What did you do this past week?
This past week I was mainly practicing for my dance team as we have a competition coming up in 2 weeks in Wisconsin. I was also catching up on classes and reading “An American Sickness” by Elisabeth Rosenthal.
What’s in your way?
For me mainly it is just staying focused on a single task at a time until it is complete. I have a really bad habit of responding to notifications or checking social media as my “break”. However, everytime I get off task it takes me a couple minutes to check back in. I want to try and increase my mental focus to work on tasks until I am complete with them.
What will you do next week?
I plan on working on Collatz, working on my Data Mining homework. Outside of that, I am excited to start my racquetball class for the semester as it is in-person. I am also going to be practicing for my dance team as we start polishing our set. Lastly, one organization I am in, Texas Blazers, is having a couple social events this weekend which I hope to attend as well.
If you read it, what did you think of Paper #1: Syllabus?
I thought it was very intuitive once I actually read through the grading scheme. Once I understood the syllabus, I wasn’t too opposed to the grading scheme.
What was your experience of assertions and Collatz?
I think it is interesting how there are different types of assertions. I experienced this during my internship last summer at Amazon where I learned how to use JUnit for unit testing in Java. It is almost identical to the was Google Test is used for C++. For Collatz, I started the assignment and made some good progress. I predicted 8 hours and so far I have spent about 2 hours. I think I have made pretty good progress and hopefully, I can hit the target.
What made you happy this week?
It was one of my friend's birthday yesterday, Raju, who is also in this OOP section. It was nice to meet up with him and the rest of my friends in CS and finally get to catch up with them after our break. I always love catching up with friends and that usually ends up being the happiest part of my week.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick of the week is to learn more about the American healthcare system. As we get older we too will eventually need to consider what type of healthcare our employers are providing us and what a lot of the terminology means (ex. copay and deductibles). This was never something that I learned in school or from my parents, but it surprised me how expensive health care is in America after reading “An American Sickness”. I think that every student should know how the healthcare system works, so they don’t find themselves in a financially tricky situation if a medical emergency occurs. While this doesn’t relate directly to software, the job we accept after college in software will include some sort of healthcare insurance. This is something we need to consider before signing with a company.
