In my summer internship, one of my tasks was designing a customer survey form. My supervisor gave me about two dozen questions that needed to be answered in various ways. A few were fill-in-the-blank, but of the rest half needed to be ranked on a scale of 1 to 10, and the other half had to be ranked on a scale of 1 to 5. This would have been pretty simple if I were able to write the html myself, but I needed to use an existing form assembly tool so that we could import the responses directly into our database. The form tool was not very sophisticated: I had control over the CSS, but not the HTML, so any changes I made were applied to all questions. I tried to find styling that would look good on both scales, which was nearly impossible with the HTML I was stuck with.

So rather than pull back and say, “To design this form well, I need more consistency. All the ranking questions should be 1 to 5,” I kept editing the CSS, trying to find a way to make the two styles look the way I wanted. I was so stuck on how to make different ranking scales look nice that I couldn’t step back and see that using the same scale would be much simpler. It took a review from a coworker in marketing to point this out, and when he did, all I could think was, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

I later realized that I was looking at the project as I would a school assignment. I took it for granted that the instructions I’d been given were set in stone and must be followed precisely. But in the office, requirements are always changing, and the person who designs form questions is not necessarily a design expert. When I graduate in a year and transition from college to industry, I’m going to have to make a mental shift from accepting projects as they’re assigned to examining instructions more critically. After all, why would I be given a project if whoever assigned it didn’t think I had some expertise on the subject?

Lesson learned: my boss is not my professor, and I shouldn’t be afraid to negotiate project instructions if I think there is a better way to do it.

It’s really easy to overbuy for freshmen year. When I was a freshman, I made a lot of mistakes in my dorm shopping. There are obvious things you need, like clothes and laundry detergent, but I wish I’d known some of these subtleties before I went shopping.

Textbooks and chocolate are essential.

Obviously, before you start buying anything, consult with your roommate(s) and school website. Don’t bring anything that the school provides in the rooms already.

General tips:

• I go to school on the opposite coast from where I live, so I had special concerns in terms of getting all my stuff there. Whenever I purchased something the summer before freshman year, I tried to buy it online and have it shipped directly to the school. I saved a lot on shipping costs that way. Consider whether shipping an item you already own will cost more than buying it near campus. It was cheaper to buy my fan on campus than to buy one at home at ship it there, even though the fan I bought was more expensive than one I would have bought at home.
• Avoid colored bed linens. You can’t bleach them.
• Avoid splitting costs of appliances with roommates. You’ll just have trouble deciding who will keep it.
• Keep your cardboard boxes for when you have to pack your things for summer. At the end of the year, there was a mad rush for boxes at the campus bookstore. I just stuck mine under my bed all year.
• Look for a dollar store near campus. My roommates and I bought all our dishware and cleaning supplies there.
• Buy your textbooks early so you can get them cheaper online and have them ready for class. But first, email your professors and ask whether the “required” textbooks are really required, or just recommended. The most frustrating thing about college is buying a “required” textbook for $200 and never using it.
• If you’re not sure you’ll use something you buy, keep the receipt. I bought an iron at Bed Bath and Beyond, never used it, kept it in its packaging, and returned it the next summer.

Must have:

• Refrigerator. It can be tiny, but you’ll want one. My school has a fridge rental program, which my freshmen roommates and I tried. It wasn’t worth it; for the $225 we spent renting a fridge/microwave combo for one year, we could have bought a fridge that would have lasted longer. Even though my dorm has a public fridge, I wouldn’t trust food I put there to stay there.
• Mattress pad. When I did my shopping, I assumed that since I didn’t need an extra mattress pad at home, I wouldn’t need one at school. Unfortunately, dorm mattresses suck. I got through one semester and decided enough was enough. My best Christmas present that year was my 4-inch memory foam mattress pad. Worth it.
• Plain old water pitcher. The bathrooms in my school’s dorms are down the hall and we don’t have sinks in our rooms. When you want a glass of water at 3am, you’ll be grateful for that pitcher of water. I got mine at the dollar store.
• Electric kettle. I borrowed my roommate’s so often to boil water for ramen that I ended up just getting one for myself. Essential for ramen, tea, and instant coffee. It need not be expensive; I got mine for $20 at a drugstore.
• Painter’s tape. When the freshmen arrive on campus and find they can only hang their posters with painter’s tape, there’s a mad rush on the bookstore for the stuff. Buy it early.
• Cold medicine. When everyone gets sick at the same time, the bookstore will run out of Nyquil, and you won’t want to leave your room anyway.

Don’t buy until you get to campus, and then only if you find you need it:

• Printer. My school, like many, has a campus-wide printing system. I bought a printer, but found I didn’t print enough to justify the cost of having my own. I ended up selling it.
• Bed risers. For all you know, you’ll have a bunk bed that you can’t raise. But if you have a single bed, bed risers are a must for more storage space.
• Water purifier. Don’t bother unless your dorm’s tap water is undrinkable.
• Furniture and fans. Your dorm should provide essentials like desks and chairs and waste bins. It’s better to wait until you get to your room and see how much space you have before you buy extra furniture. That said, a folding bookshelf and extra chair are really nice to have. Make sure any furniture you buy can be made smaller for transport. (Do NOT buy these; they fall apart if you put books on them.)
• School supplies. Buy paper and pens to be ready, but wait until you go through your first session of each class before really stocking up on school supplies. You never know when a professor will have a special requirement, supply-wise.

Another question I hear often is whether to get a Mac or a PC for college. For the most part, it doesn’t matter. Make the decision based on what kind of repair facilities you’ll have access to, whether you’ll need to run any special software for your major, and what you can afford.

One last hint: Amazon now offers a service called Amazon Student. Sign up with your .edu email address, and they’ll give you Amazon Prime for a year. That means free two-day shipping on most items. As far as I can tell from the terms and conditions, it doesn’t look like they’ll automatically renew the subscription at the end of the year, too.

I’d love to hear about other students’ lists of essentials. Leave a comment, or email me at mystitat@gmail.com. Good luck shopping!

• Flip flops. Without them, shower at your own risk.

I love my internship. I’m doing fun, challenging coding work, I’m absorbing office culture, and I get to sit in on seminars about business practices. It’s great because I feel like I’m learning what I need to know about the software industry that I can’t learn in a classroom.

But moreover, my internship is great because I don’t have signs like these on my door anymore. As much as I’m excited to go back this fall, I’m so glad classes are out for summer!

I groaned yesterday when I saw the following tweet from my school newspaper:

Faculty must vote in favor of athletics proposal at next meeting

In short, my school is considering awarding course credit to students for participating in varsity sports during the school year. Presently, a typical class at my college is worth one unit of credit, and a typical P.E. class is worth one half of a credit. Under the new proposal, participating in varsity sports would earn the student one half credit per semester, with a cap of two credits total from both sports and P.E. classes. The argument is that if the athletes dedicate so much time to a faculty-supervised activity, they deserve credit for it. The paper explains,

As it stands, varsity sports remain the College’s only faculty-supervised activity that does not receive academic credit. Activities of comparable commitment—such as [School] Repertory Dance Theatre, [School] College Orchestra and the [School] College Choir—all award participating students with a limited amount of credit, and it is our belief that the same academic courtesy be extended to athletes.

I’m biased because I have no athletic inclination whatsoever, and I have never been a fan of organized athletics at educational institutions (I have always thought that too much money goes to sports that would be better spent on academics). However, I have to give in out of fairness to the argument that if students can receive half a credit for a physical education course, it is reasonable to give the same amount for participating in varsity athletics. I benefited from a similar system when I took a year of ballet here. If I can earn credits for awkwardly balancing on my toes, my friends should be able to earn credits for improving their fencing game in a structured, supervised environment.  I assume, of course, that the same conditions for passing a physical education class are met in sports practices: students must have an attendance requirement, and they must show effort and improvement over the course of the semester. That’s fine; I can live with that.

However, I cannot agree with the other arguments my school’s paper puts forward:

On top of everything, we must remember that varsity athletics present a considerable time commitment. It is rare to find another activity on campus—academic or extracurricular—that includes a comparable daily rigor and frequent overnight obligation.

