alejandroi2seblog

[alejandroi2seblog]

Et usque ad ultimum semestri pessimi

It is with great happiness that I am reaching the end of this hellish semester, and so this will be my last journal, woohoo !

So while the professor was talking about state machines, and modelling using petri nets, a very very very small group of students were actually working on the project. It was interesting to see how the project's group consisted of around thirtyish students, and only about 9 of us were actually contributing to the coding aspect of the project. Many tasks were delegated, and meetings were held, only to be greeted with: "i didn't know who to reach out to", "i didn't know what task to work on", "i didn't know the project was for Friday (this was written on Wednesday of that same week). It's astonishing to even think that there are around 7 people who never even checked in to check the project or anything. It's hard to think that these are the people within my department, the software or computer scientists of tomorrow. Students who can't be bothered to check in on a class project and lend a hand to make sure it gets completed. I was completely baffled by what I saw, and can't believe this is the state that the students in my department are. I'm very appreciative of the people who contributed to the project in one way or another, I owe a huuuge shoutout to Luis who essentially lead the whole development of the project and every day worked to progress the project. When the due date was nearing we saw how people were still not contributing, and he took it to himself to finish the project. It's sad to see how a great majority of the project's members did not contribute anything at all, yet the "group grade" will be applied to them when in reality Luis completely finished the project by himself, and 8 others of us helped with the code. I applaud the work done by the documentation team, they were always engaged and contributed greatly to that aspect of the project. I just really hope the professor actually evaluates the project correctly and sees the disparity between those who contributed vs those who weren't bothered to help at all. In conclusion, I didn't enjoy the project experience of this course and was left wanting more of this course. I feel like the concepts presented throughout this course were covered so superficially that I didn't really learn anything meaningful. I'm quite disappointed with the structure (or lack thereof) of this course and the poor guiding (still waiting from project rubrics, or guidance of what needs to be implemented in the project) provided by the professor. I felt like this whole semester was an experiment with the way things were handled and am left worried regarding the accreditation for the Software Engineering bachelors degree.

[alejandroi2seblog]

Working on Beach Quality Report

These past two weeks my team (team 2) has been having virtual meeting in order to figure out what technologies we will be using to create the Beach Quality Report app. We are beginning to delegate tasks among team members and the rest of the group so that we can implement this as best as possible.

Meanwhile in the class the professor has been talking about modularization, state machines and automata. These concepts seem very interesting and I have enjoyed the lectures so far, since I'm more focused on working on the project for now I haven't really gotten around to completely read the slides, but I'll be doing so in the next few weeks.

[alejandroi2seblog]

YouTube > UPR

I haven't written in a while due to the boringness of these past two weeks, as well as I was "free" due to Holy Week. If free means having to study every single holiday day of holy week and not being able to at least spend some time with my parents, then yes .. I was free. One of my inconsiderate professors assigned a big project for the Monday immediately after holy week, so I spent my days studying and working on that project woohoo.

So in this class the professor finally got rid of the time logs (huge win), but I'm still stuck writing these journals. Also, the team rotations (terrible idea) were abolished and even worse now the original eight teams were conglomerated into one big group, and a small team decided (for some reason) to continue with their project. So now we have to work as one big group, and I'm excited to see how the app turns out!

[alejandroi2seblog]

There's a freaking pandemic

Corona Virus, that's the journal entry...

2020 is becoming a nightmare, first the earthquakes, now this!

So the University has decided to begin online classes. This doesn't concern me too much because I know I'm still going to have to teach everything to myself so.. nothing out of the usual. What does concern me is the lack of empathy the professors are showing towards students during these hard times. During this first week of online classes I've gotten assigned three times the amount of homework I get assigned on a normal semester. Seriously? Now? I can't even spend quality time with my family or even watch the news without being constantly stressed by the absurd amount of homework I've been assigned. I don't even want to know about what is going to happen with the exams, I'm sure that'll be a fun time!

I continue on my usual path of not understanding the lectures being "given" by my professors, now they just tell me to read chapters or send me really bad quality YouTube videos, and call it a day. This class is the only one that I'm taking that is giving live classes through google meets. I find the lectures to be engaging and am participating as much as I can.

