What did you do this past week?
This past week I spent most of my time getting adjusted to the new school year and getting back into the groove of being back on campus. I spent a lot of time updating my Google Calendar to list my finalized class schedule, each class’s office hours, and various organization and recruiting events. I also read this class’s articles for this week and I found all three of them intriguing and thought-provoking. I also spent some time applying to summer 2020 internships and lightly refreshed my data structures knowledge.
What’s in your way?
I have always struggled with time management and perfectionism (the two of which go hand-in-hand). I dwell on my work for extended periods of time to the point it’s useless and extremely unnecessary. This blog in itself is a great example: when I first sit down to start on a new week’s post, I usually grind something out within 20 minutes. Then after nearly finishing, I spend the next 20 hours deliberating whether a particular topic I wrote about is a suitable answer to the question it was attached to and I end up revising or completely scratching what I had written previously. It’s not usually grammar or typo fixes; it’s usually completely cutting a paragraph and rewriting it without the original draft’s guidance. I then end up submitting the assignment a mere hour before the deadline even though I could’ve finished the previous day by using the perfectly good earlier draft as my final submission.
The initial topic I had as the answer to this question was about me struggling with the onslaught of recruiting season with all of the applications and coding challenges and feeling like I’m swimming through molasses, but I ended up completely removing that draft (true to my word) and writing this response instead. Luckily, this is only my second draft; I was more efficient this time around!
Granted, there have only been two posts; nevertheless, knowing myself, it’ll take me a while to break out of this vicious habit of working on work to the point it’s toxic as I do a variation of this for nearly all of the things I do in my life.
What will you do next week?
I will be starting and finishing all of the projects due within the next and following weeks as these coming weeks will be some of the busiest weeks of the semester due to it being at the peak of recruiting season and when all of the first big assignments of classes are due.
What was your experience in learning about assertions and going over the Collatz project?
The last time I legitimately learned Python was the summer before my freshman year of college so most of what I had picked up back then has slipped out of my brain at this point. I enjoyed the Python refresher and learning about the various ways to potentially optimize our solutions to the problem we will be working on within the project. The workflow looked like many steps but I feel that it’ll be a good experience to go through them. After all, learning about the software engineering workflow is partially why I took this class.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
Listening to intense film soundtracks or music in other languages really helps me concentrate when I want to truly hunker down and hustle and diligently work on an assignment with all of my attention focused on it (especially when coding). I know there have been studies that say that listening to music detracts from high-impact studying or working, but from my experience that having music playing in the background boosts your productivity. The catch is that it must be non-distracting music. For me, if I listen to music with words in it, I often find myself drifting away from my work and slipping into grooving to the music. Music without words or words I don’t understand helps me focus on the words that are important at the moment (the work).
CS373 Fall 2019: Lisa Yu 