CS371p Spring 2020: Peter Cui

Seventh Entry: Week of 2 Mar – 8 Mar

• What did you do this past week?

I went to work on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. I went to Professor Ballard’s office hour on Tuesday and had an interesting conversation with him. I completed my Algorithms homework. I also did some reading on Heidegger for my Existentialism class. I watched a lot of YouTube videos on Heidegger because his ideas are very difficult to understand because his writing style is very confusing.

• What’s in your way?

I need to ask professors for recommendation letters this week because I want to apply to the 5 year program here. This is the biggest thing in my way for now and it might be a difficult thing for me to do because I haven’t developed a personal relationship with any professor I know. I also need to complete my direct journal entries for my Existentialism class and do the rewrite for Computational Brain.

• What will you do next week?

Like I said, I will go visit some of the professors I know and beg them to write me a recommendation letter. I will also start working on Project 3 with my partner and study for the OOP exam. I am kind of concerned about this exam because I read some comments on ratemyprofessor.com and they all said the exams for this class are hard.

• What was your experience of range_iterator, range and iteration? (this question will vary, week to week)

I thought the hackerrank for range_iterator was very difficult, especially the individual methods in range_iterator class since they all had very different signatures. There was a lot of minute details to remember. Hopefully I will understand it and memorize everything important before the exam because Prof. Downing said range-iterator will be on the exam.

• What made you happy this week?

One of my best friends from high school who I haven’t seen since last summer came to Austin this weekend. We hung out together on Friday and Saturday night and he slept in my room for both of those nights. Anyway, hanging out with my friends made me happy this week.

• What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

My pick-of-the-week is this book called Don Quixote. It is the first modern novel and my favorite book ever. It was written by Miguel De Cervantes in 1605. The plot revolves around the adventures of a noble from La Mancha named Alonso Quixano, who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant to revive chivalry and serve his nation, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha.