Weekly Blog Entry 2

So I just got done reading the two papers assigned for Tomorrow: Collegiate Happiness and College Advice. Pretty good advice and I just wanted to write down the few that I thought were most applicable to me.

Meeting the faculty, Studying in Groups, and getting involved in other clubs I think was the most important to me. Building rleationships with teachers is a pretty good thing because it helps cement a relationship with someone who could possibly be a great mentor and life long teacher. There are a few teachers to this day that I still email from freshmen year with questions.

Studying in Groups is a great way to learn the material. We all learn and think differently so when you sit in a group it is pretty good because you can talk about the material help each other answer questions and the more you talk about things the more it sticks in your head and the better you understand the material. Last semester in stat I use to do this with my study group a lot and I ended up making an A- in the class.

Getting involved in other clubs is pretty important to. When you constantly put yourself in a position with other similar aged people who have common interests you put yourself in a position to find life long friendship. For instance I joined the stock market club freshmen year and just constantly going to these clubs every meeting and sharing opinions and going to the social events I made friends that I still talk to to this day.

For the other paper College advice I found it interesting that programmers who have the best communication skills had the most power because they were able to communicate and gain leverage for their idea's the best. They were also taller but I really can't do much about that except wear my Nike Shoxx a lot haha.

Another interesting tip from Joel was taking Programming Intensive courses. He pointed out that most colleges dont offer software development. They offer computer science which IS NOT the same thing. You want to take CS courses that make you do a lot of programming because in doing a lot of programming you learn the skills better to develop software. Software engineering practices in CS classes are not frequent. That made me appricate the class that I am currently taking-software engineering with Professor Downing.

All in all both papers were pretty good and I took some precious gems from them. I am off now to continue working on the assignments.