6 ms·

This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college. The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the ne

This is, more or less, exactly what happened when I took Electronics I in college. The course was structured in such a way that you could not move on to the next lab assignment until you completed the one before it. You could complete the lab assignments at your own pace. If you failed the lab, you failed the class, regardless of your grade. The second or third lab had us characterize the response of a transistor in a DIP-8 package, which was provided to us. If you blew it up, you got a slap on the wrist. That DIP-8 was otherwise yours for the class. I could _never_ get anything resembling linear output out of my transistor. The lab tech was unhelpful, insisting that it must be something with how I had it wired, encouraging me to re-draw my schematic, check my wires, and so on. It could _never_ be the equipment's fault. Eight (!) weeks into that ten week class, I found the problem: the DIP was not, in fact, just a transistor. It was a 555 timer that had somehow been mixed in with the transistors. I went and showed the lab technician. He gave me another one. At this point, I had two weeks to complete eight weeks of lab work, which was borderline impossible. So I made an appointment to see the professor, and his suggestion to me was to drop the class and take it again. Which, of course, would've affected my graduation date. I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened.

CamperBob2 1y ago
Honestly, you got more real-world electronics training out of that experience than you paid for. You are now qualified to deal with remarked or counterfeit Chinese parts and other inevitable supply hazards in the business. Be grateful!
- homeless_engi 1y ago
  Yes, maybe true. But it's a pity that was not reflected in their final grade.
freedomben 1y ago
That is enraging. I've seen similar things happen too and it blows my mind how ridiculous some of these teachers can be. I don't know if it's dehumanization of their students in their minds or an utter unwillingness to devote 30 seconds of directed attention to understanding the situation and making a reasonable judgment, but whatever the cause it is prolific. The only thing worse is when one of them will add something like, "life isn't fair, get over it" when it's fully in their power to make a reasonable determination.
- selimthegrim 1y ago
  Just wait until that teacher is your graduate advisor.
  - DiscourseFan 1y ago
    I hear so many horror stories in the sciences, I have no idea why anyone would pursue an academic career in it.
    - karel-3d 1y ago
      Well in the industry you have the weekly JIRA humiliation rituals, bad things are everywhere
      - selimthegrim 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - concordDance 1y ago
        What's this a reference to? Not familiar with JIRA humiliation rituals.
        MattSayar 1y ago
        Scrum/Kanban ceremonies with assigning points to tasks etc. GP is being melodramatic
        FrontierProject 1y ago
        I've been redditing for 15 years and until a week ago here on HN, I've never seen the previous commenter reffered to as GP. What is that an acronym for?
        jodrellblank 1y ago
orlp 1y ago
What I don't understand is why it took you 8 weeks to distinguish a timer from a transistor. That doesn't make your professor's reaction alright, I just find it puzzling.
- mikepurvis 1y ago
  That would be like exposing a first year CS student to a situation where "it could be a compiler bug" is one of the potential explanations.
  - vkou 1y ago
    It's closer to exposing a first year CS student who has never touched a computer before to Windows, when the work is supposed to be done on Linux, and the TA is hemming and hawing, and insists that the reason the sudo command isn't working is because the student is not following the steps correctly. It's a problem that's obvious to diagnose... If you already have passing familiarity with the material. Most people do not have passing familiarity with electronic components when they step into an engineering program.
  - anyfoo 1y ago
    The part was marked as a timer IC.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Not just a timer IC. Literally the most common IC in the world for at least every year from 01980 to 02000 or so, maybe still today. I can understand the first-year student not recognizing it, but what the fuck was the lab tech's mental disability?
- themaninthedark 1y ago
  I would assume that you don't have access to the lab(and diagnostic equipment) at all times and taking other classes. Also him being a student, having the wrong component was probably not in his mental troubleshooting tree. I would guess that it was not in the lab assistant's troubleshooting tree either. Also once you start down the road of troubleshooting, a false trail can lead you far into the woods.
entropyie 1y ago
I ran labs in my university in Europe, in the early 2000s, and I'd like to think this would not have happened. We were selected as tutors due to our proficiency and dedication to the subject. Maybe it was a fluke, I've heard similar stories recently about local Unis.
Natsu 1y ago
It's funny, because while that's a terrible educational experience, you actually learned some important lessons despite them. I remember the first time I found out that the software documentation I had been relying upon was simply and utterly wrong. It was so freeing to start looking at how things actually behaved instead of believing the utterly false documentation because the world finally made sense again.
- euroderf 1y ago
  Proving the truism that incorrect documentation is worse than no documentation.
- don-code 1y ago
