CS 373 Week 10: Varun Rajaram

What did you do this past week?
Another hectic week of interviews for me. I’ll be genuinely glad once the recruiting season is over. I ended up being in Dallas for two days for an on-site interview and then had some more interviews on Friday. Balancing all of this with a fairly challenging Network Security project on buffer overflows wasn’t easy, but I was rewarded with the ability to make a brief trip home on Saturday night to see my family.
What’s in your way?
For the last couple of weeks, interviews have been in my way. I’m finally at the point where I have some offers rolling in and I’m at the tail end of my recruiting process for most companies, which means I can finally take a step back from thinking about my internship next summer and focus more on my endeavors as a student. Now that the grading for our second phase of the project is complete, I’m sure my group and I will meet again sometime this week to try and polish our website and add functionality for the searching, filtering, and other organizational tools that we need to accomplish for the next phase of the project.
What will you do next week?
Next week, I’ll focus more on working on my portion of the project for SWE. My group and I will need to meet up and talk about splitting up the work again, but we’ve found a good system that works and each of us has begun to develop our own individual areas of expertise on the project. Besides that, I’ll be studying for my exam in my Government class and working on a paper for my Indian History class.
What was your experience with SQL? (this question will vary, week to week)
Learning SQL has been more useful than I originally anticipated. A couple of the companies that I’m interviewing with have asked me a database and SQL related questions that I wouldn’t have prepared for if I hadn’t had the exposure I did in class. Learning about joins, in particular, helped me code up a database related solution to an interview question on Friday.
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My pick-of-the-week is to make time for the important people in your life! Last night I was able to surprise my family and important family friends by coming home as a surprise for a Diwali celebration. Traveling all the way back to Houston just for the night has been a little exhausting but it was well worth it to visit people that I truly care about.