Blog Entry #6
This blog entry will cover updates on my progress in the past week in Object Oriented Programming with Professor Downing.
What did you do this past week?
This past week I was finally able to drop the courses I did not need after dropping the 5 year grad program. My coursework was extremely overwhelming and I was glad to make the decision to go into industry, rather than continue with the program.
What’s in your way?
Currently in my way is figuring out the Voting project solution with my partner this weekend. I have ACL as well, so it is tough to work in time to complete the project as I try to balance out the weekend.
What will you do next week?
Next week I will work on finishing the Voting project, and hopefully dedicate more focus to the remaining courses I have. I am definitely interested in OOP and Neural Networks, so focusing more on the concepts (especially as OOP begins to focus more on these principles) will be great for me throughout the semester.
If you read it, what did you think of the Paper #6: Single Responsibility Principle?
The SRP paper was interesting, and I was glad to see a few simple related examples enhancing the coverage of the topics presented. I understand that this is one of the most basic principles, but it will take definite concentration to implement this in my own solutions in the future.
What was your experience of stack, queue, priority_queue, values, pointers, and references?
My experience has been pretty smooth so far with these structures and builtin types for C++. As far as learning the data structures, I appreciated covering all of their benefits and downfalls, but it was quite confusing at times when we were presented methods that could be used for certain structures, but actually were omitted.
What made you happy this week?
I enjoyed being able to drop the unnecessary classes before their next deadlines, because it freed up my schedule to pursue topics of actual interest to me. I also appreciated being able to relax yesterday at ACL and seeing some fun artists!
What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?
My tip-of-the-week would be to select the courses that you know will interest you, if at all possible. Going into this semester, I elected to take two graduate level algorithmic theory courses, on top of Neural Networks and OOP as my undergraduate courses. Although my interest definitely aligns with the latter two courses, I was stuck banging my head over the algorithms courses, which consumed 90% of my workload. Now that I have gotten rid of these, I am able to focus in on the courses that I feel engage my interest the most.