  Sometimes it's not even rare that documentation is wrong. The documentation for a vendor who I won't name - but might be at Series J and worth north or $50 billion - seems to be wrong more often than it's right. We frequently say, don't blame the tools, it's you. That pushes "blame the tools" outside of the Overton window, and when we need to blame a tool, we're looked at like we have five heads. Ten years ago, I was dealing with a bizarre problem in RHEL where we'd stand up an EC2 instance with 4GB of memory, have 4.4GB of memory reported to the system, and be able to use 3.6GB of it. I spent _a long_ time trying to figure out what was going on. (This was around the time we started using Node.js at that company, and needed 4GB of RAM just for Jenkins to run Webpack, and we couldn't justify the expensive of 8GB nodes.) I did a deep dive into how the BIOS advertises memory to the system, how Linux maps it, and so forth, before finally filing a bug with Red Hat. 36 hours later, they identified a commit in the upstream kernel, which they forgot to cherry-pick into the RHEL kernel. That's a very human mistake, and not one I dreamed the humans at Red Hat - the ones far smarter than me, making far more money than me - could ever make! Yet here we were, and I'd wasted a bunch of time convinced that a support ticket was not the right way to go.
  - Eduard 1y ago
    > Yet here we were, and I'd wasted a bunch of time convinced that a support ticket was not the right way to go. From my experiences with public issue trackers for big projects, it's very reasonable to postpone creating a new issue, and rather follow my own hypothesis/solution first: * creating a new issue takes significant effort to be concise, provide examples, add annotated screenshots, follow the reporting template, etc., in hopes of convincing the project members that the issue is worth their time. Failing to do so often results in project members not understanding or misunderstanding the problem, and all too often leads to them directly closing the issue. And even when reporting a well-written issue, it can still just be ignored/stall, and be autoclosed by GitHubBot.
potato3732842 1y ago
>I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened. This sentence could have also ended "my gpa dipped below the threshold for some bullshit mark it up to mark it down exercise masquerading as a scholarship and I had to re-take the class for a better grade anyway"
- don-code 1y ago
  Indeed it could have. I was on a fairly prestigious scholarship; luckily, my marks were good enough that this was a low-risk decision. That said... I graduated with a 3.2 GPA, after being the stereotypical "gifted" student up through high school. A 3.2 is, apparently, still decent. However, I did feel a bit of a twinge seeing my peers walk at graduation with with cords, bents, and other regalia, where I just had my standard-issue black robe. It had less to do with my grade in this particular class, and more to do with the fact that I had a part-time engineering job - 10-20 hours a week - and was making money. When you've spent a couple of years being broke, having an extra few hundred dollars per month was a big deal. Enough so that I didn't really care about putting the extra effort in for A's - that extra time was time better spent working. B's were fine if I could afford to take my girlfriend out to dinner every month. In the years since then, it seems like this was a good decision. That job became full-time after college, and I stayed there six years. At the end of six years, nobody really cared about my college GPA. At the end of nine years (when I next looked for a job), I didn't even bother listing it on my resume.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    Message for engineering undergraduates: when you have an opportunity to trade great grades for good grades and increased immediate career prospects, take it. Your internship / prospective employer cares way more about the job you're doing for them than +0.5 GPA. (If you're heading right to grad school, obviously different weighting)
    - whatshisface 1y ago
      If you're heading to grad school, it can be essential to have connections made through UG research. That's a trade that isn't just advised in some fields, but necessary. A letter of recommendation that says you're actually useful as an RA is 1000x more of a direct implication that they would benefit from bringing you on than an A in a few classes. Academics don't like finding out that smart people are impossible to work with any more than industry does, and since they're tied to you for longer, in some ways it's an even bigger deal.
__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
I only took two electronics classes, but in the later one I was the class hero for just buying a bunch of potentiometers on amazon so that we didn't have to waste all of that expensive time sitting around waiting for our turn with the only good one left. It cost me like $10
- CamperBob2 1y ago
  Literal example of "bias for action." A+
michaelsbradley 1y ago
I was in honors freshman chemistry at university. Tough class, all homework (lots of it) graded rigorously, but only the midterm and final counted toward the course grade. So if you wanted an A you had to get an A on both exams. After midterm, during every other lecture at least, the professor would sound a refrain: “An orbital is not a house! An electron does not live in a house!” Final exam had a small number of complex problems to work out with pen and paper, tough stuff, lots of calculus. But the last question ended with “where does the electron live?” That final problem, if you ignored the end wording, was super easy, something almost trivial to do with Helium iirc. The class had about 25 students in it; about 5 of us independently had the same thought: “this is a trick question, ‘the orbital is not a house in which the electron lives!’” And, independently, that’s how we five answered. And we got marked wrong, all our course grades dropped to B+/- because of that one damn question. Over a lunch or whatever, we discovered our shared experience and approached the professor as a group. He listened patiently and said: “Ah, right, I did insist on that idea, it’s understandable why you would think it’s a trick question and answer that way. But I still consider your answers wrong, grades stay as they are.” Some in the group even went to the dean and, to my understanding, he said it’s best to consider it a life lesson and move on.
- don-code 1y ago
