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Showing posts from October, 2012

What's Left

It's the end of October. There's only one more month to go before this semester ends. I just finished one project demo and one assignment this afternoon for a high-level database course. There are a few other things left.  Tomorrow, I'll meet my Final Year Project Prof. Then this Saturday, I'll demonstrate a mobile project to a start company.Next Monday, a natural language processing course assignment due; next Tuesday, an algorithm tutorial due; next Wednesday,the FYP report due. A similar deadline circle has been going on and on for the past few weeks. It will stop for a while sometime on December and then continue again. There are some problems with my time management. I stayed up late at nights in COM1 for quite a number of times to catch up with deadlines. It was actually a good thing that my bicycle was stolen last week so that I'll have to catch up with the last bus@ 11pm. One flatmate told me that " If you didn't finish sth nicely, you'll end

Having a Thankful Heart

I was very sad last week after negotiating with an financial aid officer about my eligibility of the NOC(NUS overseas college) Israel programme. He argues that the scholarship sponsors disapproved my request to go Israel but he refused to give me the sponsors' contact information to talk with them personally.  I told him that I'll go to Israel by all means, even in the worst conditions.  But he said that I won't be able to go without the permissions. Challenging the authorities just won't work. I felt so bad that I cannot continue the conversation. I returned to my lecture theater for an algorithm class but tears cannot help dropping. That was the saddest moment I've ever experienced in the last 10+ years. No one noticed that I was so sad. After the class, I pretended nothing bad had happened, and then I turned to the NOC Israel coordinator for help. The coordinator was encouraging. She knew that I might not be able to go, but she encouraged me to keep on trying.

Thoughts on Education

I feel a bit down when getting informed that one of my mid-term test is below average. Honestly, I didn't master that course solidly. I know roughly how it works, but the lack of practice make the foundation very vulnerable. I recall one of the courses I am currently taking online, a machine learning course taught by Stanford. Surprisely, I master that material much better than the school courses though the difficulty levels between these two courses are similar.Two very important aspects worth highlighting is the weekly online tutorial sets&programming exercises+ the active peer forum learning. I feel uncomfortable if I didn't finish the tutorials&programming exercises with 100% accuracy. This feeling never occurs in the university tutorial classes as I didn't get timely feedback on how well I am doing in the tutorials. But this feeling came very often when I was still in high school in China. Teachers will announce tutorials after each class and we'll have

Consistency Matters

I didn't post anything last week, which means consistency has been broken. There's a need to reflect the task management skills, otherwise I'm very likely to driving the wrong road Priority changes. A good exercise would be to list the priorities down everyday and assign reasonable time to the tasks. Then never second-doubt. 100% focusing on the task when doing it. Priority changes from time to time.  Human minds are single-threaded, thus, we'll need to keep focused when doing one particular task. Be Grateful. I received the confirmation from NOC Israel that I got admitted by the programme and I'm heading to Israel next Jan:-) Thanks a lot for Prof.Ben and Karl's help. Ultimately, it might be a plan from God. Thanks every one. The additional interview from Google went well, however, I didn't get the winter intern opportunity this time. Though it's a bit too greedy to ask for too much, I still feel a bit sad after informed that I didn't get th