Winding Down in Order to Wind Up
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
Well, another semester and my second year of college are coming to an end. I have learned and grown so much this past semester and have enjoyed every minute of it. It was great being able to write code in almost every single one of my classes.
Advanced Java was by far the most fun and I am thoroughly enjoying working on the final project which combines all of the technologies I have learned over the semester into one beautiful symphony of code. In this class we covered a pretty broad array of topics: Advanced GUI, Remote Method Invocation, Database connectivity, Java Server Pages and Servlets, and XML parsing.
My Unix class was also a lot of fun because I became proficient in vi (a skill that is rare these days) as well as learned to appreciate the wonderfulness of UNIX and other “real” operating systems, such as Linux. Working in these environments also helped me understand the “behind the scenes” operations that IDEs often hide. I also learned shell scripting in awk, sed, sh, csh, ksh, and bash. We also did some perl CGI scripting.
Data Structures was pretty fun, but it could have been a bit more challenging. I loved working on the matrix search algorithm for our first project, but the projects after that were rather hum-drum.
Software Engineering was king of interesting at times, but still felt very much like an introductory course with too broad of topics to get into anything with depth.
Physics: Electricity and Magnetism sucked. It wasn’t because it was too hard or had too much homework or was too complicated – it just wasn’t interesting. I blame my professor for this, and really wish I had the same one from last semester, Dr. Earle. Dr. Gartstein (my professor this past semester) is incredibly smart, of course, but he just explained the concepts without any kind of application. In all honesty, I only went to this class about 30% of the time.
Only about a week until I leave for Seattle and another “semester” will begin!
Well, another semester and my second year of college are coming to an end. I have learned and grown so much this past semester and have enjoyed every minute of it. It was great being able to write code in almost every single one of my classes.
Advanced Java was by far the most fun and I am thoroughly enjoying working on the final project which combines all of the technologies I have learned over the semester into one beautiful symphony of code. In this class we covered a pretty broad array of topics: Advanced GUI, Remote Method Invocation, Database connectivity, Java Server Pages and Servlets, and XML parsing.
My Unix class was also a lot of fun because I became proficient in vi (a skill that is rare these days) as well as learned to appreciate the wonderfulness of UNIX and other “real” operating systems, such as Linux. Working in these environments also helped me understand the “behind the scenes” operations that IDEs often hide. I also learned shell scripting in awk, sed, sh, csh, ksh, and bash. We also did some perl CGI scripting.
Data Structures was pretty fun, but it could have been a bit more challenging. I loved working on the matrix search algorithm for our first project, but the projects after that were rather hum-drum.
Software Engineering was king of interesting at times, but still felt very much like an introductory course with too broad of topics to get into anything with depth.
Physics: Electricity and Magnetism sucked. It wasn’t because it was too hard or had too much homework or was too complicated – it just wasn’t interesting. I blame my professor for this, and really wish I had the same one from last semester, Dr. Earle. Dr. Gartstein (my professor this past semester) is incredibly smart, of course, but he just explained the concepts without any kind of application. In all honesty, I only went to this class about 30% of the time.
Only about a week until I leave for Seattle and another “semester” will begin!
