CS371p Spring 2020: Zelin Cui

Fourth Entry: Week of 10 Feb – 16 Feb

1. What did you do this past week?

I completed my paper for Computational Brain, did my homework for Algorithms, and submitted the Collatz Project. I also did some reading for my Existentialism class. I hung out with my friends over the weekend and celebrated the birthday of one of my friends on Valentines’ Day. Surprisingly more people than I thought were born on Valentines’ Day.

1. What’s in your way?

The next OOP Project, Voting, is in my way. Also I have two midterms next week, both on Thursday. One is for Algorithms and the other is for Existentialism. I really need to start studying for these two midterms. I think I need to go to the office hour for Existentialism because I still don’t think I understood the class material.

1. What will you do next week?

I will go to work as usual. I will study for my two midterms as I just mentioned. I will also go to gym and work out at least four times this week. I will get started on the next OOP project with my partner. And hopefully I will have some time left to hang out with my friends.

1. What was your experience of Project #1: Collatz (the problem, the overkill requirements of submission, etc.)? (this question will vary, week to week)

Since I took Professor Downing’s SWE class before, this project was quite simple to me because we did the same project in SWE. The coding part itself is not hard. I think the doxygen stuff might be a little bit more confusing than I thought it would be. Overall I did not encounter that many obstacles when I was doing this project.

1. What made you happy this week?

Hanging out with my friends on Valentines’ Day made me happy. Also Parasite winning Best Picture and Joaquin Phoenix winning Best Actor at the Oscars made me really happy.

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

My pick-of-the-week is a book I had to read for my Existentialism class called The Stranger, written by Albert Camus. In this book Camus claims that individual lives and human existence in general have no rational meaning or order and he calls this fact as the Absurd. He also points out that even though our choices might be pre-determined and not having any meaning at all, we still need to make choices because these choices define us as individual person. It is a great book and it’s worth the time reading it.