Things are starting to make me SWEat #5

What did you do this past week?

Andrew Deng
3 min readSep 27, 2020

Too much and too little. I studied with friends for Japanese, studied not quite enough for chemistry, prepared for Career Fair, attended Career Fair, took my exams, worked on a few projects, only sent out about 30 internship applications, and put off Leetcode.

What’s in your way?

Scheduling and time management as well as motivation to not procrastinate. As all of my classes are simultaneously ramping up their daily/weekly responsibilities and expectations alongside the ever-growing imminence of finding an internship make it all-the-more tempting to ignore those things and just lounge around all day. My sleep schedule has also started to regress to regularly sleeping at 6 am. Gotta get this together.

What will you do next week?

Work on the IDB project, work on my two virtualization projects, and continue with the daily responsibilities of my other classes. I’ll continue to apply to internships and grind Leetcode and interview prep. I’ll celebrate the mid-autumn festival with my family and jam out on my drum kit when I get the chance.

What was your experience of types, object models, and iterators?

I’ve worked plenty with most of the Python types before, but learning about the few I didn’t know in addition to the finer-grain details of how they work under the hood was eye-opening. Regarding iterators, I’ve seen them before but never really found a good opportunity to use them, which is what Python seems to push its programmers towards. Object models are something mostly new to me; I’ve had a vague sense of how they were but now that’s been cleared up.

What made you happy this week?

Despite my full plate, there’s plenty of good that happened this week. I got an Amazon interview, which is a good confidence boost. I passed my chemistry exam and got a perfect score on all 3 parts of my Japanese exam. Working with my team for IDB was actually a little fun. I felt like I had my most productive career fair, too. Instead of spending most of my time waiting in line, the 10-minute scheduled call format allowed me to talk to many more companies. It’s also nice finally hearing “You’re graduating in 2022? We’re looking for folks like you!” as opposed to “Oh, sorry, we’re not really looking to hire freshmen or sophomores, but feel free to apply.”

Outside of tangible responsibilities, I’m back home in Plano for a week, which is a nice change of scenery. My sister’s also coming home for the rest of the year, and we’ll get to celebrate our first mid-autumn festival as a family in 9 years. Being able to jam out on my drum kit always brings me joy, too.

For things that really lifted my spirits: a WandaVision trailer dropped and a bunch of MCU news has come out. I’m considerably hyped for Phase 4. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity just dropped gameplay footage earlier today, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the thing.

What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

Despite being able to work from home, I would recommend that everyone still dress up to attend classes and work on projects and homework. It helps to build a separation between work-mode and home-mode. And if what you normally wear to campus is what you normally wear at home, I’d highly recommend for you to start considering personal style more. It doesn’t have to be to fancy, but it can do wonders for building up self-confidence and is another decent way to express yourself.

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