  I agree this seems overly principled to me. I recall a DSP class where there was an exam with a question like (not exactly this): > What does the following code print? > `printf("Hello, world!");` If you responded with: > Hello, world! ...which - of course - the whole class did, you got the question wrong. If you responded with: > "Hello, world!" ...which is actually not what that would print, you got the question right. A small band of us went to the professor and noted that, in fact, `printf("Hello, world!")` does not print the quotes. But he wanted us to show that it printed a string, and we denote strings by quotes. This was something that we learned to do just for him - all strings had to be enclosed by quotes, to denote that they were strings. As far as I'm concerned, it served no practical purpose; we never had to differentiate strings like "Hello" from ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 0] or other representations. A better example of how this could go - and not one that had anywhere near the same stakes - was a question on the entrance exam for my college radio station: > What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? I got this question right by answering, "Ni!" (edit: formatting)
butlike 1y ago
you should have gotten an A for being a real engineer
fulladder 1y ago
That's a tragic story. However, I'm surprised that the transistor was supposed to come in a DIP package. Usually through-hole discrete transistors come in a three-lead package like TO-92. Of course, that would not have helped you since yours looked like every other student's except the for the markings.
- ZiiS 1y ago
  Probably Darlington transistors like ULN2003
  - markrages 1y ago
    ULN2003 is not DIP8 And I would assume for pedalogical purposes a bare transistor would be preferred rather than the '2008 with its extra diodes and base resistor.
- genewitch 1y ago
  There can be 2 or more transistors in a dip-8, but I think the point is more that the wrong dip-8 was given, not which specific dip-8. I change details when I tell stories, both to prevent eyes glazing, and because the details don't matter that much. If I told this story to a neighbor it wouldn't involve the words "dip-8", 555, or "transistor". For instance I had a professor that just did not like me. I did all the work, the papers, but the second paper assigned was about bioethics and at the time there was a lot of negative press about that subject and I went really deep into a subject I had never heard of before. Well the prof was a bioethicist, and on some bioethics committee, and did not like my prose. I barely passed that class that semester. I think they knew they couldn't fail me because, as I said, I did the work; but they certainly made me not want to continue college, that's for sure.
  - ohgr 1y ago
    Never seen any DIP-8 transistors. Usually the discrete arrays like the CA30xx are DIP-14. Personally I'd read the label on the chip.
kabdib 1y ago
this happens in "real life" as well i spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why my 74LS20 wasn't being a dual 4-input NAND gate turns out that was a date code, and it was some other chip entirely 1974 was a terrible year for 74xx series TTL chips yes, i am old :-)
jiggawatts 1y ago
This makes me incredibly grateful for my physics lecturers, all of whom would bend over backwards to assist their students' journeys towards learning any time any stumbled or showed a spark of curiosity that needed fanning into a raging fire. I had lecturers give me bonus marks above 100% because I noticed issues like this and thanked me for helping to improve the course material! These lecturers, when merely overhearing a curious "huh?" conversation between students would spend hours of their own time scouring the library for relevant information and just "leave" photocopies for students to find the next day.
thelaxiankey 1y ago
This is crazy to me because when I've run labs in the past, there were equipment failures literally all of the time. When you teach lots of people, shit breaks. Quite often if something didn't work, I'd just have one student swap equipment with another student to help diagnose this sort of thing. Major bummer that others have had differing experiences from me, here.
saghm 1y ago
> So I made an appointment to see the professor, and his suggestion to me was to drop the class and take it again. Which, of course, would've affected my graduation date. I would have been tempted to ask him to write me a check for the extra semester of tuition, but I'm sure that wouldn't have made the situation any better (and maybe would have made him more likely to grade strictly).
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
henryaj 1y ago
I had a very similar experience during a lab internship I took during my biochemistry undergrad degree. First part of a project was running PCR on a particular plasmid that we were going to use to transfer a gene into Drosophila. But for some reason the PCR didn't work, and I spent almost all of my time trying to get the damn thing to run. Everyone naturally assumed I was just doing something wrong, being an undergrad with little lab experience. After about ten weeks, it turned out that the lab tech had written up the protocol wrong and I was using the wrong primers. No wonder it didn't work. Was one of the experiences that made me realise that working in a lab really wasn't for me...
taneq 1y ago
That's awful, and unfortunately relatable. Most of my university courses were pretty good, but I had a computer graphics course where I got about 80% for my project, and about 30% for my final grade, which meant I apparently got 0% for my exam. I was a graphics nerd, I'd written a raytracer in C++, made a decent start on a game engine in Java (including software rasterizer with perspective-correct texturing, transparency, and model saving and loading with keyframe animated forward kinematics), along with numerous games and rendering programs. This graphics course was trivial stuff and barely got past explaining what a bitmap was and how to draw pictures using API calls. I couldn't have legitimately scored zero in the exam. After weeks of trying to make an appointment with the lecturer to discuss it (and being told "you failed, get over it"). I got an email from the lecturer, admitting that they'd forgotten to add my exam score to my overall score. And from this point, it took months further to get my official grade corrected. This same lecturer also once emailed out grades by opening their whole-course grading spreadsheet, deleting all the rows except for that student's grade, and then saving it as a new file. With 'track changes' turned on.

