Thursday, April 28, 2016

As Sophomore Year Closes...

     As of today, at 9:36, I am official done with my second year of college. Looking back over the semester, I have learned an immense amount of information. My programming style and thoughts on attacking problems has improved significantly. This semester I joined our computer science department's ACM club and started attending their programming jam sessions where my team, camel_case, won first place for a majority of the sessions. While this has helped me get better at my planned attack on problems, I owe a majority of my programming improvements to my Data Structures and Algorithms class led by Bill Manaris. These improvements include error handling, my stylistic choices for programs, and abstract data types. For one homework, I had to make a DNA molecule where I implemented a conjoined linked-list. Each index of the left helix had to point to the right helix and vice versa to form the bond between the nucleotides. While the exams for this class were very hard, they improved my knowledge even further. I was able to expand my knowledge while taking an exam which is not very common. Exams are designed to test what you know, but these exams challenged us to go even further. One question on my final exam was to reverse the items of a queue by using a stack. I definitely didn't understand what the question was asking on the test (it was worded very strange), but now it makes so much sense. Stacks have a method pop() that gets rid of top element and returns it's value. I could have simply populated the stack by dequeuing the queue (FIFO) and then setting the stacks values (LIFO). I could then repopulate the queue by setting each item to what is returned by pop() (the last one in is the first one out making it in reverse order once added back into the queue). I couldn't imagine being able to write ADTs for binary search trees, linked-lists, trees, stacks, queues before this class. There's much more information we didn't even get to cover in just a semester such as hash-tables, heaps, and others I don't even know exist yet. This is only the end of my second year at the College of Charleston and there's so much more I'll learn because of our great department.