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
Rather than jump straight to 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.
Books I got to read this summer:
- 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
These books helped reinforce my passion for social justice, literature, and professional development, while giving me some R&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 as Outreach Editor, responsible for event planning and recruitment. I continued to serve as one of Vanderbilt's Undergraduate Honor Council's Recording Secretaries, and prepared for the upcoming year as a resident advisor.
Personal Projects
Beyond my course content, I didn't have a lot of experience coding going into the summer — that's definitely changed. I've been fortunate to have an environment where I could make personal projects a priority, and I selected what to build out of genuine personal interest.
Projects I built this summer:
- A C++ implementation of Conway's Game of Life (R.I.P. to John Conway)
- A pathfinding visualizer in Python supporting BFS, DFS, bidirectional search, and A*, using Pygame
- A program able to reverse audio files
- A Boggle solver using recursive backtracking in C++
- A Poker evaluator in C++
- A four-function calculator and alarm clock in Python (Tkinter GUIs) and a basic hangman game
- Two Python bots using Selenium to automate Instagram follows and emails
- Shock — a basic Unix shell implementation in C, to learn about memory management and systems design
- Implementations of Project Euler problems 1–82, placing me in the top 2% of users on the site
- Multiple data structure implementations from scratch for interview prep
- This website, in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
I also completed two courses: a comprehensive Introduction to JavaScript course via Udemy, and a smaller course on Go and gRPC. I'm proud of the focus on broadening my toolkit and using new skills for real learning experiences.
Professional Development
This summer I was lucky to still have my internship at Principal Financial Group, a financial services company specializing in investment management. I specifically worked for the Corporate Systems Support team, helping to improve observability and monitoring for critical applications enabling financial transactions. I used multiple AWS services and the Elastic Stack, which broadened my understanding of distributed systems architecture.
I've also been preparing for recruitment season by doing case interviews and practicing SWE problems from LeetCode and Cracking the Coding Interview. If anybody reading this has suggestions on ways to prepare, I'm all ears.
Conclusion
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 while also (finally) getting some more human interaction.