Journaling a bit here as a nice way to remind myself what I have done in the last month.

Classes

College classes have started! I am working with a full course load but so far it seems semi-manageable, although it is definetly by far the largest courseload I have worked with in a semester.

Introduction to Women’s Gender, and sexuality studieas

Not a ton of crazy things have happened in this class yet. I enjoy the gen-edness of this class and it definetly makes me think of things in a different way. So far, we have discussed some ideas of class conscience, intersectionality, etc. So far the only homework has been forum responses each Sunday to our assigned readings. I may drop this class if I cannot find enough time to work on my junior IS project that is a part of my algorithms analysis class, or if additional jobs end up requiring more time.

Combinatorics and Graph Theory

A challenging math class. We have talked a lot about various combinational perspectives and solved various problems that are a part of that, such as lattice paths, chooses, integer sums to a certain value, i.e. $\begin{equation} x_1+x_2+x_3+x_4+x_5 \leq 74 \end{equation}$ How many different ways can we add the numbers $x_{1..5}$ to $74$?

We more recently have gotten to combinatorial proofs, the binomial and multinomial theorem. So far, they seem to generally make sense, although induction proofs on nCr style equations is new for me and seems challenging.

Programming Languages

A hidden gem of a class so far. We have gotten to discuss some basic ideas behind regular grammar and regular expressions and context free grammars. I really liked looking at lots of different programming languages (even though Prolog is scary!!!) More recently, I had fun figuring out the tail-recursive approach to a calculating the $n$th fibonacci number within the programming language of Haskell.

Algorithm Analysis

As this class is also my Junior IS, I have been spending a lot of time thinking over different kinds of large, individual class projects to work on. My first write-up/project idea was about performance profiling to understand energy draw within different pieces of a programming language. If that idea is not feasable, I may transition it towards some kind of cybersecurity/machine learning project (although I don’t exactly know what that would look like!)

Our algorithms portion of this class has been very easy so far, in that we have started with a rigorous definition of Big-$\mathcal{O}$ (or $\Theta, \Omega, \omega, \mathcal{o}$) and all their various meanings. Then we worked with basic data structures. We have finally started approaching hash tables and min-heaps. I am looking forward to the more advanced algorithms coming in the future of this class.