What did you do this past week?

This past week was a whirlwind where everything happened all at once. I had assignments due in every single course; I spent most of my time during the first part of the week wrapping up Collatz, the next few days starting and finishing my Algorithms assignment, and the last few days completing my Computer Networks project. I also had a few interviews throughout the week and also attended the career fair events on Thursday. Lastly, since this week was the height of the recruiting frenzy, I had several WiCS responsibilities to take care of as well including holding an event on Friday morning. I’m a sucker for free swag and one of the highlights of this week was that I got a free wireless charger for my phone from a company at the career fair! I probably got a collective 20 hours of sleep this week but this week only comes once a year and although it is the most draining, stressful, and tiring week of the semester, there’s no better feeling than the relief that washes over you on a Friday night when you know you’re done with the week!

What’s in your way?

As of now, I feel like I’ve slightly fallen behind in taking time to digest a lot of the content being taught in my classes and only doing the bare minimum in my coursework for the sake of recruiting and preparing for interviews. Ultimately, I feel like what’s in my way is just catching up and getting back up to speed with fully comprehending the topics being taught in my classes right now.

What will you do next week?

I will be working with my group on kicking off project 2 and hopefully getting a good chunk of work done. I hope to also get a lot of my homework done ahead of time so I’m not scrambling to finish (like I ended up doing this past week).

What was your experience in learning about operators and AWS?

I enjoyed learning about operators as they are crucial to understand for general computations in Python programs. It’s also great that the TAs have extensive experience and insight in these tools we will be using heavily so that when we run into troubles, regardless of the differences between everyone’s projects, we can go to them for help!

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick-of-the-week is iOS 13. I’ve been raving to my friends ever since it was released about how Apple finally rolled out Dark Mode and how I’ve gone to the Dark side and haven’t looked back since. Furthermore, I like how they revamped the default Apple Reminders app as now it’s more user-friendly and has more features.

What did you do this past week?

This past week, the reality of school and the next few months of my life finally showed its face. All of my courses released their first assignments and projects so I spent a lot of time working on those. I worked on some of the workflow for the Collatz project as well as getting the brute force solution on HackerRank, however I unfortunately did not get as much done as I had hoped. As one of the WiCS corporate officers, I am responsible for coordinating with our organization’s sponsors as well as FoCS companies that want to host a free event with our student organization. I spent several hours every day corresponding with various companies, the department, and other WiCS officers regarding events and the sponsorships. Most companies are reaching out now as recruiting season is in full swing at this point. On that note, I also spent some time working on applying to companies and completing coding challenges.

What’s in your way?

I mentioned last week that my weakness is time management (which was what was in my way for a lot of the tasks I had needed to complete). After some introspection, I can see that what is in my way now is balancing and prioritizing things. There are things to be done in a day and some take precedence over others – for instance, assignments due that day are of more importance to finish in that moment over assignments due in a week. Furthermore, I spent unnecessary amounts of time checking and refreshing my email instead of taking that time to read up on how to fix the bug in my Collatz project. Ultimately, I need to work on setting myself on a path to success rather than assigning myself to the easiest thing I could do and lazily neglect the more important things.

What will you do next week?

Next week I will finish the Collatz project as well as my other courses’ assignments and homework. I have a few recruiting deadlines coming up this week that I will be doing and I will also be attending the career fair as well as the career brunch on Thursday. Thus, next week will be one of the busiest weeks for me in the entire semester, and I hope I’m prepared for it!

What was your experience in learning about unit tests, coverage, exceptions, and types?

I enjoyed learning about all of these. I think it’s definitely important when developing robust code that needs to be vetted through and through especially when working in an enterprise setting. I believe that it’s very applicable for future projects and future jobs as well so it was helpful to learn about them in this class.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

For Mac or Linux users, Homebrew is a great tool to install in the terminal. It’s a package management tool that makes installing software onto your computer simpler and more straightforward. For instance, when I needed to install a newer version of Python on my computer, all I needed to do was run a command on the terminal:

brew install python3

It’s a very neat tool that makes installing and managing software much easier.

What did you do this past week?

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).

What high school did you go to?

I attended Westwood High School. The school’s colors are identical to UT’s colors, so oftentimes while combing through the dozens of T-shirts I have accumulated over the years, I find it fitting that a large majority of them are burnt orange.

Why did you come to UT?

The factors that I weighed most heavily in my college choice decision were education quality, tuition, and location. While deciding between another school and UT, I found that they both had equivalently acclaimed computer science departments, UT’s tuition was significantly cheaper considering it was a state school and I would be paying in-state tuition, and the location of UT was in the heart of Austin, a city bustling with life and the place I had called home for the previous 7 years.

Why are you in this class?
What are your expectations of this class?

As one of the most famous upper-division electives offered within the department, I thought there was no better time than now to enroll and join in on the hype.

More seriously, I have heard over and over again from previous upperclassmen about how much they had learned through this class and how it’s one of the best courses offered in the department. Furthermore, I have spent most of my college CS career programming in Java – I lightly dabbled in other typed languages for Operating Systems and Computer Architecture (C++ and C respectively) but mostly stayed within the Java bubble. I hope to diversify my programming language portfolio through taking this course.

How did you feel about the cold calling?

My senses are heightened the moment I step into the classroom and the anticipation (or dread, those two feelings are basically interchangeable to me) wakes me up and keeps me alert through the entire 50-minute class which is exactly what I need at 10 AM on Mondays and Fridays (and Wednesdays). Although I’m very much not the biggest fan of cold calling, it’s definitely one of the most straightforward ways to keep a class engaged in the lecture and it works.

I look forward to the coming weeks!
– Lisa