Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome

Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.

As the students last quarter nears it’s end, the student may develop a general sense of apathy towards certain assignments. As the excitement of joining the industry looms on the horizon, the student may feel a waning of the urgency surrounding their grades and assignments that irrelevant to their future. This sudden decline may feel foreign and jarring, as grades and the job search have enveloped the students life for the duration of the degree program. The student must now learn to assimilate back into their life before their degree program, in which they had such things as hobbies to dedicate their free time to.

As my job search has been wrapping up, I’ve been getting more and more free time. It’s been a while since my first undergraduate degree, so I forgot what it’s like to be a full-time student with no other obligations. Since I’m taking three computer science courses, it seems like I have so many assignments to do, but I feel have quite a bit of free time on my hands. The days seem to pass by without much productivity on my end because I just can’t bring myself to do what I know needs to be done. I think this partially happens because there’s only so much computer science that one can learn in a week. It would be different if I were taking two CS courses and one humanities course. At least I would get a change of pace when I went to study up on the humanities course. As of this quarter, my brain has just been on technical mode, where there’s not much rounding out of the topics I dedicate my time to. I guess what I’m trying to say is this degree program has made my really appreciate the general education that my first degree program made me go through. Even if I didn’t see the point at the time.

I’m sure when I look back, I’ll miss school and miss having the drive to better myself day in and day out. As of now, I’m pretty burnt out. It’s been a long year and a half of dedicating my weekends and after-hours to learning. I’m pretty ready for a break, and a substantial one at that. Writing this post has made me bit nostalgic though. Looking back, I’ve had some good times, some rough assignments, but mostly good times learning more about computer science and growing as a developer. I honestly almost don’t recognize the developer that I’ve become and the situation I now find myself in. If I had to go back a year and a half, I would probably do it all over again. I’m glad to be where I am now. I’ve had some gripes with the way that some courses were taught at Oregon State, but I can’t deny that this degree program propelled me towards my current situation.

I just checked how many assignments I have left until I’m free from school for a year. As of today, November 11th, I have 20 computer science assignments left. 20 more assignments to push through until I get my second piece of paper that says “You did it.” It almost doesn’t feel real.

Funny, I was pretty unmotivated going into this post, but I guess the nostalgia of recollecting on my progress has put me in a new headspace. I think it’s time to decrease the assignment count to 19.

Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.

With the hustle and bustle of school, job applications, and graduate school applications, the student can easily become overwhelmed. As their calendar fills up and their general motivation trends downwards, the student may begin to forget to complete some of their obligations. This overloading of tasks can lead to symptoms such as forgetting deadlines.

I just had an awesome weekend in San Francisco at Outside Lands. For those who are unaware, Outside Lands is a three day music festival hosted in Golden Gate park. Musicians and artists from across the globe (including an indie artist from Norway–looking at you Boy Pablo) and food vendors native to the Bay are gathered to celebrate. The great thing about this festival is that the music spans the whole spectrum, from rap to folk. The festival starts at noon and ends at 10PM. Given travel times to and from the crowded event, the festival can easily consume 72 hours of your life.

For someone who is taking three computer science courses and applying to jobs and graduate school, that’s a lot of time to take off. Not to mention that my girlfriend and I drove up to the Bay from southern California. Set the time consumption count to 96 hour would ya?

Over the weekend I forgot to respond to my team’s standup discussion and actually I had to make my video for discussing my project contributes pretty last minute as well. I’d been in the middle of catching up on my operating systems coursework (thanks to smallsh), when I realized that I had an hour and a half to record, post, and upload my contributes to my group project thus far. To be even more frank, this blog post is due in about 50 minutes here.

I love getting to celebrate and enjoy weekends, especially right after the excitement of getting a fantastic job offer, but this festival couldn’t have fallen on a worse weekend in the quarter. This week I have and had six online assessments to complete for job applications on top of what is considered to be the most difficult programming assignment in the whole OSU online degree program. Talk about a doozy of a week.

You might be wondering why I am completing six online assessments for jobs if I have a fantastic offer in hand. Well, the company that I have an offer for told me last week that they make data driven offers for their compensation packages. Fantastic! Except that apparently, their data has found that Caucasian males and Asian males tend to ask for further compensation. I, fortunately enough, happen to fall under both of those demographics. Meaning that, the company is expecting me to ask for more compensation and has thus altered their offer in anticipation. When I tried to push back with the recruiter for standard compensation levels that I found online, it seemed that the company would be unwilling to negotiate with a competing offer. Thus, six online assessments. I’m hoping to land one of the six to bring the offer up at the company who gave me the original offer.

