Late Nights, Peter Norvig and the Benefits of Being a Keener

September 24th, 2010 • Academics, Student Life

So the second week is now over and I am totally exhausted. It seems like the fact that Fridays have been crap days for me so far is going to be an ongoing trend. The assignments for my honours math class are always due on Fridays at 9am and it seems that no matter how early I start, I’m still up until 3am on Thursday nights finishing up and up again at 7am to get to class. The fatigue seems to be worth it so far, however, since I did end up getting 2% away from an A+ on the first assignment. Now that is a worthwhile trend.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, none of my classes apart from Math302 have had any significant assignments so far and they are just now beginning to come down the pipe so my weeks are going to get even busier. Five classes sure is a lot, and if I didn’t recognize the value in strict time management in first year (because I really, really didn’t) then I sure as hell do now. I don’t think that there is a way to maintain an 80%+ average across five 300-level Science classes without being one of those painfully keen nerds with the colour coded schedules that have slots budgeted for teeth-brushing time. Not that that’s a bad thing. Since the middle of the summer term, I’ve cut out all distractions- MSN, computer games, Facebook and, well, I never had a TV. It makes a massive difference and I’ve seen probably a 10% increase in all of my grades so far. Something to consider if you feel like you’re struggling to meet your deadlines. You’d be amazed at how quickly you stop missing them.

There have been a couple really great things that have happened so far, too. First of all, even though my linguistics class is mind-numblingly basic (I seriously feel guilty for how much of a sandbag class it is), the subject itself is really cool and it’s spurred my own readings and research into the subject. I’ve decided to minor in Linguistics now, as well. So funny- linguistics and computer science were never things that I was introduced to before UBC, so I can’t say that I was one of those kids that tinkered around with circuit boards or pondered the morphology present in Green Eggs and Ham, but they’ve become what I now plan on dedicating the rest of my life to. This is why I cannot emphasize enough that it’s really important to expose yourself to new things, because who knows what you’ll end up loving.

Also, last night I had the distinct honour of seeing Peter Norvig give a talk on what you can do with large sets of data. For the non-computerishly inclined, Peter Norvig is like… the paragon of computer science around today and is my hero. Seriously. Peter Norvig is currently the director of research and development at Google (!!!), and if that wasn’t enough, he was also the senior software development at NASA where he worked on the Mars Rover project. AND he wrote the defining textbook (in my opinion) on AI around today, a copy of which I treasure and should have gotten signed (like some other people did… haha, so nerdy). Last night, I stood two feet away from this guy.

Oh, and the lecture was awesome, too.

It seems like up until now, my posts have only really spanned the tedium of my academic life. I’m going to work on something that other people might actually find useful for next time.

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