A ton of studying ahead

It seems that the good times have ended. Exams, which seemed much further away last week than they do now, are right around the corner. This semester I am facing the worst exam schedule I've ever had and coupled with the fact that all of my courses will require a fair amount of time to study for, I'm getting really worried. I am quite behind in MAT223 and will have to teach myself a ton of material in the upcoming week. Furthermore I will be entering the STA247 exam with something like a 60, and seeing as how I have a significant amount of trouble with the material, I really feel I might be in jeopardy of failing. I started studying yesterday but I really feel I am going to have to devote my life until Dec 9 to studying. So be it, at least I can complain about it on this blog. On the upside, studying for Test 3 will just be another form of studying for the exam, so I don't really mind having it on the last day of school. So be it, at least I can complain about it on this blog.

On another note, we got our problem sets back and as predicted, I basically imploded on Problem set 5 with an awesome 0/10. Ah well, it appears I completely missed the point of the question. In retrospect I probably should have spent more time on it but so it goes sometimes. I'm a lot more confident in problem set 6 at least. Today I also looked over the problem solving exercise and was going to write up a solution, however this quickly turned into an act of futility as I failed at using the Wiki and lost motivation to continue. I took a look at all of the problems but ended up trying the SimpleCartography one. I'm not going to go into my current solution here since I should be posting it on the Wiki. Going to have to do that in between study sessions sometime next week. Hard to believe the semester is a week from being over, its really insane how fast the last 3 months flew by and how much (or how little depending on the context) I have accomplished since then. Let's just hope exams go well.

Things on the horizon

The past two weeks have been a nice break from everything, but things are about to go bad very soon. Exams are coming up and I am really worried. The workload is picking up again also, with 3 assignments due Monday, A3 being one of them of course, the other two being for STA247 and CSC207. I've looked over A3 a bit and will be doing most of it this Saturday and probably Monday with my group. I'm glad to say it doesn't look nearly as intimidating as A3 was. Lectures have gotten way more abstract lately with finite state automata and I will have to really devote some time to becoming familiar with these soon. Exams seem to be just on the horizon but I still have some time. Today I finished the last problem set with two buddies and ended up spending most of the day at school failing to do stats, then going home...and writing this blog entry. The problem set was certainly easier for me than the last one and having friends with me to clarify things was a big help as well. Problem set 5 was a definite screw up looking back on it now. Oh well, maybe I will end up getting some part marks. Anyways there isn't really much else going on right now, I'm off to use what little free time I have for some much needed relaxing :)

Some sort of break

So this is the first week in a long time where I actually don't have an assignment or test due in the next few days. I finished off the last horrible vestiges of my tests/assignments this Tuesday with my linear algebra quiz that in all honesty think I did fairly poorly on. Unfortunately I only had a day to study for it and missed a key part of the material. Nevertheless I'm fairly certain my mark will be 14/20, so things could be worse.

We got Test 2 handed back today and I am really happy with my mark. My final mark was 19/24 which is...about like 7 more then I was expecting. The fact that I'm not really as lost as I thought I was and that I can still come up with logical proofs for more complicated problems is a big relief. I don't think I will be leaving a question blank again anytime soon. Looking back on when I was writing it I thought I did extremely poorly and seeing that I was actually on the right track for every question is a big relief since I was beginning to feel really lost in this class. Doing the problem set has forced me to catch up on some of the material (although I'm fairly certain my solution for ps5 was just terribly terribly wrong) so I'm happy that I can start actually understanding what is going on. Although I've got a CSC207 exercise and STA247 problem set (I hate those things..) due Monday I'm going to try to catch up on all the reading for DFSA's so that come Monday I can have a better understanding of what is going on. Exams are coming up and with my horrible exam schedule (4 in a row) I have to really focus on learning the material now as essentially I'm going to have very little time to study after school ends.

The wave continues

Well the wave of assignments and midterms continues. I'm really starting to burn out and can't wait until next week when I will finally have a break (somewhat). The drop date just recently passed and I'm facing a lot of anxiety regarding my course and degree decisions. A recent new interest in investments has made me consider getting a major in Economics and a major in CS instead of doing just a specialist in CS. There are a number of reasons for this, however I really think its too early for me to decide yet. However I would really like to keep this option open and my choice of STA247 may impact this in the future. So when 'the wave' ends I definitely have to go see a guidance councilor and likely talk to the economics department.

Test 2 was just yesterday and I really don't think I did well. I've spent the last few days working on a CSC207 assignment and had to do most of my studying on Thursday. My friend Tushar decided to go to Danny's office hour and I figured I'd tag along. I'm glad I did because even though the material wasn't exactly on the test it definitely clarified a few things about mergesort. I thought my answers to #1 and #3 were somewhat hand wavey and I was unable to prove any sort of loop invariant for #3. However this time I decided to just write whatever I could rather then leave it blank. I figure if I can get at least some part marks then this test might not be so bad. My answer for #2 I think was fairly correct, however I think I should have used induction rather then simply explaining everything in english. We'll see once I get it back, looking back though I think I did terrible...hopefully I didn't totally implode.