What did you do this past week?

This past week felt pretty slow actually. On Monday I prepared for the career fair by looking up the companies that were attending and creating targeted questions to them. It definitely made me feel slightly more confident when I was at the fair. That confidence did not last long though, as I had a mock interview with Citi and I froze up on almost all of the questions. That was very frustrating to me because I felt like I knew these topics, but the fact that the interviewer was waiting for my response caused my brain to stop functioning. I had to miss class on Wednesday since I was down in San Antonio attending the funeral for my girlfriend’s grandfather. On Friday I’m going to see Black Panther, and on Sunday I’m going to a Foreigner concert.

What’s in your way?

As mentioned above, I realized that I am severely under prepared for technical interviews. Cracking the Coding Interview book helps for sure, but I seem to just have a sort of “stage fright” when put in an enclosed space with an interviewer. This is definitely something that I will have to work on. I plan to ask some of my CS friends to conduct mock interviews. Hopefully this will help me become more confident. One this that got resolved this week was that we found a great home for my roommate’s puppy, so that definitely taken some stress off of all of us.

What will you do next week?

This coming week will be spent studying for two tests, one in this class and one in my computer security class. I feel pretty confident about the test in this class, but I really haven’t paid much attention in my security class so that will take some preparation.

What’s my experience of the class?

Monday’s lecture felt a bit rushed, but overall lectures are just as interesting as the beginning of the semester. I never recommend skipping a lecture for Professor Downing’s courses. I had to miss Wednesday’s lecture and I tried to look at the notes and files that he uploaded, but really didn’t get the explanation that I needed from them to catch up. I will probably be attending office hours to get a better grasp on concepts that I missed, including copy constructors and operator overloading functions.

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

My pick of the week is W3Schools. This site provides quick references on how to accomplish tasks in certain programming languages. It definitely doesn’t give a comprehensive guide or a deep understanding of the concepts, but it is useful for those times when you forget the syntax of a particular part of a language and need a quick refresher.