CamperBob2 1y ago

Honestly, you got more real-world electronics training out of that experience than you paid for. You are now qualified to deal with remarked or counterfeit Chinese parts and other inevitable supply hazards in the business. Be grateful!

homeless_engi 1y ago
Yes, maybe true. But it's a pity that was not reflected in their final grade.

freedomben 1y ago

That is enraging. I've seen similar things happen too and it blows my mind how ridiculous some of these teachers can be. I don't know if it's dehumanization of their students in their minds or an utter unwillingness to devote 30 seconds of directed attention to understanding the situation and making a reasonable judgment, but whatever the cause it is prolific. The only thing worse is when one of them will add something like, "life isn't fair, get over it" when it's fully in their power to make a reasonable determination.

selimthegrim 1y ago
Just wait until that teacher is your graduate advisor.
- DiscourseFan 1y ago
  I hear so many horror stories in the sciences, I have no idea why anyone would pursue an academic career in it.
  - karel-3d 1y ago
    Well in the industry you have the weekly JIRA humiliation rituals, bad things are everywhere
    - selimthegrim 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - concordDance 1y ago
      What's this a reference to? Not familiar with JIRA humiliation rituals.
      - MattSayar 1y ago
        Scrum/Kanban ceremonies with assigning points to tasks etc. GP is being melodramatic
        FrontierProject 1y ago
        I've been redditing for 15 years and until a week ago here on HN, I've never seen the previous commenter reffered to as GP. What is that an acronym for?
        jodrellblank 1y ago

orlp 1y ago

What I don't understand is why it took you 8 weeks to distinguish a timer from a transistor. That doesn't make your professor's reaction alright, I just find it puzzling.

