College campuses have a certain kind of vibe that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It could just be all my awesome friends I didn’t get to see during the summer. It could be the fact that you won’t find this many people of our age all crammed into the same area and working towards a higher goal anywhere else. It could be the fact that everyday is a little different and life never feels too routine. Or it could be all that “pursuit of knowledge” and gorgeous Spanish-Mediterranean revival style architecture.
Registration season is upon us! It’s one of my favorite parts of the semester. Pouring over the course schedule and meticulously fashioning the perfect arrangement of classes (and 10 alternates) is just so deeply satisfying.
I have a troubling relationship with vacations. Don’t get me wrong – I love them. I wouldn’t complain much if life was just a series of summer, winter, and spring breaks. But somewhere in high school, breaks lost their golden sweetness and took on an anxious flavor.
This semester was the first time all of my CS classes were upper division elective courses. It was giddying to have complete freedom after semesters of following a mandated path (even if it was an interesting mandated path). Two of the courses I ended up taking were Introduction to Data Mining and Introduction to Computational Linguistics (from the Linguistics Department). Several weeks ago, I started noticing that a lot of concepts from the two classes were overlapping. My linguistics professor would mention a classifier that was used to categorize words from a body of text and then the next week I would learn how to implement a version of that classifier from scratch in my data mining class. This happened several times and one week we went over the same probability and statistics concepts in both classes in order to lay a foundation for other concepts we would be learning.
Complain, complain, complain. People complain a lot. Even I’ve done my fair share of complaining. Even though scientific studies have shown the negative effects of complaining, you can listen in any public space and hear complaints being traded back-and-forth like baseball cards. Despite the detrimental qualities, when all else fails, griping and grumbling is the glue that brings people together. It’s an easy conversation starter. Any stranger can sympathize with you over the horrible morning traffic or your neighbors stupid dog that won’t stop howling at the moon.
“I feel like I don’t get excited about computer science stuff anymore.”
A friend of mine mentioned that in a group chat during winter break. My knee-jerk reaction, “Go read cool articles!” was rather hypocritical. I don’t read as many tech articles as I should. However, I still felt the burning need to defend computer science. Computer science was not just “exciting!” but “EXCITING!!!” - 24/7, 365 days of the year.
My Facebook news feed has recently been peppered with a string of ridiculous and delightful events that perfectly sum up my feelings as the semesters draws to a close.
I’m not a certified doctor, but I’m pretty sure I got glasses from reading too much (I’m also pretty sure I almost burned down my childhood home from reading too much - but that’s a different story). Third grade was the year I got glasses (I spent hours in the store on a personal quest trying to find the most Harry-Potter-like glasses), and that was also the year I started reading novels way past my bed time by the dim light of my desk lamp.
Guess the Scene: I do not know what I’m doing and it’s just me, the whiteboard, and an unbearably awkward aura, accentuated only by the mute blinking of the engineer sitting at the table behind me.
Where am I? An interview (that is crashing and burning) of course.
Career fairs remind me of animal courtship displays. Companies and students put their best foot forward; one side tries to dazzle with tantalizing job opportunities and the other with shining intellect. Recruiters reel in potential employees while students fish for the right words to string together into intelligent conversations. The ultimate goal? Employment.
