Why hello there, sad and lonely blog! Sorry I've neglected you for so long, let me dust the cobwebs off you.
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| that's a programming joke... in case you don't get it |
A couple of hours ago I took my final exam for my C++ class. Wheew, what a load that's taken off my mind! I'm glad its over, and I'm also glad it happened. Summer classes can be a little daunting sometimes because there is so much material to cover in such a short span of time, and this one was no exception. Actually... it
kind of
sort of was a little different; this class was 8 weeks long instead of the usual 4, so we had more time to cover the material, but it still felt like a race against time. It was a HUGE learning curve... my Post-Bacc Certificate is in GIS, and that C++ has really nothing to do with it, but it was required anyway. The great majority of the class were computer science majors that already knew the language, but it was completely new to me.
Most of the time I always felt like the slowest student in there (I wasn't). We had 15 scheduled lectures, 12 labs, and 3 exams. I love writing notes, and I'm an extremely visual learner, which means I learn material best by writing it in my own handwriting and then seeing it in my mind's eye later. I managed to fill up a 3-subject notebook in 8 short weeks, all color-coded and with exam reviews included. That took a lot of my time.
I also managed to stumble my way through the labs and I surprised myself at the end of each one. It's something that I've given a lot of thought to over the last couple of weeks...
You see, the material covered in the lecture was all well-defined and theoretical... but it was the kind of stuff you don't understand until you actually apply it. At the start of each of those 10 labs, soon after reading the assignment, I thought about giving up. Everything seemed so impossible! There was absolutely NO WAY I could figure this program out and complete it in the next 24 hours!
Soon after every moment of panic, I would painstakingly open Notepad ++ and start with the only thing I knew how to do... the bare basics. Name, lab name, class number, date...
Then I would move on to writing out the
Purpose of the program... what it was meant to do. That cleared things up A LOT. Sentence by sentence, it all started making sense. Now I knew
what to do, just not quite
how to do it, although the end result seemed clear.
So I took it one line at a time. I typed out what I knew was right... I asked the professor A LOT of questions about what I was unsure of, I read and re-read the directions, I tested and changed the program more times than I care to remember... and I still came up short. Each one of those labs had a tiny section of it that nobody could do without our teacher's help. The kind of help where she literally did it all for us and told us step-by-step which keys on the keyboard to press so it comes out right. I could not have done it without her.
Some programs were easy... some were hard. The easiest one I wrote was only 150 lines of code, took me about 45 minutes, and just all made sense. I later came to find out it was the shortest anyone wrote... some people's were over 2,000 lines long!
The hardest one was the time I sat in that chair for
6 hours. Everyone else (teacher included) had already finished and left, and I was left alone to fix my own mistake and I worked sooo hard to get my program to compile and run... only to get an 86 on it for all that work. (I never got anything below a 93 besides this one).
So lesson learned... I was surprisingly good at some things, and I was surprisingly mediocre at others. Still, it all balanced out to give me the grade I wanted and felt I deserved in the end :)
