Coursera

This is actually a backdated blog entry. Around early December of 2016, I decided to enroll in a course called "Astronomy: Exploring Time And Space" to challenge myself. It's a bad habit of mine to do things halfheartedly and give up along the way, even the things I love doing. This time, I thought it would be the same. The entire duration of the course lasted for 3 months.

Nice....

Lo and behold, the result of talking to myself for about 3 months, trying to figure out how certain things work in the Universe. Since I have completed the course, let me walk you through how I felt. 

It started off as a gentle stream in the beginning where you play in the water and have fun understanding core concepts of things we can relate to. As you gradually progress forward in the middle chapters, that gentle stream leads you to a raging torrent where I started to struggle to understand stuff like Black Holes, Neutron Stars, General Theory of Relativity, Olber's Paradox ect. There are concepts that I have never even heard of before such as degenerate matter and electron/neutron pressure. I took plenty of time and had to do a lot of external reading to understand these concepts. Then the course throws you off a steep waterfall near the end as things became very unintuitive to the human perception. You start to learn things in Astrobiology like "Are we in a simulation?" and be prepared for lots of hypothesis' and speculations.

Don't go in thinking that it's a course for beginners who possess zero knowledge in astronomy. That being said, I did enjoy myself throughout the whole crazy journey of staying up till 4am on certain days to ask the lecturer questions over a LIVE YouTube feed, doing external reading and watching tons of videos to understand better, literally talking to myself to create a mental image of things I didn't understand, and constantly refreshing the webpage for my result after the completion of every written assignment. After spending US$49 and going through 174 M.C.Q.s with 5 written assignments consisting of 14 topics, I made it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

I would like to thank Prof. Chris Impey from The University of Arizona for his dedication in making those lecture videos and the people who assisted him in doing so. Also, special thanks to the moderators in the Coursera forum, especially Ms. Christy Read for clearing my doubts.