Time commitment cannot be a factor in determining course credit. If it is, where do you draw the line? While the paper claims it is rare, other extracurricular organizations do demand comparable time commitments. If an activity demands as much or more time than a varsity sport, does that mean students should be able to earn credit for it? I do not think it does. There is little precedent at my college for awarding more units of credit based on time commitment; CMPU 101: Introduction to Java and CMPU 331: Compilers are both worth just one credit here, despite the disparity in difficulty and quantity of homework of each.

The article continues,

Given the extent of this demand, the faculty must consider what it can do to mitigate possible academic pressures on these students. While athletes will continue to be held to the College’s rigorous academic standards, the athletics credit could discourage a varsity athlete from unnecessarily taking on five academic credits while in their athletic season.

With the proposed varsity credit, the athlete seeking to assume five courses in his or her athletic season will be checked with an overload form, thus encouraging the student to think twice about assuming such a large academic and extracurricular load.

I do not think awarding credits for sports lends itself to holding students to high academic standards. On the contrary, athletes would be able to take two fewer academic courses over their college careers in order to meet graduation requirements. Moreover, I do not think the faculty has any obligation to give athletes a break with academic pressure. Participating in sports is optional, and should always take second place to academics.  Students also do not need a formal warning when they take a full schedule of classes in addition to participating in sports – they know what they are getting into. I do not think that awarding credit will be seen as a warning not to take more academic classes, but instead as an excuse not to.

While I agree that it is justifiable to award athletes credit for participating in varsity sports at my college, I do not think it is because sports are the equivalent of an academic class, or because doing so would force athletes to seek approval before taking extra classes, but rather because varsity sports are comparable to already-lax physical education classes. By awarding course credit for sports, the faculty will give athletes the same break that they give to students who take yoga instead of chemistry. It is not that I think there is anything wrong with that; I just think the faculty should admit it.

In November, I wrote a post detailing my struggle to learn from PowerPoint presentations in my Operating Systems class. I’d like to take a moment to explain what kind of lecture style I do enjoy learning from.

One of my favorite professors teaches philosophy at my college, and I’m taking his Modern Western Philosophy class this semester. I don’t prefer his class because I like philosophy any better than computer science, but rather because I always feel like I’ve learned something from his lectures that I couldn’t have found elsewhere. His style is what I think a real college course should feel like.

The surprising part is not that he lectures without PowerPoint, because many professors also avoid presentation software. The surprising part is that I prefer his chalkboard notes over PowerPoint despite the fact that his handwriting is almost completely illegible, suggesting that there is a quality of “chalk talks” that is useful to my learning style beyond just being able to read the notes. I have some ideas why this might be:

• I focus on the presenter instead of the presentation. With both professor and a projector in the classroom, the presentation becomes a main character in the lecture, and sometimes overpowers the professor. This is especially true if the professor does not write his own slide deck. Taking the projector away can help the professor sound much more knowledgeable and in control of what he says.

• I don’t need to read the board to know what the professor has written. That he makes a note after a talking point is enough to know that it should be written my notes, too.

• Chalkboard notes are concise, while badly-made presentations contain overly wordy slides. No one would sit and take the time to transcribe as much in chalk as they could in PowerPoint. Also, professors write notes on the chalkboard in real time, which removes the temptation to sit and read a lengthy slide that has been prepared beforehand.

There is another aspect of my philosophy professor’s style that is specific to his subject which makes his lectures more effective. His class is about thoughts and events which occurred hundreds of years ago, and the class is situated in a building completed in the 1897. Sitting in an old-fashioned classroom, with an old-fashioned professor, taking old-fashioned notes just puts me in the right mood to learn about historical thoughts and figures.

I concede that the class would probably be more effective if I could read the chalkboard notes, but I still do not think that this class would benefit from PowerPoint. While switching to PowerPoint might help me read the lecture points, it would change the entire style of the class, including the amount of notes presented and the focal point of the lecture. It would also add a flavor of modernity to an otherwise deliciously old-fashioned class. I’ll take my philosophy just the way it is, despite despite the illegible notes.

