A fresh start

Tomorrow will be my first day of the 2016 Spring semester, as well as the last semester as a sophomore. I will shop 7 courses in total and decide to take 4 or 5 of them.

Semester Goal:

"Believe you can and you're halfway there." —Theodore Roosevelt

Heading to 16 Spring

Today is the Friday before the official start of the Spring 16 semester. As I retrospected in last post, I have done a decent job for this winter break, perhaps I can give myself a score of 80.

Again, I want to post an update of my plan for the following weekend: Sat, Sun and Mon:

Finishing watching the Princeton Algorithms I videos for today.
Finish watching Intro to Data Structures in C and the Learn C the Hard Way
Review python for the Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures

Hope I can follow these plans.

At the end of Winter Break 2015-2016

Next week will be the last week of my winter break and school starts in the following Tuesday.
To be honest, I am feeling quite nervous right now. This year I will soon turn 20 years old, which represents the real beginning of my adulthood. I have to start thinking about family, jobs, beyond the the school work, and what makes me nervous is the uncertainty of my future. I have a lot of dreams since I was a little girl; However, now, when many opportunities all open to me, I start to confuse what do I really want. Perhaps, the uncertainty is the true beauty of life and to keep challenging myself to improve is the essence of being mature.

During this winter break, I helped my cousin with her college application, and re-watched several movies and shows. I enjoyed the lovely Christmas with John at the Grace Chapel church and learnt a lot through those Bible Study Sessions. I also feel proud of myself exploring the C programming language and the Unix/Linux system, as well as reviewing the data structures and web development. Even though I still feel like I am lazy and unproductive, I shall say that I had a great winter break, a productive one compared to last year.

I had a very nice ending of 2015. I am really thankful that I am lucky enough to get the Google Engineering Practicum internship, where I can work on awesome projects with google engineers and learn a ton during the next summer. However, at the same time, I feel very unqualified, and wish to improve myself dramatically from now on. Thank you Google for giving me this opportunity and thanks for trusting me and encouraging me to keep learning.

Finally, I just finished the almost-last course selection for next semester. I plan to register for Programming Paradigm, Algorithms Design and Practice, Data Visualization, Relational Database Design and Introduction to Computer Architecture, and I am also going to take the 300 level statistics course at HC. I know that would be a very busy and challenging shopping week, but also a very fun one. I hope to select 3 computer science course, together with the math course, and hopefully take another course for college wide requirement. There would be tons of challenges this year starting from next semester, but I promise to myself that I will keep on going, be more optimistic, be more open to challenges, and enjoy my life in a pool of programming and mathematics.

A look forward for next week including a plan for tonight:
Come on Lexie, believe in yourself; you can do it!!!

Tonight: Finish the Markov Text Generator project
Monday - Friday:
Princeton Algorithms [main focus]
MongoDB course
Graph and Balanced Search Trees

Preparation for new semester
Programming Paradigm -- Learn C the Hard Way
Algorithms Design and Practice -- Algorithms Princeton and Udacity
Data Visualization -- Python zentut
Relational Database Design -- Udacity
Introduction to Computer Architecture -- edX
Mathematical Probability -- Udacity Inferencial Statistics