CS 371p Fall 2020: Michael Lee

What did you do this past week?

I spent this past week mostly getting back into the flow of having classes. Most of my time was spent working on the Collatz project for this class and my first project for my Neural Networks class.

What’s in your way?

I have a project that I need to complete for my Computer Networks and Privacy class that I haven’t started. One thing that I really appreciate about Professor Downing’s projects are that the deliverables and workflow are all very clear with little room for ambiguity. I can’t really say the same for my projects in my other courses since sometimes it’s not very clear how to proceed.

What will you do next week?

This coming week, I will try to finish up all of my projects and hopefully get a head start on any other work that may come up.

What was your experience of Collatz, the starter code, the makefile, its optimizations, and exceptions?

This will be my 3rd time doing the Collatz project so I think I’m very familiar with everything that is going on in the project. When I first did this project for Professor Downing’s SWE class there was definitely a lot to take in at first but once you break down the individual deliverables it’s very manageable. I also really like this particular problem since it’s a pretty classic algorithms question with several different possible optimizations/data structures that offer tradeoffs between preprocessing and query complexity.

How are you doing and holding up? What’s been most helpful for you in terms of support at this time?

I’m doing fine. One thing I’ve been struggling with recently is continuing to stay motivated. Typically, I try to stay ahead of the material in my classes but due to the nature of my classes and my current work environment I’ve been finding that harder to do than usual.

What made you happy this week?

Funnily enough, being back in school has been something that’s made me happy. I’ve taken a few semesters off to do internships and having the freedom of being back in school has been a refreshing experience for me.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

I would highly suggest taking a look this article on some rules of thumb when negotiating a job offer. Negotiating an offer is something that can have a compounding effect as your years in the industry grows and I believe it’s important to have at least some foundation in how to approach the issue especially since, as engineers, most of us do not have first hand experience in this sort of thing yet.