My spring semester started two weeks ago and already I feel swamped. I’ve entered a semester-long robot competition in addition to having a normal course load, and I have summer internship applications and club responsibilities to juggle. The hardest part is that whenever I have a free moment and I just have to take a break, I can’t relax without thinking to myself that I have a full to-do list, and I don’t have any excuse for not doing those things that have to get done.

I’m doing two things differently this semester to organize the deluge of work, and it has worked well so far.

Google Calendar and Tasks

I discovered this semester that if you turn on Tasks in Google Calendar and assign due dates to them, they show up on the calendar with little checkboxes. When you check an item, it draws a satisfying little line through the title of the task. I use tasks for my things to do outside of class, like club duties and internship deadlines. Those show up in orange. I have a seperate green calendar for homework, so I can see at a glance what has an academic deadline and what might be put off until tomorrow. I also have calendars for class times and general events.

In the past, I’ve kept track of homework assignments in my head. It worked well throughout high school and had worked out all right until now. But without my calendars, I don’t think I could keep up this semester. It’s amazing how many times I’ve thought to myself, “I feel like I have nothing to do; there must be something!” at which point I check the calendar and find that yes, there are at least five or six things I should be doing. Having a ready list keeps me on task. Just having everything on the calendar also helps me realize how little time I actually have and how important it is to schedule well.

Avoiding Reddit

I’m a big fan of Reddit.com. I like the community, and I always find interesting articles to read. I even participated in the first Reddit Secret Santa last year. The problem with it for me is that once I click a link or two, I find myself clicking more, and I can never get away from it.

At some point over winter break, I decided that although I was having a very relaxing vacation spending hours a day on Reddit and never getting out of bed, not being productive was getting on my nerves. I’d think of lots of projects I wanted to work on, and at the end of the day, nothing happened. To break that pattern, I decided that for my new year’s resolution I would remove the Reddit link on my browser toolbar and abstain from the site altogether. I didn’t think I could handle never visiting Reddit again, so I decided to stay away until February and reevaluate my decision at that time. Well, it has been a month, and even though I miss keeping up with news and memes, avoiding Reddit has been wonderful for my productivity. I’m a little sad to say that for the sake of my classes I’m going to have to continue my resolution into the rest of the spring semester.

I noticed today that as I frantically scribbled to keep up with my philosophy professor’s lecture, there was an audible hum of typing in the classroom. It was the first time I noticed that I could count more students using netbooks than notebooks to take notes in class.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like to take notes with a pen and paper. As I’ve discussed previously, the act of writing helps cement the lecture material in my mind better than passive listening does, and studies have shown that it’s not just me [pdf]. Still, I know that my old-fashioned ways are quickly going out of style.

I don’t know if typing notes aids memory as well as taking notes on paper does, but I do know that it does not work for me. I decided at the beginning of last year that it would be nice to bring my laptop to class so that my notes would be neatly organized (and actually legible for once), and changed my mind after only one or two classes. I could never type fast enough to keep up with the professor, and every five minutes I found myself cursing at not being able to copy the diagram on the board. It was a relief to have my Five Stars and Pentel R.S.V.P.s back at the end of that little experiment. Considering my negative experience, I wonder how my classmates can keep up. I know that not everyone learns the same way I do; maybe my peers don’t need notes as copious as mine in order to do well.

If notes are going digital soon anyway, maybe there is a technology that will make up for my ineptitude with typed notes. Tablet computers have been around for years, but I know only one person who uses one in class, and even then she types rather than using the stylus to take written notes. (Maybe Apple’s soon-to-be-announced tablet will bring tablet computers into more common use, the same way the iPhone has with smartphones.) There are also electronic pens which record your written notes for later uploading. I was able to test-write one such pen at MacWorld Expo last year, and it was all right. It would probably mesh well with my way of learning, but I don’t trust myself either to bring one pen to every class or to keep it charged. I’m also not sure if my busy schedule can accommodate the extra step of uploading the notes from the pen to my computer.

Of course, I’m making the assumption that my classmates are actually using their computers to take notes rather than goof off online, which is a huge leap of faith and a different rant entirely. But even though I’m not keeping up with the latest tech trends in note-taking, I’m doing what works best for my learning style, and I’m okay with that.

