1. What did you do this past week?

This past week I began the second project which involves writing a program to determine winners of an Australian rules election. The manner in which a winner is determined makes absolutely no sense to me, but politics have never been my thing. I am working with a fellow 439 TA whom I led discussion with last semester. I think we make a pretty good team, so hopefully the outcome will be good. In my other classes there is not much going on other than the usual regular assignments. I attempted to help as many students with Project 0 (439) as possible since it was due this week, but some bugs are just really hard to track down. Unsurprisingly, I found groups that clearly did not take our advice of starting early…

2. What’s in your way?

I currently have a blocker in my iOS homework that involves showing an Alert through a table view. Hopefully I can get it sorted on Monday during office hours if I don’t figure it out this weekend.

3. What will you do next week?

Next week will be focused heavily on finishing Project 2, since it is due on Friday. I feel like we are a little behind, so there needs to be some diciplined work action. In addition, my iOS group and I need to nail down an idea for the semester project and turn in the paper for it on Wednesday. I am pretty aprehensive about this project, since none of us have iOS experience and the course has been pretty underwhelming thus far. Hopefully it turns out OK.

Thoughts on the course, so far…

I enjoyed the guest speaker this week in lecture. While the things he talked about weren’t new ideas to me, I really like that professor Downing is trying to incorporate as much real world informtation/practices as possible. So much of school is spent on theory and toy programs/projects, leaving those who do not get internship experience at a real disadvantage.

Tip of the Week:

Get an internship before you graduate. Period. As Downing has mentioned many times, internship experience is as mandatory as the degree being sought if you want to succeed. The real world is nothing like school, and employers are much more likely to hire someone who will spend considerably less time ramping up before they can do real work.