mikepurvis 1y ago
That would be like exposing a first year CS student to a situation where "it could be a compiler bug" is one of the potential explanations.
- vkou 1y ago
  It's closer to exposing a first year CS student who has never touched a computer before to Windows, when the work is supposed to be done on Linux, and the TA is hemming and hawing, and insists that the reason the sudo command isn't working is because the student is not following the steps correctly. It's a problem that's obvious to diagnose... If you already have passing familiarity with the material. Most people do not have passing familiarity with electronic components when they step into an engineering program.
- anyfoo 1y ago
  The part was marked as a timer IC.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Not just a timer IC. Literally the most common IC in the world for at least every year from 01980 to 02000 or so, maybe still today. I can understand the first-year student not recognizing it, but what the fuck was the lab tech's mental disability?
themaninthedark 1y ago
I would assume that you don't have access to the lab(and diagnostic equipment) at all times and taking other classes. Also him being a student, having the wrong component was probably not in his mental troubleshooting tree. I would guess that it was not in the lab assistant's troubleshooting tree either. Also once you start down the road of troubleshooting, a false trail can lead you far into the woods.

entropyie 1y ago

I ran labs in my university in Europe, in the early 2000s, and I'd like to think this would not have happened. We were selected as tutors due to our proficiency and dedication to the subject. Maybe it was a fluke, I've heard similar stories recently about local Unis.

Natsu 1y ago

It's funny, because while that's a terrible educational experience, you actually learned some important lessons despite them. I remember the first time I found out that the software documentation I had been relying upon was simply and utterly wrong. It was so freeing to start looking at how things actually behaved instead of believing the utterly false documentation because the world finally made sense again.

euroderf 1y ago
Proving the truism that incorrect documentation is worse than no documentation.
don-code 1y ago
Sometimes it's not even rare that documentation is wrong. The documentation for a vendor who I won't name - but might be at Series J and worth north or $50 billion - seems to be wrong more often than it's right. We frequently say, don't blame the tools, it's you. That pushes "blame the tools" outside of the Overton window, and when we need to blame a tool, we're looked at like we have five heads. Ten years ago, I was dealing with a bizarre problem in RHEL where we'd stand up an EC2 instance with 4GB of memory, have 4.4GB of memory reported to the system, and be able to use 3.6GB of it. I spent _a long_ time trying to figure out what was going on. (This was around the time we started using Node.js at that company, and needed 4GB of RAM just for Jenkins to run Webpack, and we couldn't justify the expensive of 8GB nodes.) I did a deep dive into how the BIOS advertises memory to the system, how Linux maps it, and so forth, before finally filing a bug with Red Hat. 36 hours later, they identified a commit in the upstream kernel, which they forgot to cherry-pick into the RHEL kernel. That's a very human mistake, and not one I dreamed the humans at Red Hat - the ones far smarter than me, making far more money than me - could ever make! Yet here we were, and I'd wasted a bunch of time convinced that a support ticket was not the right way to go.
- Eduard 1y ago
  > Yet here we were, and I'd wasted a bunch of time convinced that a support ticket was not the right way to go. From my experiences with public issue trackers for big projects, it's very reasonable to postpone creating a new issue, and rather follow my own hypothesis/solution first: * creating a new issue takes significant effort to be concise, provide examples, add annotated screenshots, follow the reporting template, etc., in hopes of convincing the project members that the issue is worth their time. Failing to do so often results in project members not understanding or misunderstanding the problem, and all too often leads to them directly closing the issue. And even when reporting a well-written issue, it can still just be ignored/stall, and be autoclosed by GitHubBot.