I subscribe to the Google Student Blog primarily for scholarship announcements, but the majority of posts are ideas on how students can use Google Docs to simplify their lives. Sometimes the suggestions are good, but most of the time the ideas are too mundane to be of much use. The most recent post, however, is just patronizing. Apparently the Google Docs help site has set up a new Docs for Students page, designed to “highlight how various student populations can use Google Docs in their daily life.” Unfortunately, rather than sort tips and tricks by document type or class subject, the content is distributed among five stories of fictional students using Docs to accomplish tasks that might be better accomplished though other means. For example,

Lisa is a French major and very excited about starting her classes. On the first day of class, the French teacher doesn’t speak a word of English. Lisa’s French is good but she realizes she needs some help. To test her ability, she pastes an article about soccer from a French newspaper in a Google Docs document and tries to understand what it says. Then, she uses the Translate document feature to test her knowledge. Turns out, she doesn’t know as many French words as she’d like to, but this helps her improve her vocabulary.

Granted, I appreciate being able to translate chunks of foreign-language text into English. I am just amazed that Google thinks that it isn’t enough to inform me of the feature, and that it would be better to frame a story of a French major around the feature so that I might better relate to her. It sounds as though it is supposed to appeal to a middle school student, rather than a college student. (A college student should at least know that Lisa would learn more effectively if she looked up the unknown words herself, rather than translating the document all in one go.)

Sadly, it gets worse.

Lisa’s life long dream is to study abroad in Paris. She applies for a study abroad program during her Sophomore year. To help her gain an edge on the competition, she decides to use one of the many professional looking resume templates in the Google Docs template gallery and picks one particular template called Blue Rays Resume. Between the styles on the template and her well written essay in French, she impresses the judges and is selected to go to Paris.

I’m no human resources expert, but I shudder at the thought of sending out my resume using that template. Google does have a few nice resume templates, but that isn’t one of them. What is Google trying to tell me here? If I use Google Docs, I could be chosen to go to Paris like Lisa?

Google could have made a well-organized list of reasons why college students should use Docs. There really are some compelling reasons, including no cost, ease of collaboration, and the ability to back up documents and access them from any browser. Instead, they wrote success stories for us to relate to. I’m just not impressed.

December is a particularly hectic time for college students: in addition to all the normal holiday preparations and festivities, we have an extra hurdle: finals! For this reason, most of us can’t get out in time to get a Christmas tree, even a little one, before it’s time to go home for winter break. So, inspired by Pooh’s tree from Winnie the Pooh and Christmas, Too, I decided to bring a little holiday cheer to my dorm suite by making a wall-mounted paper tree. I think it worked out pretty well, and only took an afternoon to print and assemble. (Click images to enlarge.)

You’ll need:

• Christmas tree template image
• Color printer and white paper
• The Rasterbator
• One string of tree lights
• Painter’s tape
• Scotch tape

The first step is to print out your tree. I used The Rasterbator to transform my tree template into a huge, rasterized image of my tree in easily-printable PDF format. You can adjust the size of the image to fit your wall space; mine came out at 30 pages, measuring about 40″x60″. Make sure to follow the instructions on the website for best printed results.

Once you have printed out the tree, lay out the pages on the floor so you can see how they should be taped together. Trim away the white space from the each pages. Since very few printers can print all the way to the edge of the paper, all the pages will have some white space on the edges. The pages that have interior tree segments should be trimmed with care because the edges need to match up when you tape them together. The edge pages can be trimmed a little less tediously, because a little extra white space on the edge isn’t so noticeable once it’s on the wall.

Once each page is trimmed, the tree is ready to assemble. Piece the tree together upside down on the floor, then tape the edges together. I found that I had to use quite a bit of tape to get the edges to line up nicely and not show the wall through the final picture, but there’s probably a better way that I didn’t think of. Tape was easy to use, and I had it on hand. Either painter’s tape or scotch tape would be fine for this image because the whole thing is dark, but I’ve taped rasterbated images together with painter’s tape before and been sorry later because the blue tape showed through the white parts of the image.