[alejandroi2seblog]

Burnout

Its been rough since the extreme hell week I had this past week. I studied as best as I could for this class' exam, read all of the slides, practiced some of the book's exercises and yet failed the exam, as did the majority of my classmates. Seems to me like the material covered through the lectures vs what actually came in the exam are so different, it seems like the exam was completely made up. The stress of studying and failing this exam, coupled with the extreme stress of studying for the exam I had for Computer Architecture 2 (less than 24 hours between both exams), as well as dealing with all the bullcrap homework I was being given eventually led to me having a full blown panic attack the day of my CA2 exam and having to seek psychological therapy. I was advised to take about five days off from the University and to spend time by myself.

All the stress and anxiety I've been going through has not been worth it. Dealing with incompetent and apathetic professors, unrealistic homework assignments, and garbage "lectures" have lead me to believe that this university is pretty bad (to say the least). I'll be taking things slower, taking more time for myself and actually enjoying my day to day life.

I'm finally beginning to understand some of the concepts being presented in this course, such as the algebras, functions, the domains and phenomena. I must say, this isn't what I was expecting from this class and I'm finding it very hard to understand these concepts, the book doesn't help either, the author types out complete paragraphs which pose no significant meaning to the concepts being presented; I am bored of trying to understand these confusing terms.

P.S. I hate the time logs and I really hate having to assess and give a grade to my classmates, not really fair to anybody.

[alejandroi2seblog]

Job Fair, exams and more . . .

I forgot to mention that last week I attended el Colegio's Job Fair, and needless to say I had an amazing time. I started my day by printing about twenty resumes (you can never have too many) and dressed up for the occasion. A feeling I never forget when I get to the University on Job Fair days is students glaring you down and staring for being dressed up nice for the Job Fair. I dislike how people from my department tend to not attend the job fair due to their own shortcomings and their ideals, but have the audacity to stare me down and judge for me wanting to attend the job fair. Very strange world we live in but whatevs. Besides this, I handed out around 13 of my resumes during the job fair and had amazing talks with the recruiters from many companies. The most notable one was Nagnoi, because I've been going to their booth every semester and this time they recognized me and called me by my name. This was an amazing feeling because I felt like they were genuinely interested in me (gif related). Lets see how things turn out, I'm looking for a summer internship and maybe a coop for next semester.

So in this class we've been covering the domain engineering topics, such as Domain descriptions, entities, functions, etc. Honestly I'm very lost with these topics and I'm planning on reading up these slides so that I can better understand what is being attempted to be covered in the lectures. The exam is coming up next week and I can confidently say that I haven't understood these topics and am suffering from the lack of organization of the lectures.

[alejandroi2seblog]

time logs time logs sgol emit sgol emit

Phew! What a way to start the semester!

To put things shortly, this week knocked me down. At the beginning of this week I started getting lots of homework from my other classes, and had to organize my time as best as I could. Quickly I figured out that I had to start planning out my weeks and working on the famous "time logs" the professor was hinting at. The thought of being accountable for every minute of my time, and having to divide my time into categories was insanely overwhelming. This past week I've been struggling with remembering to jot down the time all of my tasks are taking me and then breaking it down into different categories: This is madness! 

So as I was losing my mind with the time logs, I worked on a Statistics and Probability lab I had, I cleared 1000 emails from my inbox (cartero can frig off), worked on a MIPS assignment for the Computer Architecture 2 course I'm taking, and began working on the Proposal for the BQR project. We had a meeting as a team and quickly assigned tasks for each member of the team.

Sometimes I feel like no matter what I do, I seem to end up with the most irresponsible students from the entire universe. The day before we had to hand in the Proposal I found myself working with one of my other team members, and we single-handedly wrote everysinglepartofthefrigginproposal. I seriously despise irresponsible team members and I feel like this might drag on, hopefully I get transferred to a more responsible team soon.

[alejandroi2seblog]

First Week!

To kick this blog off, I have very high expectations for this course due to it being the first INSO concentration course. So my experience in this course will mold my opinion for future INSO courses.

During the first few weeks of this class, not much was done and I am honestly very lost with what is going on in the course. This is due to the lack of organization with what the professor is asking us to do vs what is actually going on in the course.

In these few weeks, the class was divided into 8 teams, I now form part of team 2. I am very excited to begin working with my team mates, and to develop/flesh out the proposal for my team. The idea we chose for the project was to create a Beach Quality Report app for the local beaches in Puerto Rico, I'm very excited because I was the one who came up with this idea!