Wednesday/Thursday/Friday – Days 204/205/206
February 26, 2013
Wednesday was another chance to catch up on a little sleep. I arose from slumber at a good ten-thirty, got reading for the morning and promptly fell asleep on my desk chair. Not much of a success. A nap during Networking helped a little and before I knew it I was back in rehearsal.
I am so glad to be back in regular rehearsal, with our regular repertoire As much as the spring show was quite the spectacular to behold, the music wasn’t quite to my taste. Unfortunately though, it seems much of my old favorites have quite left my head! Ah well, time to crunch down and relearn the good tunes.
From there it was another all nighter to write some more code! Hooray.
Thursday. Physics. Team meeting. Tired. Running out of steam. Need Shabbat. Played Piano. Fell Asleep.
Friday was a grading party. Due to the completion of the CIS-121 midterm by our students, we now had 106 papers to mark (Australian for ‘grade’). This meant from 10:30AM to 3PM I was sitting in a room with the other TAs pouring over paper after paper, marking question after question and dearly hoping that my recitation did well (they did!). One brief intermission was a quick visit to the careers fair to talk to a certain employer with whom I am interviewing in the near future. I’m quite excited as I’ve had a little more practice at phone coding interviews and am now a little more confident. Hopefully it all goes well.
After grading was our regular staff meeting (not so much fun) and our TA training session (not so exciting). Though, through the TA training I have made a few friends from the CIS TA body, in particular Amalia Hawkins and Harmony Li, both lovely lower level CIS TAs (the classes, not their skills).
Friday night I was back at Shira Chadasha which wasn’t as musical as usual but still not bad and then to dinner through Hillel ‘mix-em-ups’. My table was a little uninspired but it was still nice and afterwards I spent the requisite hours with Aviva, Ariella, Michal and co.
Finally my week was over and I could head to bed for sweet repose.
Classes – Wednesday – Day 48
September 10, 2012
Class began today at 10AM and after grabbing today’s issue of the Daily Pennsylvanian (the student run newspaper) I ambled off to the engineering building.
My first class was CIS-121, basic algorithms and data structures using the Sedgewick textbook. Most of the hour was spent on administrative affairs with the lecturer going briefly into a history of algorithms for finding ‘highest common divisors’, from the simple and slow methods all the way to the recursive algorithm found by the Greek mathematician Euclid.
That finished all my officially enrolled classes for the day but, after checking out what was available, I found another two to keep me occupied in the afternoon. After a quick lunch at the Hillel (where I met plenty more people again), it was off to ‘Ruby on Rails’, a class worth half credit, covering the design and implementation of web applications. The class had a maximum allowed size of twenty people, however more than thirty packed into the room. The course got down to business straight away with a ‘Hello Lolcat’ exercise being posted for homework.
My final surprise class for the afternoon was Elementary Russian with a lovely old Russian lady by the name of Ludmilla. The class was incredibly unstructured and my classmates weren’t exactly thrilling however, I quite enjoyed it and got started learning the Russian alphabet and pronouncing all the new sounds.
That evening was our first TRAC (The Rodin Arts Collective) Music Floor Meeting. Anil and I met with all the residents from our floor and our RA (Residential Advisor) Will, to discuss the upcoming year in music and, to get to know each other a little. Following that it was up to the glorious Rodin rooftop lounge wherein an unmatched view of the Philly skyline could be seen (photos to come later). There we met the members of the other residential programs and socialized for a time. For those of you who may be a little confused, a residential program is a floor of the dormitory buildings dedicated to helping students engage with an area of interest and fostering community learning about a specific area through house funded events. In my case I’m on the musical engagement floor which features a resident musician, composer and music historian living on our floor, alongside visits to various musical events and institutions. The rooftop meeting was replete with delicious desserts sponsored by Rodin, provided by Penn Hillel and, was mainly an event to introduce us to each other and to the schedule for the next year.
Following the meeting it was back to the room with Anil to watch an episode of Breaking Bad and then to a short nights sleep.