Use painter’s tape to mount the assembled tree on the wall. I had to use painter’s tape because my dorm won’t let me use anything else on the walls, but other means of adhesion probably would have worked just as well. Make sure you mount it near an electrical outlet so you can plug in the lights. Next, using clear scotch tape, starting at the top, tape the Christmas tree lights on the tree, winding your way down until you get to the bottom. I liked the clear tape because it blends in pretty well, but I had to use a lot of it because it doesn’t stick terribly well. Make a paper star to tape on top and stick it up there.

I think the final result looks pretty nifty. We put ours about a foot above the floor and over a little bench so we could put presents underneath. It won’t fool anyone during the day, but at night with the colored lights on the effect is rather striking. It would also look pretty cool with paper ornaments taped on.

I say it’s a dorm-style tree, but it would be great for anyone living in an apartment, condo, or other small space. It’s also quite a bit cheaper than buying a real tree for me, because I have a quota with my college’s printing system that I haven’t maxed out yet. I’m not sure if printing 30 color pages would have been more expensive than a real tree if I had to pay for the ink myself. It’s certainly cheaper once you factor in the cost of ornaments.

If anyone else tries this out, I’d love to hear about it!

One of my favorite classes this semester has been Intro to Cognitive Science. I took the class because more than a few of my friends who think the same way I do are Cognitive Science majors, and this semester the class was taught by one of the rock-star professors in the department. He’s a great lecturer, and I think I’ve learned a lot from the class about cognitive function, as well as the crossover between cognitive science and computer science. I might even get more into studying artificial intelligence before I graduate.

That said, while I think very highly of this professor, he did something I thought to be ridiculous this past week: he assigned a group essay.

I dislike group projects as much as the next person, because I worry that my group members will slack off and leave me with the brunt of the work. But even if they’re all hard workers, it still doesn’t feel fair to me that my grade will be partially determined by the efforts of people I have no control over. So to take control and ensure a good project, I feel pressured to take extra time and help the group members who need extra coaching to produce a decent piece of writing, which still does not seem fair.

Just having a group project is one thing, and I probably would have been okay with a different kind of project. Usually in these sorts of situations the group members can divvy up the work and put it all together close to the due date, spending minimal time consulting with other group members. But this assignment was a group essay. Essays, as I know them, are supposed to have a single point of view throughout to create coherence. How were we supposed to write the paper, I thought, without sitting together the whole time so that the person who wrote the conclusion knew what the person who who wrote the introduction had written? How was one paragraph supposed to follow smoothly to the next when the next paragraph had not been written yet?

The worst part, I felt, was that this was the last assignment in the class before finals season, meaning that during the time everyone was rushing to finish final class projects and study for finals, we also had to find time to meet as a group. It would have been more courteous, I thought, for the professor to have assigned this project much earlier in the semester.

Despite the fact that I spent a significantly larger amount of time worrying about the paper than actually writing it, the method we used to divide the work actually worked fairly well. Everyone did their research and came up with topics for the essay independently, and we went with the best idea among the four of us. The essay prompt came with 8 questions that had to be answered, so we divvied up the questions and answered them each in a paragraph or two. To put the whole thing together, we used Google Docs to compile our sections into one document, then sat around a table for a couple hours, each on our own laptops, reading through the paper, asking each other questions about what we had written, and editing simultaneously (Google Docs is cool with simultaneous editing like that). The end result did not flow as a paper written by one person might have, but it was at least coherent. My fellow group members really liked the simultaneous editing idea, and they had fun watching comments and corrections appear spontaneously in their writing.

I understand why students have to complete group projects: working in groups doesn’t stop in school, and we’ll probably be doing collaborative work the rest of our lives. For this paper specifically, the professor told us outright that the reason he assigned it was that no one researcher writes a scientific paper alone anymore, and that articles are now expected to include descriptions of how each author contributed. However, the difference between group projects in business and in schools is that in business there is usually a designated group leader, whereas in school the group members are expected to agree on everything democratically. This slows down the group’s progress and increases the need for constant consultation, which is the part that bothers me the most.

In retrospect, I guess assigning a group essay was not all that silly. I did learn some cool stuff about how the brain processes vision, and I did introduce my groupmates to the wonders of Google Docs. But the experience was still stressful, and like most students, I wish my professors would refrain from assigning group projects altogether!