fall ’19 catalog is out! by Joonho K. '20
and a summary of sites we use to plan semesters
the fall 2019 catalog was released recently, perhaps yesterday, and already i’ve seen my friends planning out their fall semesters on firehose for lack of better things to do. michael from 2E is part of the dev team at sipb that’s working on the new-and-hopefully-improved-but-probably-not-yet courseroad 2.0, successor to blogger danny b.d. ’15’s courseroad which has many blog posts about it. (use our website’s search tool! it’s not too bad.) courseroad 2.0 was also released recently, and although it’s in a bit of a rough shape from personally wrangling with it for a little while, it’ll probably be a better version than the original in the near future.
i know for sure that i’ll be using some of these sites in the next couple days to plan out schedules when i have the time:
student.mit.edu/catalog/index.cgi
this is the holy grail. heading 2 tier, no question. personally, i think this website is beautiful. there really is something nostalgic about those HTML4-era-looking icons and the verdana font. this website is the bible of all the classes offered at MIT in the fall. personally, i’ve got the URL memorized. it provides all relevant information about a class and nothing more or less. it is the epitome of what online university class catalogs should be. on the other hand, catalog.mit.edu/subjects/ is absolutely inferior, and is harder to read for lack of icons, and boasts disgustingly modern aesthetics. it also doesn’t include info on actual class schedules, so in short is only pretty to look at and honestly doesn’t even deserve the heading 4 on wordpress.
courseroad.mit.edu/old/
sorry michael, but for now i’m going to go ahead and say this one’s better for now. there’s just a couple things that make it confusing to use at the moment to say it’s better than original courseroad. also, the original courseroad also has a beautiful, nostalgic layout and color scheme to it that courseroad 2 homogenifies.
courseroad.mit.edu
i was originally going to bump it down to a heading 4, but i think it’ll just keep getting better so i’m going to say it deserves the heading 3. i also talked to michael himself for five minutes and was able to learn a lot of non-obvious but necessary/cool features. for example, to change the class year, you click on the year for any semester in your road and a popup appears, where you can tell it your class year. i was initially confused using the app because the default is freshman year, and i thought it was a bug that the road went until 2024. also, you can click and drag classes in right from the requirement list on the left, which is nice and something the original didn’t have.
tldr: good to great features, UI/UX is a little questionable right now, and also bootstrap is not nostalgic to look at.
firehose.guide
now i feel bad for all the recent mit grads that just missed firehose when it was released, because this is a really good tool and the one i primarily use. it’s an indispensable way to quickly see how your schedules will actually turn out on paper so you can debate with yourself for a bit longer whether or not you should not pre-reg that class you really want to take but it’s got a mandatory section at 9am and you’re really not about that.
heading 2 tier for sure.
three bonus things:
- i dyed my hair! it’s light pink. i like it a lot.
- i did not succeed in the housing lottery to move back to east campus, so i’m staying at next house next year. this is sad, and maybe i deserve it, but i’m also happy that i’m fine with it since i like 2E.
- watch letterkenny, it’s a good show.