I celebrated a triumphant return to college a couple weeks ago, moving in the 30th and finding it very easy to get back into the swing of things. First thing I did? Help run a laptop orientation session for the freshman.
The way it works is as follows: every freshman is required to buy the same laptop. This makes support a lot easier for our tech department, and also means that the school can standardize on a set of software that everyone gets access to (and gets pretty deep discounts on at the same time, because of the volume of purchases made). However, the network services here are pretty intense - we run everything from an online learning management system (ANGEL, for those wondering, but it may shift to Blackboard in the not-so-distant future) to a couple different network file systems (AFS and DFS) to integrated Kerberos/LDAP authentication.
Technobabble over.
Anyway, the complete orientation takes about four hours, and includes just about everything a new student could possibly want to do with their laptop. I do mean
everything - the session starts with a ten-slide PowerPoint presentation before it even gets to "plug in your laptop," and progresses through
another ten slides before it gets to "press the power button to turn on your laptop." I did get to deal with some pretty interesting questions - one kid didn't receive exactly half his power cord, and another got two mice in his package. And I got paid for four hours' work. Not a bad deal.
After finishing that, I had a few days' downtime before classes actually started. I spent a good part of it moving in various people, including Jarek, Jimmy, Matt, Jessica, and Catherine. I also finished up some summer work during this time, and submitted my last weekly invoice - everything from here on out is on an as-needed basis.
What with that being done, I shifted my attention to classes. I'm on track to graduate after three years with a triple major in computer science, software engineering, and math, but my schedule is pretty restricted as to what I can take when. This quarter, I'm enrolled in:
- CSSE371: Software Requirements and Specifications
- CSSE372: Software Project Management
- ECE332: Computer Architecture II
- MA381: Intro to Probability with Applications to Statistics
Of those four, two (CSSE371/372) are part of the junior project track, which I'll get to in a second. ECE332 looks pretty interesting - it's an expansion of CSSE232, Computer Architecture I, and deals primarily with modern processor architectures and how CPUs (and GPUs) do what they do. So far we're still working on MIPS cores, a little-used architecture that works well for teaching purposes, but I think we'll be moving on to the more common x86 and amd64 architectures eventually. MA381 is effectively a rehash of both DISCO courses and AP Stats from high school and doesn't look too interesting (except for the professor - she makes it worthwhile to go to class every day, just to see what she gets up to. I mean, this is a woman who actually bet against the class on the
birthday problem, and had no problems taking our money when she won).
Anyway. The junior project series of courses is going to be the defining feature of this year. Over the course of the year (which, as a reminder, is split into three "quarters" here), I'll be taking seven courses (CSSE371-377) that all deal with some aspect of software engineering and project management. These are the primary courses that define a software engineering major, and once I complete them I'm effectively 90% done with that major. Of the seven, I'm currently enrolled in the first two, but only 371 is looking like it's going to hold my interest; it deals with requirements gathering and specifications for a software project, which is something concrete I can hold on to and apply to projects. 372 deals more with the hand-wavy art of project management (hence the name), and uses an absolutely disgusting amount of acronyms and buzzwords.
No big social plans have materialized as of yet, but Chris should be coming down to visit next weekend, so maybe we'll get up to something then. And I have a car now, so my horizon is expanding. This year is shaping up to be a pretty good one.
