I thought it’d be fitting for my first post to be about my summer. One commonality basically every student shares right now is that our lives have been totally thrown for a loop by COVID-19. While I was fortunate enough to still have a stable place to stay, necessities, and an internship, there is definitely something to be said about isolation and the repetitive nature of the sedentary existence quarantine has basically forced on us.
However, I’m really proud of the amount I was able to accomplish this summer, through learning new skills, reading, educating myself, and taking advantage of quarantine as much as I could.
Self-care
To start off, rather than discuss personal projects, I want to talk about self-care. Being cooped up allowed me to get acquainted with myself again, and relearn what a positive mental state is for me outside of a school setting. After taking a class in Russian literature this year, reading two >700-page novels got me in the mood to read for pleasure again. I spent an inordinate amount of time reading.
I got a chance to read:
- American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? - Mumia Abu Jamal
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X. - Malcolm X / Alex Haley
- Are Prisons Obsolete? - Angela Y. Davis
- The Plague - Albert Camus
- The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
- Case Interview Secrets - Victor Cheng
- The Awakening - Kate Chopin
- Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
- The Working Poor - David K. Shipler
- American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
These books helped to reinforce my passion for social justice, literature, and professional development, while giving me some R-and-R outside of my personal endeavors.
Campus Involvement
Outside of reading, I’ve been preparing to get involved on campus next year. I began a role on the executive board of the Vanderbilt Institute for Society, a satirical journal (think The Onion) as its Outreach Editor, where I am responsible for event planning and recruitment, attempting to figure out what that’ll look like with COVID. I continued to serve as one of Vanderbilt’s Undergraduate Honor Council’s Recording Secretaries, as we still had a need to process delayed cases over the summer. Finally, I prepared for the upcoming year as a resident advisor. With the current climate and uncertainty surrounding coming back to school, I’m glad I still have a role waiting for me when I come back.
Personal Projects
Next, let’s talk about personal projects. Beyond my course content, I didn’t have a lot of experience coding. However, that’s definitely changed this summer. I’ve been fortunate enough to have an environment where I could make coding personal projects a priority. Moreover, I selected what I wanted to develop out of personal needs and interests.
This summer, I’ve built:
- A C++ implementation of Conway’s Game of Life (R.I.P. to John Conway)
- A pathfinding visualizer in Python supporting, breadth-first, depth-first, and bidirectional search, as well as A* pathfinding, using the Pygame library
- A program able to reverse audio files (i.e. backtracking)
- A Boggle solver using recursive backtracking in C++
- A Poker solver able to take formatted input of two players and return number of wins of each player, in C++
- Implementations of a four-function calculator and an alarm clock in Python, with GUIs made in Tkinter, and a basic hangman game
- Two Python bots using the selenium framework that automate sending Instagram messages / follow requests and emails, respectively
- A basic shell implementation, called Shock, in C to learn more about memory management and systems design
- Implementations of Problems #1-82 in Project Euler, putting me in the top 2% of users on the site and improving my knowledge of discrete math, problem solving, and dynamic programming
- Multiple implementations of different data structures from scratch to use as I practice for upcoming interviews
- Finally, this website, coded in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (I hope to update it to a more advanced framework, like React, eventually)
I also completed two courses: one via Udemy, which was an extremely helpful and comprehensive Introduction to JavaScript course, and another smaller course about using Go(lang) and the gRPC framework. I’m seriously proud of the focus on furthering my repertoire of technologies and using my new skills for some amazing learning experiences.
Professional Development
Additionally, this summer, I was blessed to still have my internship to look forward to. I’ve been working for Principal Financial Group for the past 2 ½ months, a financial services company specializing in investment management and financial security. I specifically worked for the Corporate Systems Support team, where I helped to improve observability and monitoring capabilities for critical applications enabling financial transactions. It was a rewarding experience, especially as my introduction to software engineering and development in a corporate environment. I had the opportunity to use multiple AWS services and the Elastic Stack suite of applications, which broadened my understanding of the design of more complex systems architecture.
Finally, I’ve been preparing for the upcoming recruitment season by running case interviews answering practice SWE interview questions. The latter questions have mostly come from Leetcode and the famous “Cracking the Coding Interview.” If anybody reading this post might have suggestions of ways to prepare or people to contact at specific companies, I am all ears for tips on how to better prepare.
Conclusion
Ultimately, while I definitely wish COVID didn’t have me locked down, I think I effectively made use of the time I had. I’m looking forward to continuing my progress in computer science this year while also (finally) getting some more human interaction.