Month: October 2021

I am currently taking CS344 this quarter in addition to this class. CS344 is one of the more challenging courses and as a result I have been thinking about different types of learning.

When I first started at OSU, I struggled learning the material. I wanted to improve my study habits and I eventually found a course to help. The course is called “Learning How to “Learn. Here is a link: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

This course taught various techniques on how to learn and retain information effectively. One of these techniques is the pomodoro technique in which you work for set amount of time, take a short break and then repeat the process.

The most useful thing this course taught me was the power of taking a break. Many times I have been stuck on a problem and instead of trying to power through, I now take a break and do something relaxing like taking walk. More often than not, when I come back, I am able to solve the problem or at least make progress.

Project:

This week on the project, I focused mainly on learning React. I have learned quite a bit, however, I still don’t feel confident in my abilities yet. I have started building some of pages for the project in React but I’m sure my confidence will grow as I continue to work with it.

Outside school:

I am a full time student and this is my last quarter here at OSU. Next year, I will start working. Being a full time student has it perks especially in this online setting. For example, I go to the gym frequently and can go whenever I want so I am able to avoid when it is crowded. I am a big sports fan and went to Boston Red Sox playoff game the other day. Last year, I was able to go snowboarding during the week which was fantastic.

My time with this flexible schedule will be coming to an end in a few months, so I am trying to take advantage of it whenever possible. One of the main selling points of OSU is that it is flexible and I definitely appreciated that aspect of the program. When I start working it will be more difficult to do things during the week.

This week we started to get more in depth on the project. We have decided on a framework and have begun to diagram various portions of the application. At least at the beginning, I will be working mainly on the front end. I don’t have a ton of front end experience but am excited to learn.

For the front-end, our group decided to use React. However, none of us know React so that could present a few bumps in the road. React seems like it is quite popular in the industry which is the reason we chose to use it.

So far I have done some of the mock ups for the pages on the site. A new tool I have been using is called Figma. This tool is also fairly popular in the industry so I figured it would solid for creating layouts. However, the free version only allows for the creation of three pages. I only realized this after I created the third page. The mock up of the landing page can be seen below.

I am also taking CS344 this semester, which has been going well so far.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

This week we got our group assignments for the project that we will be working on over the course of the term. My group will be working on the Job Tracker project.

This project involves building an application where a user can track jobs that they have applied to. I think this application is useful, especially for computer science majors, in that many of us have applied to a tremendous amount of jobs/internships. For me personally, I applied to over 200 internships last year. A website that allows for tracking of applications would have been a useful tool in that process. There were a few times were I would fill out an application, only to to discover that I already applied to the position.

Our group is planing to use React, Express and Node.js. We have not finalized the database portion but will most likely use some sort of relational database. I haven’t used these technologies/frameworks in about a year so I will definitely need to brush up on details. My was internship this past summer was mainly back end work using Java and Spring Boot.

Outside of school, a few of my favorite sports teams are ramping up. I am a fan of Boston sports, with hockey being my favorite sport. The Bruins are about to start and the baseball team, the Red Sox, are currently in the playoffs.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading!