DKE Maastricht University Survival guide

This guide was composed by several students from DKE.

Living

Housing

• Sign up with Maastricht Housing ASAP. Housing waiting lists are done based on the time you’ve been registered.
• A ‘normal’ student rooms runs about 250-350€ out of the centre, 350€-450€ in centre. Expect to pay about 50€ more in your first year.
• Room availability tends to be highest December-May; as most students finish their study then, coupled with low demand.

Food

Dinner

Decent, not too expensive (by Maastricht standards)

Lunch / Breakfast

*) Secret entrance is the studded brown door, walk until you see a downwards staircase on your left, follow it down until you get to the cafetaria. See: https://tinyurl.com/yb3ggrj3

	Protip: After a hangover, order eggs on bread + ham,cheese and a freshly pressed glass  of juice. 
    	Breakfast of kings for ~4€.
	(They have filter coffee & sandwiches as well)

Also Incognito serves coffee from time to time. (Check with members)

Cooking

• Great site, good food, not costly: http://www.budgetbytes.com/
  

    Protip: Check out "Taco Pasta"
  

• Market on friday sells a bag of fruit/vegetables for 5€.
• Go to the ALDI or Lidl (cheaper supermarket) once in a while for ‘stockups’.

Must have

• Work late at night, or long hours on PC? Install F.Lux
  (Ensures your eyes will last)

• Gym & Sports all year == 180€ @ UM Sport
  Do some form of sport (e.g.: bouldering) as even the tiniest bit of exercise will give you energy.

Uni

Projects

• Before starting any project; look up the problem in the book AI: Modern Approach (Russell & Norvig).
  This generally saves you about 4 weeks of work
• There will come a time when running a long experiment for 3 days straight, where it will crash on the 3rd day without any output.
  Obviously, day 4 is presentation day.
  • Ensure that you write out results while an experiment is running to a text file. It’s a one-liner you can lookup on Stackoverflow.
• Depending on that one guy in your group to do the coding for you is the quickest way to fail DKE. Yes, you will skate by. However, come the harder single assignments (year 2/3, Bachelor Thesis) you will crash and burn.
• Learn about version control.
  
  • Lookup Git on Google
  • Get confused because of the pages upon pages of documentation, then download SmartGIT
  • Learn to select files, then press Commit.
  • Come to the understanding that you now have the power to "quick-save" any and all documents, not just code, and go back in time.
  • Regret all life decisions as you did not commit your work during that all-nighter before the presentation and you can’t replicate your results… or get any results for that matter.
  • Seriously, before changing anything, COMMIT YOUR WORK.
• Learn about LaTeX. No, not that kind of latex.
  • Use TexMaker, Overleaf or some online WYSIWYG LaTeX editor.
• Might seem like a no-brainer but.. attend the project examinations.

Books & Articles:

• PDF/Epubs of books and articles you legally own can be easily obtained from:
  http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ (All sorts of literature, including comics etc) Also see:
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library.nu
• Get a Incognito membership, it pays itself back after the first 2 booksales.
• Check with your professor whether the literature has changed recently. If not, get it second hand from Facebook, or use your social skills.
• Check the library several weeks before the start of the actual course for free. You can extend up to 10 times without having to spend any money.

Studying

• Time management. The key to success is to identify when you will be swamped with work, and when not, and plan around that.
  • Week 1-4 in a block are the “Party/holiday” weeks.
  • Week 5-7 are the “Now lets get shit done” weeks.
• No matter how well you got by doing things last minute in high-school / previous programs, you will crash and burn if you maintain the same attitude at DKE.
  • Cry {INSERT TIME X} from now when you realize that we told you this and you choose to ignore it.
  • No, this is not a challenge to showcase how intelligent you are because you could finish course X while you “only studied the night before” / “not at all”.
  • Realize that discipline vs. intelligence is very much like the tortoise vs the hare.

• Realize that every year builds upon the knowledge in the years before.
  Courses, in general, aren’t standalone.

  • Yes, you might finish Calculus with a 6 by cramming hard last minute. But you’ll pay for it every math course coming afterwards.
• BONUS EXERCISES: Easy way to get your grade up, and they often come back on exams.
• If you are easily distracted:
  • Try to limit any and all distractions. Try studying at the library / DKE (see next section), change your OS, etc.
  • Study in 45-minute intervals, reward yourself after each interval. (go outside, etc)
• DKE has a lot of contact hours, but attending lectures (without sitting in the back, gaming) will give you ample time to do work ensuring that you’re free afterwards.
  • Most of the time, courses are linked to your current project. There will be insights you can gain to solve certain problems.
  • Be sure to at least skim the lecture pages, so that you don’t spend several hours discovering something that someone from another project group got handed to them in week 1.

Exams

• During normal semesters you will be swamped with project work in the week before exams.
  There are two kinds of students:

  • Those who study in week 6 (or earlier) instead of 7, and pass.
  • And those that don’t because they have to finish the project presentation, code, report, experiments AND FINALLY study.

• Review before exams with a group of students.

    Protip #1: Rooms at DKE are mostly deserted the days leading up to exams. 
    Protip #2: Use 1.001/2.009 as your personal lair of studying, with optional private cinema display of Judge Dredd at the end of the day (beamer!)
    Protip #3: CodePoKE (company founded by DKE students) provides a working spot for DKE students if the library & DKE are too crowded. Often there are senior students there you can ask questions to. Contact Gijs-Jan Roelofs, or someone from Incognito who can get into contact.
  

