Hi Readers!
Sorry for not posting for the month of August, life has been kind of crazy from the last post to now. I moved out with my fiancée to a new apartment, started my masters program at Cal State Los Angeles, working longer hours at work to make up lost time, … the list can go on.
Moving Out
To kick it off! Yes I moved out to a new apartment with my fiancée. So far it’s been pretty chill, and I’m not seeing any changes in our relationship which is a great thing! But it’s been kind of chaotic since this is our first place together or just our first place moving out from our families; So for this past month we’ve just been buying all the essentials. Such as a couch, bed mattress, a dining table, toiletries, and even kitchen condiments! Not only has it been taking a lot of our time up from deciding what we want to purchase to actually purchasing it. We’ve realized that it was also FINANCIALLY expensive. But because my fiancée is a thrifter, I feel that we kind of saved big! We decided to get our dining table and dining chairs from FB marketplace which was $1200 MSRP but got it for $150! We looked at IKEA for couches, but we ended up going on Amazon that had basically the same thing. The IKEA couch was almost $900 but on Amazon we bought it for $250. The only thing we did not cheap out on was the bed mattress, I feel that it was something we should invest in since human beings sleep on a bed 1/3rd of the day. As of right now, we’re really just waiting for Black Friday so that we can buy some things to add some personality to the apartment.
Starting School
As mentioned previously in my last post, I was going back to school for my Masters in Computer Science. The classes that I am currently taking is:
- CS 5220: Advanced Topics in Web Programming
- CS 4661: Intro to Data Science
I am only taking 2 classes due to tuition costs and I wanted to make most of how many classes I can take with the flat rate Part Time Student Fee. CS 5220 so far hasn’t been too difficult, and I don’t think it will be since the learning objective and outcome is to teach student about web development, e.g. Creating a frontend, making web-api requests to the backend, and connecting the backend to some database… Thing’s I already do at a professional level. However, this class is a great learning opportunity for me since we will be doing things in an entirely different stack than what I do at work. The stack is Vue.js as our frontend, Node as our backend, and MongoDB as our database.
For CS 4661, the entire topic is brand new to me… When I was studying for my undergrad, everything was about how software talks to the machine; e.g. Compilers, Microservices, Programming languages, all the nitty-gritty things. Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence were things that I did not have an opportunity to learn because those elective classes were always filled the first day of class registrations at UC Irvine. So far, the class really intrigues me! Learning about what kind of data and machine learning algorithms are out there and how we can use that to create our own predictive classification models. We’ve been given the opportunity to create our own predictive classification model as a final project with a team of at most 5 and my team and I have chosen a project where we can predict the origin of the food cuisine given only the ingredients.
Overall the workload has been okay, during my undergrad I was constantly taking 18 units and was on a quarter system versus now I’m only taking 6 units and on a semester system. I’m also trying to be a lot more organized by using great tools in my arsenal such as Obsidian for note-taking, creating charts, and utilizing a plugin that creates a kanban board so that I can keep track of my tasks and get work done! The awesome thing too, is that I have it sync’d to every device that I own via Google Drive since the vault (storage system) is just a folder directory.
Work
I think my work life has kind of shifted due to the effect of having a class in the middle of the day every Friday. On Friday, my Intro to Data Science class is from 12:00pm - 2:45pm, and it is a 15 to 30-minute drive to school depending on the traffic. So I’m usually done with work on Friday by 11:30am. Which definitely makes me short about 4 hours from working 40 hours a week. So how do I make up for this lost time? I’ve thought about working 4 hours extra on one certain day, splitting it into 2 hours for 2 days out of the week, or just working on the weekends. Currently, right now I work 2 hours more on Tuesday and Thursday since my other class is on Monday and Wednesday starting at 7:30pm. 2 hours extra for 2 days is a lot better for my mental health than grinding 4 hours more for one day. But nonetheless, this still takes time away from my personal life and I feel that Friday’s are the best days for me to be productive at work because I’m not in any meetings at all, and I can just focus on getting my stories and tasks to the finish line before the weekend starts. So, I feel that I’m not really as performant as I was before I started school. But I believe all I need to do is to find my rhythm, and my performance will be back to normal… hopefully.
As always, I am going to still try my best to stay consistent on these posts! Even though I’ve already missed one haha.
“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” - Neale Donald Walsch