potato3732842 1y ago

>I chose to take a horrible but passing grade in the lab, finished the class with a C- (which was unusual for me), and went on to pretend that the whole thing never happened. This sentence could have also ended "my gpa dipped below the threshold for some bullshit mark it up to mark it down exercise masquerading as a scholarship and I had to re-take the class for a better grade anyway"

don-code 1y ago
Indeed it could have. I was on a fairly prestigious scholarship; luckily, my marks were good enough that this was a low-risk decision. That said... I graduated with a 3.2 GPA, after being the stereotypical "gifted" student up through high school. A 3.2 is, apparently, still decent. However, I did feel a bit of a twinge seeing my peers walk at graduation with with cords, bents, and other regalia, where I just had my standard-issue black robe. It had less to do with my grade in this particular class, and more to do with the fact that I had a part-time engineering job - 10-20 hours a week - and was making money. When you've spent a couple of years being broke, having an extra few hundred dollars per month was a big deal. Enough so that I didn't really care about putting the extra effort in for A's - that extra time was time better spent working. B's were fine if I could afford to take my girlfriend out to dinner every month. In the years since then, it seems like this was a good decision. That job became full-time after college, and I stayed there six years. At the end of six years, nobody really cared about my college GPA. At the end of nine years (when I next looked for a job), I didn't even bother listing it on my resume.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Message for engineering undergraduates: when you have an opportunity to trade great grades for good grades and increased immediate career prospects, take it. Your internship / prospective employer cares way more about the job you're doing for them than +0.5 GPA. (If you're heading right to grad school, obviously different weighting)
  - whatshisface 1y ago
    If you're heading to grad school, it can be essential to have connections made through UG research. That's a trade that isn't just advised in some fields, but necessary. A letter of recommendation that says you're actually useful as an RA is 1000x more of a direct implication that they would benefit from bringing you on than an A in a few classes. Academics don't like finding out that smart people are impossible to work with any more than industry does, and since they're tied to you for longer, in some ways it's an even bigger deal.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago

I only took two electronics classes, but in the later one I was the class hero for just buying a bunch of potentiometers on amazon so that we didn't have to waste all of that expensive time sitting around waiting for our turn with the only good one left. It cost me like $10

CamperBob2 1y ago
Literal example of "bias for action." A+

michaelsbradley 1y ago

I was in honors freshman chemistry at university. Tough class, all homework (lots of it) graded rigorously, but only the midterm and final counted toward the course grade. So if you wanted an A you had to get an A on both exams. After midterm, during every other lecture at least, the professor would sound a refrain: “An orbital is not a house! An electron does not live in a house!” Final exam had a small number of complex problems to work out with pen and paper, tough stuff, lots of calculus. But the last question ended with “where does the electron live?” That final problem, if you ignored the end wording, was super easy, something almost trivial to do with Helium iirc. The class had about 25 students in it; about 5 of us independently had the same thought: “this is a trick question, ‘the orbital is not a house in which the electron lives!’” And, independently, that’s how we five answered. And we got marked wrong, all our course grades dropped to B+/- because of that one damn question. Over a lunch or whatever, we discovered our shared experience and approached the professor as a group. He listened patiently and said: “Ah, right, I did insist on that idea, it’s understandable why you would think it’s a trick question and answer that way. But I still consider your answers wrong, grades stay as they are.” Some in the group even went to the dean and, to my understanding, he said it’s best to consider it a life lesson and move on.

don-code 1y ago
I agree this seems overly principled to me. I recall a DSP class where there was an exam with a question like (not exactly this): > What does the following code print? > `printf("Hello, world!");` If you responded with: > Hello, world! ...which - of course - the whole class did, you got the question wrong. If you responded with: > "Hello, world!" ...which is actually not what that would print, you got the question right. A small band of us went to the professor and noted that, in fact, `printf("Hello, world!")` does not print the quotes. But he wanted us to show that it printed a string, and we denote strings by quotes. This was something that we learned to do just for him - all strings had to be enclosed by quotes, to denote that they were strings. As far as I'm concerned, it served no practical purpose; we never had to differentiate strings like "Hello" from ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 0] or other representations. A better example of how this could go - and not one that had anywhere near the same stakes - was a question on the entrance exam for my college radio station: > What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? I got this question right by answering, "Ni!" (edit: formatting)

butlike 1y ago

you should have gotten an A for being a real engineer

fulladder 1y ago

That's a tragic story. However, I'm surprised that the transistor was supposed to come in a DIP package. Usually through-hole discrete transistors come in a three-lead package like TO-92. Of course, that would not have helped you since yours looked like every other student's except the for the markings.

