42 Piscine Day 24

Edit: This is part of a series that culminated here, Next post. Previous post.

Edit2: I consolidated all the posts of the piscine daily posts here

Edit3: You can read up about what it’s like as a cadet at 42 here

Anyone who’s ever attended college knows what finals week feels like, this week has felt the same. There was a group of us talking about grabbing pizza on Wednesday night (tonight) I guess the local pizza place has a Wednesday night deal or something. But when we talked about it at lunch the consensus was “no, we need to study”. That’s about the vibe right now, people are maxing out their time, doing what they can to prepare. Many are still working on the group project BSQ (has a lot of do with optimization) but even more are just going over material and studying. Today was also the day we graded our Rush02 project, but as my team and I didn’t finish, it wasn’t a personal concern of mine.

Some of my friends and I were discussing yesterday how a few of the seemingly brightest people have stopped showing up, one in particular, he was french, tall, curly haired, what most would consider good looking, What’s more is he has years of experience as a developer, so he knows his stuff. If he had half of my ambition or if I had half of his advantages I would have conquered the world a month ago. Anyways I guess the guy decided that his time in the USA was better spent sightseeing than here in the lab, so he just sort of quit showing up. I had completely forgotten about him until they brought him up. Then we went on to list another couple of people who also were intelligent and promising candidates that just sort of stopped coming, an interesting phenomenon that I had somehow not noticed before, this has been a minority though, most of the smartest people are still here.

I suppose the month long piscine is very good at one thing in particular, filtering out those who are dedicated and those who are not, those who only have a slight interest end up quitting, those who don’t feel up to the task quit as well and then at the end of it we are all filtered by ability to learn, actual skill and personality fit. The longer I’m here the more I feel converted to this style of doing things. I wonder if a clearer cut system of what’s expected and a more involved on-boarding process wouldn’t lower attrition rates, but then again is that something that they want for the program? As it is only those who truly want the opportunity, can think for themselves, know enough to proceed and are dedicated are the only ones to get in. In some ways those are the most valuable things to screen for, so really the system isn’t broken is it, not so long as it’s doing exactly what it was intended to do.

I couldn’t sleep last night, I woke up at 2AM and after laying in bed for an hour decided that going back to sleep wasn’t going to happen. So I was back at the lab until 8AM, tried to sleep again, failed, then finally got about 4 hours between lunch and dinner. It’s thrown off my whole day, and my ability to think throughout the day.

At 3AM the lab was still lively and had about 20 people working on group or personal projects, It’s actually really cool that we have a lab that’s open 24 hours, that you can take the time to go and get something done when you can’t sleep. Around 5AM the lab was empty, there was just two of us, me struggling to get things done and one other guy sprawled out on chairs taking a catnap.

There are about 76 people in lab right now at 6:30PM, which feels an accurate assessment. I hear that most piscines are much fuller than ours, and I know that when it’s more full the lab can get pretty hot. During our first exam when most people showed up, that first hour was unpleasantly warm. I bought a fan on recommendation, and I’ve not used it as we’ve been small most of the time. I don’t have a way to pack it on the plane, someone is getting a free fan I guess.

There is a tradition of throwing a BBQ after the piscine, a few people have formed a sort of party planning committee and a “buy in” for a plate of food has started. I spent about 30 min trying to get past paypal security until I gave up and went with venmo, which was also a struggle as the search didn’t find the guy I needed to find right away. Finally I had him send me a link to his profile. The committee made a flyer, and I guess a lot of the cadets will make an appearance as well, should be cool to do some mingling.

I’ve been solidifying travel plans home, flight plans, rides from airports, communicating with my job after being gone for a month. It’s odd to think about leaving in a few days. This place has almost felt like home for the last month, the people I’ve gotten to know I’ve gotten to know well, there are friendships there, I hope to see most of them again once we are all Cadets, but I know there are some I’ll not see again. A few people have invited me to come visit them where they live later, so far I’ve gotten invitations for New York, Ireland and Wisconsin. Now I’m fairly well traveled so far as the western and southern USA, but I’ve yet to be to the northeast, and as for Europe I’ve only really been to Iceland, I’m not even sure if that actually counts lol. I’ll have to start gathering phone numbers to set up further plans. To anyone reading, if I’m still in Austin when you read this, let’s go for taco’s I know a few places.

My schedule for work has me back on schedule starting Monday, I wish I could say I was excited... But it will be good to see some people again, they are in for a shock now that I’ve cut my hair and shaved my beard though. Many of these people have never seen me without a beard, should be a fun day.

Not much else going on, we are all just working as hard as we can to either prepare for the exam or finish our last project.