Hello Folks,
First, It feels challenging, sometimes scared and responsible to be a Student again after giving a pause to my work back there in India. While, I am writing this post I got an idea to keep this post as more elaborate with my till-now experience here in Seattle-US.
A great city with a good Spring season (Flowers all around with Sun starring them). So getting back to the title now, It wasn't that easy to incorporate rather recall all those characteristics I had in myself during my student life. I really took some time to go back to past and recall how I took classes, the way I paid attention and the way I dealt with some of the difficult assignments at that time. But this was all in that 1 week before the classes started. Since, I arrived 1 week earlier I got some time to recall them. But after the classes started, its now that I feel I can look around to some other things.
Something about the University: Northeastern University, Seattle is a great to place to study at. India being a country with high traditional values, its not that easy to capitulate those values and just settle quickly at this new land. But, I think the university played a role for me and making me comfortable though slowly and always teaching me lessons on the way. The staff working close with Students (I really think this point is very similar to what APIIT had), good technology infrastructure (I was surprised by the size of the projector in the lecture room, even more when I presented a co-op presentation on it. I will come to what co-op is.... :) ), their hospitality are some good qualities to mention. I think all the reasons I thought had something optimistic in it.
Coming on to the subjects I took:
a) Programming Design Paradigm (PDP)
b) Database Systems (DB)
c) Co-op Seminar (This is what I was talking about above)
I really think that all the three subjects I took in my first semester were really good. PDP of which I will mention some of the assignments we got as examples, DB which sometimes went very deep into the memory calculations we would need to access some data and finally co-op which is about some great behavioral skills to have in you.
Starting with PDP which is a pure programming course based on Scheme programming language had assignments every week. This was no less than 40 hours per week which we generally spend at work.
I know that almost all of you must be familiar of the Pitcher/Jugs problem which is famous being a Google Interview Question. We got an assignment which told us to have some Pitchers and a desired amount and we had to determine the moves in which we could achieve the desired amount. I think this was a great question as I really enjoyed developing it. The whole week, my brain had almost n pitchers with any quantities.
The image above shows an example. Just to explain The solve function takes a list of Pitchers which is one of 8 liters, 5 and 3 respectively and the desired amount is 4 liters. The result is a list of moves where a number is the jug/pitcher number. I would suggest you to try these moves by making an assumption that the first pitcher is initially filled completely and you cannot waste any water, you only have this amount of water. This was the first time I implemented the breadth-first search algorithm which was a good experience.
Another assignment I found interesting was the N-level tree. Try the video below:
So, I press T and a new tree is created, pressing N while a tree is selected creates a new child and d while a tree/child is selected deletes it. I think this was really a good one.
We had almost 10 assignments and its not possible to describe everyone of them here, but these are some good ones.
The Database Systems which also had submissions every week involved concepts such as Indexing, Cost calculation, stored procedures and user-defined functions. I think seeing the course content is what encouraged me to take this subject and it was a good experience.
Some other things I would like to mention is the speed of speaking of native people here in US. It really made me thought when one day, I tried to ask the bus driver if this was the stop I wanted to get down and in spite of asking him 3 times I couldn't grab his answer properly and got down at the stop and more funny thing was that the stop was the wrong one. I think, till the time you try to understand what have they said, its gone. But, I remember the lessons from Asif's Sir class during my under graduation which have helped me a bit. Some picky things such as "(pronunciation of P is Phee not Peee") I hope I am still write.
The next semester is about to begin and the vacation is like it never started. I think gone are the days when during the vacation, I would be at home enjoying the best food in the world. I must say food is one thing I miss almost every time.
I hope you enjoyed reading the post though and as always feel free to give any suggestions on the things mentioned in the post.
Thanks,
Vishal
First, It feels challenging, sometimes scared and responsible to be a Student again after giving a pause to my work back there in India. While, I am writing this post I got an idea to keep this post as more elaborate with my till-now experience here in Seattle-US.
A great city with a good Spring season (Flowers all around with Sun starring them). So getting back to the title now, It wasn't that easy to incorporate rather recall all those characteristics I had in myself during my student life. I really took some time to go back to past and recall how I took classes, the way I paid attention and the way I dealt with some of the difficult assignments at that time. But this was all in that 1 week before the classes started. Since, I arrived 1 week earlier I got some time to recall them. But after the classes started, its now that I feel I can look around to some other things.
Something about the University: Northeastern University, Seattle is a great to place to study at. India being a country with high traditional values, its not that easy to capitulate those values and just settle quickly at this new land. But, I think the university played a role for me and making me comfortable though slowly and always teaching me lessons on the way. The staff working close with Students (I really think this point is very similar to what APIIT had), good technology infrastructure (I was surprised by the size of the projector in the lecture room, even more when I presented a co-op presentation on it. I will come to what co-op is.... :) ), their hospitality are some good qualities to mention. I think all the reasons I thought had something optimistic in it.
Coming on to the subjects I took:
a) Programming Design Paradigm (PDP)
b) Database Systems (DB)
c) Co-op Seminar (This is what I was talking about above)
I really think that all the three subjects I took in my first semester were really good. PDP of which I will mention some of the assignments we got as examples, DB which sometimes went very deep into the memory calculations we would need to access some data and finally co-op which is about some great behavioral skills to have in you.
Starting with PDP which is a pure programming course based on Scheme programming language had assignments every week. This was no less than 40 hours per week which we generally spend at work.
I know that almost all of you must be familiar of the Pitcher/Jugs problem which is famous being a Google Interview Question. We got an assignment which told us to have some Pitchers and a desired amount and we had to determine the moves in which we could achieve the desired amount. I think this was a great question as I really enjoyed developing it. The whole week, my brain had almost n pitchers with any quantities.
Another assignment I found interesting was the N-level tree. Try the video below:
So, I press T and a new tree is created, pressing N while a tree is selected creates a new child and d while a tree/child is selected deletes it. I think this was really a good one.
We had almost 10 assignments and its not possible to describe everyone of them here, but these are some good ones.
The Database Systems which also had submissions every week involved concepts such as Indexing, Cost calculation, stored procedures and user-defined functions. I think seeing the course content is what encouraged me to take this subject and it was a good experience.
Some other things I would like to mention is the speed of speaking of native people here in US. It really made me thought when one day, I tried to ask the bus driver if this was the stop I wanted to get down and in spite of asking him 3 times I couldn't grab his answer properly and got down at the stop and more funny thing was that the stop was the wrong one. I think, till the time you try to understand what have they said, its gone. But, I remember the lessons from Asif's Sir class during my under graduation which have helped me a bit. Some picky things such as "(pronunciation of P is Phee not Peee") I hope I am still write.
The next semester is about to begin and the vacation is like it never started. I think gone are the days when during the vacation, I would be at home enjoying the best food in the world. I must say food is one thing I miss almost every time.
I hope you enjoyed reading the post though and as always feel free to give any suggestions on the things mentioned in the post.
Thanks,
Vishal