ZiiS 1y ago
Probably Darlington transistors like ULN2003
- markrages 1y ago
  ULN2003 is not DIP8 And I would assume for pedalogical purposes a bare transistor would be preferred rather than the '2008 with its extra diodes and base resistor.
genewitch 1y ago
There can be 2 or more transistors in a dip-8, but I think the point is more that the wrong dip-8 was given, not which specific dip-8. I change details when I tell stories, both to prevent eyes glazing, and because the details don't matter that much. If I told this story to a neighbor it wouldn't involve the words "dip-8", 555, or "transistor". For instance I had a professor that just did not like me. I did all the work, the papers, but the second paper assigned was about bioethics and at the time there was a lot of negative press about that subject and I went really deep into a subject I had never heard of before. Well the prof was a bioethicist, and on some bioethics committee, and did not like my prose. I barely passed that class that semester. I think they knew they couldn't fail me because, as I said, I did the work; but they certainly made me not want to continue college, that's for sure.
- ohgr 1y ago
  Never seen any DIP-8 transistors. Usually the discrete arrays like the CA30xx are DIP-14. Personally I'd read the label on the chip.

kabdib 1y ago

this happens in "real life" as well i spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why my 74LS20 wasn't being a dual 4-input NAND gate turns out that was a date code, and it was some other chip entirely 1974 was a terrible year for 74xx series TTL chips yes, i am old :-)

jiggawatts 1y ago

This makes me incredibly grateful for my physics lecturers, all of whom would bend over backwards to assist their students' journeys towards learning any time any stumbled or showed a spark of curiosity that needed fanning into a raging fire. I had lecturers give me bonus marks above 100% because I noticed issues like this and thanked me for helping to improve the course material! These lecturers, when merely overhearing a curious "huh?" conversation between students would spend hours of their own time scouring the library for relevant information and just "leave" photocopies for students to find the next day.

thelaxiankey 1y ago

This is crazy to me because when I've run labs in the past, there were equipment failures literally all of the time. When you teach lots of people, shit breaks. Quite often if something didn't work, I'd just have one student swap equipment with another student to help diagnose this sort of thing. Major bummer that others have had differing experiences from me, here.

saghm 1y ago

> So I made an appointment to see the professor, and his suggestion to me was to drop the class and take it again. Which, of course, would've affected my graduation date. I would have been tempted to ask him to write me a check for the extra semester of tuition, but I'm sure that wouldn't have made the situation any better (and maybe would have made him more likely to grade strictly).

deleted 1y ago

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henryaj 1y ago

I had a very similar experience during a lab internship I took during my biochemistry undergrad degree. First part of a project was running PCR on a particular plasmid that we were going to use to transfer a gene into Drosophila. But for some reason the PCR didn't work, and I spent almost all of my time trying to get the damn thing to run. Everyone naturally assumed I was just doing something wrong, being an undergrad with little lab experience. After about ten weeks, it turned out that the lab tech had written up the protocol wrong and I was using the wrong primers. No wonder it didn't work. Was one of the experiences that made me realise that working in a lab really wasn't for me...

taneq 1y ago

That's awful, and unfortunately relatable. Most of my university courses were pretty good, but I had a computer graphics course where I got about 80% for my project, and about 30% for my final grade, which meant I apparently got 0% for my exam. I was a graphics nerd, I'd written a raytracer in C++, made a decent start on a game engine in Java (including software rasterizer with perspective-correct texturing, transparency, and model saving and loading with keyframe animated forward kinematics), along with numerous games and rendering programs. This graphics course was trivial stuff and barely got past explaining what a bitmap was and how to draw pictures using API calls. I couldn't have legitimately scored zero in the exam. After weeks of trying to make an appointment with the lecturer to discuss it (and being told "you failed, get over it"). I got an email from the lecturer, admitting that they'd forgotten to add my exam score to my overall score. And from this point, it took months further to get my official grade corrected. This same lecturer also once emailed out grades by opening their whole-course grading spreadsheet, deleting all the rows except for that student's grade, and then saving it as a new file. With 'track changes' turned on.