Speaking of deadlines, it seems like one of those assessments will be expiring soon. I’m off to the races again!

Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.

Flashes of euphoria are another prevalent symptom of PGQS. The student oftentimes will daydream about their possible future life, be it as a graduate student, an employee in industry, or a life unrelated to their major. This daydreaming may lead to extreme excitement about the possibilities. A major risk factor for this symptom is applying to jobs or schools in different states or countries. This can oftentimes lead the student to ponder what life would be like in such a position and the excitement that comes along with that lifestyle. A job offer or letter of acceptance are highly likely to lead to this symptom.

I’ve received an offer!

All the doubt and the thick fog surrounding my future has cleared a pathway to success! The offer is for the California Bay area, so I’ll get to move back there and live with all my friends from my first undergraduate degree. Now I can relax in every other interview I have lined up, because I will know that there is no pressure. I’ll be alright, regardless of the result.

It’s kind of crazy that I got an offer from my preferred company, and nobody else. Somehow the stars have just aligned, and my path has essentially been divined for me. To be fair, this was the one opportunity that I really put my best foot forward in.

All the other interviews I had seem to have been stepping stones for me to get to where I needed to be. In each interview, I got a bit more comfortable with the rigor of technical interviews, up until the point that I was ready for this one. It’s funny because I was so upset after some of the rejections, but I should have had a bit more confidence that the pain and failure of one interview was guiding me towards success in another.

I feel so fortunate that my job search has gone the way that it has. I didn’t even mean for all of my other interviews to lead up to this one. I didn’t mean for this to be my the last interview–the one that I would be the best prepared for. Somehow it was, and another piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. I guess I’ve got to be more like the Philadelphia 76ers star center, Joel Embiid, and ‘Trust the Process’. Though, I’m not too sure how well that’s going for the team with the whole Ben Simmons fiasco.

Here’s to the euphoria of finally making it.

Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.

After covering the topical breadth of their major coursework, the student may have honed in what topics do and do not excite them. This allows for their coursework to be exciting and meaningful in the development of their career. Filler classes seem to be fewer and farther between, as the student has progressed through major requirements and on to the elective and senior coursework.

Despite the hectic nature of the job search and the uncertainty that the future holds, this quarter is lining up to be pretty awesome. I had initially planned on transitioning my summer internship’s work on to my senior capstone project, but when I saw the opportunity to work on a reinforcement learning project, I couldn’t pass it up.

To give a little background on why this project is so exciting to me we have to go back to my senior year of my first undergraduate degree, in 2019. I had already decided to minor in computer science at that point, but I had not really decided what to focus on within the major. That’s when I saw this awesome video from OpenAI. OpenAI, Elon’s tech company devoted to the development of AGI (artificial general intelligence) for societal good, created a playground in which agents were to learn how to play hide and seek. These agents, hiders and seekers who’s roles I’m sure you can deduce, learned the strategies of the game without human interference or guidance. The hiders learned how to move blocks in order to create enclosures that the hiders couldn’t walk or see into. Subsequently, the seekers learned how to use ramps to invade the buildings that the hiders had created. The seekers even figured out a bug in the physical laws of the game eventually and exploited it to attain victory.

These agents were learning and, what appears to be, thinking. Back when I saw the video for the first time it was absolutely mind blowing to me, and to be honest, it still is. So when I saw the chance to create something similar, I had to jump on the chance. My group is making a clone of the old Atari game, Breakout. We plan to create an agent that can play the game and learn the tactics of the game. Eventually, we plan to pit the agent against a human to compete, but I’d also like to stretch the game a bit to see how different generations of our agent compare to each other. I want to see how the strategy of each agent evolves if we put two agents on the same board and with their own ball and see who can break the most bricks.

I’ve always planned to eventually create such a project with soccer, my childhood sport and hobby. I’d love to see how agents learn to play the game and what strategies develop over time. This project is propelling me in the right direction for creating my own simulation of the sport and eventually reaching my goal of working in multi-agent reinforcement learning.

Outside of my senior capstone project, I’m taking the cloud development class. This course is pretty awesome, as it has covered RESTful API’s, the bread and butter of backend software engineering. I’m getting great experience with reading documentation and incorporating pre-built software into my own applications. It’s something highly relevant and eye catching when placed on a resume.

Lastly, I’m still continuing work from my summer internship throughout the quarter! I’ll be assisting with the wildfire classification and detection models, and how to cleverly use mobile robots to assist with these tasks. Not every undergraduate has access to real world data, and gets to train machine learning models on it

I feel extremely blessed for these opportunities and I’m glad my time gets to be devoted to them rather than the facets of computer science that don’t interest me.

Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.

Another common symptom is a wavering moral ideology. As the student prepares for the natural progression from academia to industry, they become more aware of why others work for companies who’s driving principles do not align with their own. Be it due to a lack of other offers, greater compensation, less stressful work environments, or a multitude of other possibilities, the student may consider working for such company for what they tell themselves to be “at most” a few years.

A lot of decisions seemed a lot easier to make when I was younger. Black and white. Every question had an answer, and everything else was wrong. Simple. Choosing which company to apply to and allow myself to work at doesn’t seem to be quite as simple.

During my first undergraduate degree, I talked to a small company that was looking for interns in electrical or mechanical engineering. I happened to be, at the time, studying both. When I approached their booth at the career fair, not only were the engineers that I talked to very personable and welcoming, but the company itself had never lost an engineer. What a fantastic sign of how much I would enjoy my work. Our conversation at the career fair went so well that they actually extended an offer for me to join them as an intern, without even completing an interview.

The only catch was that the company was a weapons manufacturer. At the time, I had nothing else lined up for what I thought was the last summer of my undergraduate career. If I took this offer, I was sure I could get a return offer and a great stable job for myself. I would just have to get used to the idea that things I create were being used to threaten and harm other people. That’s not something that I took lightly. I ended up not taking the offer, not having a job lined up for the summer or after I graduated, and my career in mechanical engineering stalled. As I put the finishing touches on my computer science degree, I find myself in a similar position.

There are tons of companies out there who profit off of violence, laborer abuse, social irritation, or a number of undeniably unjust things. It would seem, upon a glance, that these companies would be easy to ignore. The only problem is that these companies hire tremendous amounts of engineers.

The thing is, if it’s not me, it’ll be somebody else. Somebody else make that weapon that’s used on fleeing enemies. Somebody else will create that robotic system that tracks and fight humans. Somebody else will write the algorithm that pits us against our neighbors. That’s why each time I come across a new posting at a new immoral company, I find myself asking the question–“how long could I work here and still respect myself?”.

Pre-Graduation Quarter Syndrome occurs in students either entering or in the last quarter of their degree program.

The first and foremost symptom is a persistent uncertainty about future plans. Whether it be in discussions with career counselors trying to assist in the furtherment of the student’s career or with the student’s grandfather about what company the student is going to employed by so that the grandfather can buy stock in the company, the student may have difficulty contributing to the conversation. Typical stumping questions include, but are not limited to, the following: Where are you going to be in three months? Are you going to graduate school? What’s going to become of you and your significant other once you graduate?

---

“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is.”

John Allen Paulos

Unfortunately, this fundamental principle of the universe is something that I’ve become all to familiar with.

When I enrolled in the computer science degree program at Oregon State, my initial plan was to apply to graduate school for machine learning and artificial intelligence. I geared all my electives towards this goal. I took an on-campus course CS499 – Deep Learning, for what I hope, are obvious reasons. I took CS475 – Parallel Programming to learn how distributed computing works, because it can be applied to machine learning to reduce the training overhead. Since I transferred in course credits from my first bachelor’s degree, I only needed to take 3 electives and a project course. But in order to achieve my goal of applying to grad school, I decided to take 3 more units than necessary, transferring an extra $1500 from my pocket to Oregon State. The reason for that was because I wanted to take CS 493 – Cloud Development because of the prevalence of integrating machine learning applications with the cloud. Of course, taking CS 493 meant I needed to take CS 372 – Intro to Networking, because it is a prerequisite.

When it came to my summer internship, I had three options:

• Option 1: Get paid the most and work on what seems to be an unimpressive project.
• Option 2: Get paid a decent salary and work on a cool project that will expose me to DSP and machine learning.
• Option 3: Get paid next to nothing and work on a cool project AND get a letter of recommendation from a professor for my graduate school applications.

Gung-ho, graduate school bound me chose Option 3.

Now, in my final quarter at school, I’m supposed to be applying to graduate school and gearing up for potential internships. This plan was going smoothly until I, out of curiosity, applied to some entry-level jobs at some large tech companies. After doing some of the online assessments and getting further in the interviewing process than expected, I’ve begun to re-evaluate. Is going to graduate school, for a degree that will not immediately increase my net worth, worth it? Am I willing to pay the opportunity cost of not working at a tech company and not garnering years of software development experience?

I’m not sure about the answer to these questions, but I do have a big interview coming up for a company that I think I can’t turn down. Hopefully, a job offer from that company, or lack thereof, will clear up some of the fog surrounding what’s to come.