Final Semester Impressions

Classes started this week. By now I’ve gone to each one at least once and have a feel for what the next several months will look like.

The “ughs”

Let’s get the bad out of the way first. I don’t like ending on a sour note.

There’s really only one “ugh” class this semester. It’s officially called “Software Business” but the professor has also called it “Creating Software Ventures”. He seems so focused on how to make yourself as rich as possible by coming up with a good startup idea that you can exponentially grow and eventually sell. Nevermind long term viability, or trying to make something genuinely cool or useful for the sake of it. I like money as much as the next guy, but making it your sole focus and dumping your time and effort into a risky startup that probably isn’t even that original? That’s exhausting to even think about. Not to mention there’s something gross about trying to pitch it as a path to success to a bunch of students who have little to no real world work experience.

The class at least sounds easy. According to the professor everyone who puts the time into their project gets an “A” and you have to basically do nothing to get lower than that.

The highlights

The first highlight: I somehow managed to work out my schedule where I have only one morning class on Wednesday and no classes on Friday. I wasn’t even trying to do that, things just worked out for me. I don’t have to stress about finding time for work, class projects, or big boy job hunting.

The class I might be looking forward to most is run by this guy who’s been in the industry for 50 years and worked on some pretty cool projects, and it’s more or less about how not to do software engineering. There’s a big focus on learning the reasons software projects fail, which apparently are rarely purely technical. I tend to love practical and easily applicable classes the most, so I’ve got high hopes for this one. It seems fairly low pressure too as long as I stay on top of the reading and find the time to contribute to whichever project I get on.

I’m taking a 100 level intro to data science class for easy elective credit. I chuckled a bit walking into that class for the first time because, even though it’s targeted towards freshmen and sophomores, I could tell there were other seniors who had the same idea as me. It should be easy since the class assumes no prior coding experience, but I’m hoping some of the material will be interesting anyway.

The last highlight is a database design class. This is another that I’m hoping will give me some good practical experience. I already have some ok experience setting up and managing databases through various projects and my work but it’ll be nice to actually take a class on it now.

Overall it’s looking like it’ll be a pretty positive semester. Looking forward to things.