Tuesday, July 10, 2012

So this is life...

Hello again my faithful followers!

I'm trying to get better at updating this thing so bare with me...I know it's been a few weeks but in all fairness my life isn't as exciting (or frustrating) during the summer as it is during the school year. Much more time to enjoy being young and get things organized than during the school year so I'm DEFINITELY trying to take full advantage of that...especially since I know when I return to school three things will be occurring: 1) I will be in school, which means classes, which means more work; 2) I will be helping Yoonki work on his study for his Doctoral Thesis (which includes preparing a new paper and modifying the old one for submissions) and 3) I will be working on getting things rolling on my own research for my thesis/prelim exam (which also means more paper writing/conference finding). Trust me, it's not as fun as it sounds :D! I think I like the idea of getting ahead on my thesis work -- it's proving to be more difficult than I originally thought it would be! I want to come up with something really good (I hate feeling like I'm half ass-ing anything; makes me feel dirty) so I'm hoping the more papers I read (I've probably read 5 decent ones so far that I could probably use) the more concrete/developed idea I'll come up with. I just hope I'm putting myself on a good timeline - I stress pretty easily (anxiety sucks) but having some kind of plan usually helps. That is, unless things don't go according to plan which in that case I'm just one big ball of anxious stress waiting to explode. But fortunately no nuclear war yet :)

As for my internship...it's still BOSS! I've been getting to contribute more and more to the project and on top of that I'm getting compliments on my work/workmanship which definitely means a lot being that it's been a while since I've done development work. The more I'm working here the more I'm remembering why I got into computer science in the first place -- problem solving! Not just code problem solving, but overall problem solving -- what's best for the user? how can this be made better? why isn't this working? What it's not doing is helping me decide what I want to do when I'm done with school - I'm really enjoying this and wouldn't mind coding everyday for the rest of my life. However, I do miss reading/writing papers and solving problems on a larger scale - the unknown that is research. If I could have a job where I was able to code half the day and then spend the other half working on research I'm almost positive this would be the perfect job for me! I don't know if I could see myself doing one without the other (and hopefully I won't have to choose)! Fortunately, I have a couple more months at my internship and a few more years in school so there's time to make a decision; hopefully it will be an easy one. In the meantime, I'll focus on taking it a day at a time, enjoying my internship and preparing for the upcoming semester (which includes figuring out my funding - would LOVE to avoid loans at all costs, but it's not looking promising :/).

Well, I should get back to being productive (not that keeping my followers informed isn't important - but it doesn't pay :D )! Until next time... <3