• Bring snacks & water (e.g.: bananas). But don’t you dare bring anything that makes noise.
• http://wiki.msvincognito.nl tends to have old exams you can use to practice.

  • Make sure to do practice exams without your notes at least once. Besides the obvious, it forces you to acknowledge where you might want to spend more time practicing.

    Protip: Print out lectures on paper before the lecture and take notes on them.

Programming

• Programming subjects are ideal for self study.
  Your development environment (IDE) and compiler give you an interactive feedback loop that quickly allows you to learn how to properly program. You have an automated system that will provide you with corrections.
• For those new to programming, realize that you are learning three things at once:
  • A new language; its syntax and vocabulary (API)
  • A new way of thinking; how to go from problem to code.
  • How to debug a logical program, and doubt everything about yourself.
    Divide up the learning process into these three categories and tackle them individually
• If you find that all of these things above are too much all at once, use an online code learning website such as codecombat.com.
  • They tend to use a more forgiving language.
  • They provide more ‘meaningful’ and shorter challenges. Above all, they give proper hints and personal feedback.
• Realize that truly learning how to program comes by doing projects of your interest.
• If you don’t know what Stackoverflow is, google it and learn to love it.

Math

• Realize that there is a ton of high-quality study material on the internet that you can partake in at your own speed, and ask questions on anonymously.
  • Calculus: https://www.khanacademy.org/
  • Linear Algebra: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010/

  • See MIT Opencourseware, Coursera, Udacity; etc.

      Caveat: Online videos aren't a replacement to lectures, as sometimes courses require specific techniques outlined in said lectures.
    

• If you have trouble understanding certain concepts, try searching online for “visualizations”. Most often someone made a very good visualization of concepts that you can interact with to grasp a subject in minutes, that normally through text can take forever to grasp.
  • Eigenvalues & vectors: http://setosa.io/ev/eigenvectors-and-eigenvalues/
  • Markov Chains: http://setosa.io/ev/markov-chains/
  • Machine Learning: http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/ etc….
• Realize that doing the actual exercises is crucial for math courses.
• Realize that you fundamentally lack the ability to review and correct your own exercises without outside help if you don’t fully grasp the subject.
  • Get a solutions manual, preferable one that shows you the steps of calculation.
  • Setup a group of students to review the course material. Split it up into sessions for making exercises and theory review. Get an experienced student to help with the theory review.
  • Help a group of students if you are experienced. The best way to review theory is to see if you can explain it to someone else.

Professors

• Prof. Kelk: Don’t miss a single lecture. He is the best at explaining complex subjects.

    Seriously
  

• Prof. Thuijsman: Don’t miss a single lecture. His syllabi tend to not cover techniques he explains in class.

    Double seriously, you'll hate yourself come exam.
  

• Prof. Karel: Pay attention and write down everything said in his lectures. It will come back on exams.

    It might save you an extra YEAR of studying
  

• Prof. Collins: Don’t get scared when he goes down the rabbit hole with mathematical proof. Try to follow, but rest assured you will not need to replicate the proof on your own. He usually summarizes the end result, and the process provides insight into why things are the way they are. Just be glad you are there along for the ride, you won’t get the chance too often.

• Prof. Paredis: Often overlooked, but a potential source of terrifyingly on-point and difficult questions during project review. Be respectful and he will give you insight into your project problem.

Thesis

• Pick a topic that you know you can finish in 30% of the time.
  • By definition, you’re not experienced enough yet to estimate how long something will take, so you’ll still run short.
  • Try to limit risk or aspects over which you have no control. At the very least factor them in your estimation. E.g.:
    • Robotics: the robot could malfunction / break. You have to deal with signal noise on sensors. (Your excellent algo might work in lab conditions, but sadly fails miserably on sensors.)
    • Datamining: the dataset could be of shit quality (which happens about 95% of the time when dealing with real-world datasets). The dataset could be so big that any decent algorithm will blow up your little 32GB RAM ‘workstation’. Yes, I said 32GB of RAM was little. And obviously, the cluster that does have RAM is currently in use by some other student/PhD.
• Realize that “even bad results are results” is a blatant lie.
  • On that note: DO NOT falsify results.

Social

• DKE is relatively unique in the fact that due to its size students of all years tend to communicate with each other.
  Knowing someone from the years above you is a good thing (TM).
• Incognito tends to organize a wide range of activities for people of varying interests.
  • Ask an aKTie member when certain events of interest will be hosted, or whom you can contact for certain interests.

Groups

• Boardgames: https://www.facebook.com/groups/395260880543893/
• Roleplaying: https://www.facebook.com/groups/322206474811704
• Programming: https://www.facebook.com/groups/937739742957425/
• Magic - The Gathering: https://www.facebook.com/groups/magicmaastricht/

Sights

• Carnaval (around February) is something you should have witnessed once.
  A ‘gentle` introduction is done on November 11th on the Vrijthof.
• Go to the top of the local “mountain”, Sint Pietersberg.

Misc

• Best toilet on DKE is on the first floor, one of the left. (When you go upwards from 0.015)

Transport

• Things to look out for when buying a second hand bike:
  • Check if all gears are in working order. (Especially second gear as its an expensive fix) Watch out for worn down teeth.
  • Check if both brakes work properly.
• You can buy bikes from Jules & You (next to DKE) or Facebook groups. (Watchout for stolen bikes on the FB groups)
• Get cheap lights from the HEMA so you don’t get fined by the police. They patrol the centre of town semi-regularly.
• Besides the obvious chance of theft, don’t leave your bike unattended for more than a week as the municipality removes ‘discarded’ bikes.