Let's hear it for Summer! Yesterday I marked off the last four items on my finals checklist and spent the rest of the day unpacking and attempting to find a place in my room for all the junk from the dorm.
Now that the year is over, I'd like to cap it off with a list of various things I noticed during my time at Purdue.
Free time cannot be underrated
As evidenced by the infrequency of my posts over course of the year, I certainly didn't have much free time between classes, CS projects, math homework, french nonsense, and whatever else happened to be taking up my time at the moment. I spent most of what little free time I did have playing pool, lifting at the Rec. Center, hanging out with friends and neighbors, reading, and watching the occasional movie when I found I had two hours to spare. I'm sorry to say I only went to only one Purdue party (and one non-Purdue party) the entire year. While this probably helped my grade in the long run, it did nothing for my college story repertoire.
College is a lot like high school, only more so
The procedure is the same: one pays attention in class, gets the assignments, slogs though them at his or her desk back home, and turns them in hoping they are what the teacher wants. However in college everything about this familiar routine is magnified tenfold: there's more work, it takes longer to do, teachers' expectations are often higher, deadlines are stricter, and most importantly, it's all impossible to get away from. In high school I always had a few hours at home every evening when I could fully relax. There's no such thing in college. Even when I had free time (as mentioned above), I always had something hanging over my head that I had to choose not to do.
Some people I've talked to feel that the biggest difference between high school and college is that college requires one to study without being "spoon fed" by a teacher every day. However I think I didn't have this problem because I lost about a fifth of my high school career to cancer and had to learn quite a bit on my own. This, one of the very few benefits of having the disease, taught me how to learn on material without the aid of a teacher close at hand.
All this isn't to say I didn't find college a shock. On the contrary, I was all sorts of distraught for the first month or two thanks mostly to the programming classes. In the past, I had always programmed for fun with a very loose and flexible idea of what I wanted done. In the first semester Java class and later in the C/C++ class, I got my first taste of strict specifications and even stricter testing procedures. I remember hearing stories, especially in the Java class, of people losing points because they messed up a single character of output. The examinations, too, really threw me for a loop. I remember talking to people in the Java course who were shocked to find they got a 14 out of 100 on the first midterm. I got something like a 54, which was I think the lowest percentage I had ever gotten on any test in all my years of school. I felt, and still do feel, that the exams in both the Java and C/C++ courses were unfair, inaccurate, poorly made, obsessed with useless trivia, and filled with trick questions. In my opinion, the projects should have had a far greater impact on the final grade because 1) they show what we can do, not what obscure syntax we have memorized, 2) they have far more in common with what we will be doing once we join the workforce, and 3) writing programs on paper is the most idiotic idea of testing I've ever seen. But of course, no one cares what a measly freshman has to say about it, so I might as well continue on to my next topic:
Grades in college deserve an F
Throughout the year and in almost every class, I had no clue as to what my final grade would be. When teachers count homework toward only 20% of the final grade and then curve tests so heavily that a 60% might be either an A or a C depending on the weather, it is incredibly difficult to gauge one's progress. The online gradebook helped to alleviate this problem slightly by displaying score distributions, but in most cases no one knew what to expect. Case in point: my grades come out on Wednesday and I haven't the slightest clue what I'm going to get in several classes.
College: surrounded by intellectuals
The fact that I have met scores of interesting, intelligent people this year isn't all that much of a surprise seeing as I went to such a large, well-known, and highly regarded university. Several of these same people have become my friends over the past few months, and I'm thankful for it.
Now if only more of them were girls...
Work counts as vacation
I start work monday as an intern with the credit union IT department that I worked for last summer. I'll be doing something I like, I won't have homework, and I'll be making money; can't ask for a better summer than that.
Here's to a much-needed vacation. I hope everyone reading this has a great three and a half months.