I’m back! Wow, what a semester. That was hard…. I’m exhausted. I actually finished my last final a few weeks ago but I’ve just been so tired and have been slowly recovering my will to accomplish anything. And also I moved domain out of AWS and that took a while for really no reason. And now here we are.
Going back to school has made me feel very old.
Exhaustion is the main take away for me. I cannot really cram anymore and if I do, it will come back to bite me. I studied over thanksgiving weekend for my first final and then took it on that Sunday. It wasn’t until Thursday later that week that I had enough energy to stay up past 8 PM. This lifestyle is wrecking me. I made a lot of mistakes in how I handled school so far but hopefully that means I can learn some lessons as well.
To summarize the semester, I took it very seriously for the first couple weeks and ended up putting like 20 hours each week into homework. This was mainly because I was learning Python and R at the same time so I felt a lot of motivation to get up to speed and be competent. Eventually, I let my guard down as the assignments became more manageable. I would usually be able to finish both class weekly assignments in 4-5 hours. And there were many weeks where that was all that I did and fell back into old habits of just simply trying to get the minimal amount done. This really came back to bite me when I needed to prep for tests as I really just forgot most of what I had learned.
I think what I need to do next semester is really dedicate some time every day to school. I’ve found that’s what’s worked best for me with going to the gym, cooking meals, really anything. Habits are a powerful tool for me. Also, I probably need to study somewhere other than at home. It’s just so easy to get distracted with other things or put things off. Really, these are things that I should’ve been able to put into practice more with all the things I’ve learned this year but it’s never too late. Unless I failed out, then it would’ve been too late.
I ended up getting one A and one B and now you say, wow you were really overreacting with failing out. I need to maintain a 2.7 GPA to stay in the program, so if I had gotten a B and a C I could’ve been dismissed. However, these were also only intro classes, so I think I can only expect things to get harder from here on out. Overall, I’m happy that I’m taking courses and learning new things, the process is just extremely hellish. Some of it really is enjoyable because coding is like solving a puzzle and general analytics is just like hypothesis testing. I’m glad I’m taking this direction and I’m hoping it can help me career-wise.
Moving forward
I want to continue blogging again regularly and I hope this is something that I can manage on top of school and everything else in my life. I have some analytics projects in mind that I want to work on outside of class just to hone my skills. They’re Magic: The Gathering related funnily enough, but I feel there is room here to combine two of my interests for a common goal.
The first is taking game data and creating some models that will tell me what the best cards are, or what the best decisions to make are. The second is to take card prices and try to evaluate why certain cards are expensive.
Lastly, I think there is room for my original blog posts as well. I’m really just in maintenance mode though, so there is not that much to share. I have continued going to Muay Thai and cooking at home (though Hiro did most of the cooking this past fall). I have not been keeping up with my finances as much because of we combined our finances as well so there is way more to track. But I want to keep looking at that stuff and learning from it. Maybe I can do something every other week. We’ll see!
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