first graduate classes

My first day of graduate classes were Thursday, and I must say having gone through them has made me feel better about this semester overall. Before Thursday, I had been stressing out because this is my first semester of graduate school and I plan on working 20 hours/week. Full-time for graduate students is only 9 hours and I was used to 15 as an undergraduate, but I figured the classes would be much more intense so the fewer credit hours wouldn’t help much. However, one of my classes that I was expecting to seem harder doesn’t seem so bad. It’s a software engineering course and though I will have a project in it, the majority of the class looks like reading papers and writing one-page summaries of them. I’ve finished one already.

Algorithms looks like my hardest class, and the book is ginormous. (On a side note, when Firefox didn’t underline “ginormous” in red just now, I got quite confused and had to look it up in a dictionary. That’s a real bloody word! I’m now trying to remember if I knew this at one point or if I’ve always been under the impression that it was a made-up portmanteau, like ‘chillax’. Jeez…) Programming languages seems like it’ll be fun; we’ll have four major programming projects in there, the first involving Python and C, another using ML, one I don’t know about yet, and the last involving Smalltalk and Java. For our first homework, we were each assigned one question from the book which we’ll present in class next week. I got assigned a small program which I implemented recursively in Ruby very quickly, but unfortunately my professor told me I couldn’t use recursion because it defeats the point of the problem. Shucks.