Today was my last day of exams! The algostorm* is officially over.
Looking back, it’s been a good semester – definitely the most academically involved, but not the worst mentally, emotionally, or physically. In other words, only the most in terms of hours spent doing classwork.
I can say fairly now that I’m glad I took the classes I did. Compilers taught me tons about software engineering and team dynamics, and I feel like I could write a dummy compiler in the future, maybe for propositional logic. That’d be cool. (It probably exists already, but whatever). It also feels nice to know that there are so many tools that exist out there to make the process of compiling much faster.
Taking ML before CV definitely helped for the deep learning portion of the class. Apparently last year the final CV project was building your own learner, which was removed this year. I feel like it’d be more indicative for what actually happens in research and industry. Maybe a summer project?…
Theory of Computing and Algo had exactly 1-2 weeks of overlap where I could breeze by – when we learned about Turing Machines. Otherwise, they covered different topics, and I’m glad I got to take both classes. My favorite topics in Theory of Computing were regular languages and automata, and CFL’s and PDA’s. For Algo, I really enjoyed greedy, dynamic programming, and NP-completeness reductions.
I have about a week to play with before my internship starts, which will likely go towards very slow packing, apartment cleanup, and doing all the fun things that were postponed because of finals. Sailing on Cayuga Lake, anyone?
Good luck to everyone who is still taking finals, and hello summer!
*Algostorm is a Cornell CS nickname regarding exams in Intro to Algorithms, CS 4820, inspired by Darude’s Sandstorm, a widespread meme within the interwebs. It’d be great if it caught on at other schools.
Adventures 