Famous Last Words: The Final Week

This week was my last week because I did enough extra credit to end a week early! It's pretty exciting, but looking at the blog posts for next week, I'm actually a little disappointed I didn't skip some extra credit and do those instead. I know I still can do the posts for next week, but I'm just preparing to be super busying preparing for finals.

I feel pretty mixed about this past week. The readings were pretty excellent! I don't know what it is, but the past few weeks have been super interesting and I just flew through the readings for both days. They were super creepy and weird which is always fascinating to me. As for the extra credit assignments, I did extra reading which was helpful, but I had trouble getting through the other ones. It's always the end of the semester where I lose motivation to finish assignments, so it wasn't surprising. The most disappointment for me personally comes with the story I wrote for my storybook. I just feel like it was so subpar. I had a really hard time coming up with how I was going to wrap up all of the conflict that I opened up in the last story. Agh! I know I can do better, and reading over my first two stories, I know I could have improved those too, but I suppose this will have to do. I feel kind of guilty because I don't feel like it's my best work, but I suppose I'll see what the reception is like first.

Going forward, I'm not sure if I'm going to do any more assignments for this class. It really depends on how studying / the final assignments for my other classes go. I'll probably do a revision no matter what though!

Mixed feelings

via Wikimedia Commons

Famous Last Words: A Week of Much Needed Laziness

I guess I'll actually cover two weeks of review, since the week for this class actually spanned 2 weeks.

This week I went really hard on the assignments and extra credit because I wanted to put myself in a good position to finish out the semester a week early. Well, I did that during the week leading up to Thanksgiving break. This week, I planned on doing all of my assignments + extra credit before the break but that didn't happen.

It also didn't happen anytime during the break even though I stayed away from my family. Instead, I spent a lot of time playing video games with my friends and just relaxing. By the time Sunday rolled around, I was a little upset that I didn't do any homework, but then I realized that just doing nothing productive for a few days actually was really nice.

I should be able to finish out this semester pretty strongly. I don't have any major projects, just three midterm exams to finish up. Oh! And the final story for this class, which should be challenging but fun to write. Which, to be completely honest, is probably going to haunt me all week. I have NO idea how I'm going to finish the story... and I upped the ante majorly in story 2 by bringing a more sinister element into Miles' adventures. I honestly don't think it was the right decision from a story perspective because it completely changed the tone of the blog and was pretty difficult to write. Anything with a more darker, complex narrative takes a lot more time and pages to turn into a good piece of writing, so I'm not exactly optimistic about my ability to turn this one around (and still be satisfied with the result).

For the rest of this class, I'm going to try to finish up the extra credit assignments for the week (minus the reading) and hit tomorrow pretty hard. The goal is to finish everything except for the Project story by Friday, which should leave me plenty of time to mull over how I'm going to decide Miles' fate.

Image from GoodFreePhotos

Famous Last Words: Bouncing Back

This week

This past week, I found out that I did pretty terribly on one of my midterm exams. It's the only midterm for that course too, so the blow hit me pretty hard. I'd done pretty well on the homeworks, but I will admit that my class attentiveness wasn't as good as it could have been.

I felt so embarrassed, even though I will be the only person to ever see it. I don't want to face my instructor in class next week, and I didn't really feel good about myself at all. Instead of just accepting it, I felt my face flush with heat and I got a lump in my throat. This doesn't usually happen to me, and even when I do worse than expected, it usually doesn't hit me this hard.

I can still pass the class, but I really need to step up my game and work hard to ace the final exam. Though I don't pride myself on being a grades person, this really hit me hard.. The culture is so ingrained in me that it's tough to shake, and this time I was the one shaken up.

The future

When you're a senior, everyone expects you to have it figured out. Classes should be easy because I've taken so many of them, so when something like happens I can't help but feel badly about myself.

For the next few weeks, I'm really going to hit the books hard. I don't want to just pass all my classes, or just do the minimum in order to get the grade that I want, but rather I want to decimate the rest of the semester. I want my teachers to question whether or not it was me putting forth an assignment because the quality is just so damn good. That is the way I should approach everything, but it's really hard. That doesn't mean I can't do it. I'm going to. 

Basketball player rebounding

Famous Last Words: Hackathons and the Election

This class

I haven't done one of these posts before, so I'm going to reflect on the entire semester instead of a past time period.

For this class, I think I've done a pretty okay job with the work that I've done so far. I've had some not-so-good work ethic at times, but the work that I have done for the class (stories, storybook, and critiquing others) has been good effort on my part.

One mistake that I made was depending on Canvas to check my grade. I thought, since some assignments weren't graded properly, that I was getting a high-A this whole time, but as it turns out I should have hit 300 points at the end of this week to be on pace for an A, but after doing all of the extra credit assignments this week, I will be just short of 300 at the end.

In the next few weeks, I'm going to work really hard to do every assignment well and also finish this extra credit. I want to finish the class by Week 14, so it's going to take a lot of work!

Outside of this class

This weekend, I went to a Hackathon, which is an event where a bunch of students work on developing programming projects. It was a really neat experience actually. They have them all year long, and I definitely want to attend as many as I can. There were a lot of people there who were more experience than I was at programming, and that makes me really want to improve as much as I can.

Additionally, the election is coming up this next weekend. I'm not really in favor of either candidate because both scenarios, to me, suck. Trump is clearly a bad choice. He's incredibly offensive, inexperience, and doesn't have any real plans with details. Hillary is a seasoned politician, one that has done some rather shady stuff, including breaking the law with her private server. Though I am more of a democrat in terms of policies, I really also despise political corruption so it makes me hard to vote for her.

Students at a Hackathon