we should be able to pick one partner, and have the last one be determined by the algorithm. This is where Sanjay had a complete meltdown. "I honestly don't want to make these labs easy. In most lab courses, they basically design it so that you can't fail. I made sure that wasn't a thing in this course. The bureaucrats in the First Year Engineering office keep trying to inject their NDP ideals, but I tell them this is the University of Waterloo, not Laurier..." Just take that in for a second. Not wanting to fail kids in labs is a part of the First Year office's NDP agenda. At that point my brain had melted, and leaked out of my ears, but he continued. "You know what? I want you to design a partner picking algorithm for ECE 155, email it to me and Jeff." I looked at my watch and realized that the lab had ended 20 minutes ago, and the TAs were looking askance at Sanjay Singh, silently begging to be allowed to leave. One of them had finished marking my demo sheet, and timidly handed it back to him for approval. He takes one look at the paper, "A 90, really? I would've given them an 85..."