Semester Wrap Up

This is a final project for one of the intro seminars at Northeastern

In our CS1200 class, students are required to wrap up their semester with a “digital media presentation” about things they’ve learned during their transfer to Northeastern, with special reference to the earlier required events and assignments for the class. My opinion overall is that this class was worth it, despite being a gimmicky first semester seminar.

Any class scheduled on a Friday afternoon should get massive points for seeming relevant in retrospect, and that’s even harder to accomplish when the focus is as dry as “career development.” This class covered a lot of the ettiquette that students who didn’t work in high school would have missed – submitting a cover letter, communicating over email, or even basic time management technqiues – and all of those lessons had a lot of value. Most of the classes were concise, and the selection of events for students to attend out of class focused on connecting them to the university’s resources and communities.

Of all the lectures, a few definitely stood out.

Time Management

My favorite thing we did in this class, by far, was the time map.

I’m the sort of square that enjoys planning, and I’ve been scheduling out my days since this lesson. In the first few weeks, transitioning from a high school environment to a college environment was difficult because I had to make the leap from having classes that were occasionally busy to having four constant things to worry about. Using my calendar to specifically allocate time for different activities made it so much easier to keep track of all the assignments going on at one time.

We’re supposed to document personal growth via “SAIL Dimensions,” which I still don’t quite see the point of. I’ll leave these little markers around to indicate how I feel these experiences helped me, but I can’t how breaking it down into little categories is very useful – everything helps in ways that are much more complicated.

SAIL Dimensions: Intellectual Agility, Well-Being

Ethics & Integrity

Another shock in my transition was the introduction of programming homework assignments. These universities actually have the resources to issue and grade real programming assignments. Every time I submit a program, someone evaluates every single line. The ethics and integrity lecture was all about how to collaborate on these new assignments without accidentally violating university policy.

To demonstrate, the instructors had our class play a game where some students had to assign punishments to others in a faked “whodunit” case of cheating. We were much more lenient than the university would have actually been, because we didn’t know where to draw the line for programming assignments. This lecture helped us find it.

SAIL Dimensions: Professional & Personal Effectiveness

Advising 101

The last lecture I want to mention is the Advising lecture. Again, I love to plan, so having an entire lecture set aside to talk about major requirements, patterns of attendance, and other constraints to account for when scheduling was great.

Since we made plans, I’ve had a successful registration for my second semester and I’m looking forward to it.

SAIL Dimensions: Professional & Personal Effectiveness

The Passport Series

I started the semester with a huge bias against the Passport Series. It seemed like the university’s special way to haze incoming students by burning their time with useless, mandatory events. It turned out that the real haze was HONR 1102. The Passport Series was great.

I attended three great events:

  • a Daynard Community Lecture from Prerna Lal, a legal activist for undocumented immigrants. She had such a cool perspective as someone who started in a ragtag diffuse protest group and ended up a professional legal counselor for people in need. (SAIL: Social Consciousness & Commitment, Global Mindset)
  • The CCIS Undergraduate Research Night, where I got to see some of the students presenting their research. This was cool because I had been trying to read one of Wolfgang Gatterbaur’s papers and, coincidentally, the student behind the research was there presenting. They explained a lot of key points that made the paper digestible. (SAIL: Professional & Personal Effectiveness)
  • The Intro to Github Seminar. I’ve worked on so where git didn’t do what I wanted. It seems like the kind thing you’re just expected to know, that no one ever bothers to explain. This lecture was pretty basic, but it still helped me figure out how git can be used in an actual workflow and how you should expect to work with others via repo. (SAIL: Professional & Personal Effectiveness)

In Summary

My first semester has been a lot of fun. I think I’ve had a good transition and I’m excited to start the second semester fresh. If I had to describe CS 1200 to an incoming student, the first word would be “pragmatic” – the tips and tools that the class provides are very helpful for students trying to survive in a new academic environment. It was definitely a big aid to that transition.

So, if I had to give at least three pieces of advice for a future new Northeastern student, they would have to be social (read: not “pragmatic”). Here’s some important tips you won’t get in CS 1200:

  1. Spend time in the common room. Some of my friends are really isolated at their college. They don’t know anyone on their floor, and they don’t have any good ways to meet other people. Open spaces like the common room are good places to sit if you have spare time.
  2. Join a club that isn’t a seminar club. A lot of the clubs I was first interested in (TEDxNEU, NUACM, etc) do seminars for their members. Sometimes the seminars are really interesting, but clubs are supposed to help you balance all the time you’ll spend receiving information in class. I think clubs are best as excuses to make time for things you would probably blow off otherwise.
  3. Take classes with good professors. I’m lucky enough to have four kick-ass professors who are all teaching subjecs they care a lot about. These classes matter to them, and they matter to me, and they’re so productive because of it.

So, that’s the summary of my first semester. I hope to have more technical posts out soon. I’ve got a cool project on ethereum smart contract analysis in the works.