Welcome to the Digi-Jungle

Hooray! The semester has finally started (two weeks ago) and I am fully settled in, I am now officially a relocated Californian. School has been going well (so far) and I am actually really enjoying the material which will probably help with the retention of said material.

There are a ton of things to write about but I am going to skip over a lot of them because if I didn’t this post would be just long enough for people to not want to read it. So I just want to touch on a few topics; my hopeful posting habits for the semester, my professors, and my first program.

So since the start of the semester at DigiPen I have been feeling out what my schedule will end up being like for the next few months. I can say with the utmost confidence that free time will be a precious commodity but this will hopefully not influence my planned posting habits. I want to be able to write one or two entries a week and they will range. I will probably end up talking about school a lot but I will sneak in the occasional post that somebody will actually want to read.

As far as talking about my classmates go I will only refer to them by their nicknames to ensure some level of privacy. Sure other DigiPen students will know who I am talking about but then again we are a small school and everybody (should) know everybody.  

Moving onto my next topic my professors, all I can say is holy crap. I will be honest I came to DigiPen with semi-low expectations for my professors, and I can gladly say that they completely obliterated my mental image of them. I have had two weeks of classes now and I have not had a single lecture that was boring, dry, or confusing. All the material has been presented to me in an organized fashion by a person who knows what they are doing.

On top of having intelligent professors they are also human. They actually give a crap about the students and will go above and beyond to help. The best part about my professors though is that all of them understand one important concept a lot of educators just seem to not pay very much attention to; they know the best way to teach us, is to entertain us.

All of the professors are like clowns!

Through the guidance of my super-awesome professors today I was able to do something I never thought I would ever do. Write and run a program from nothing in C and have it work. Now I know this doesn’t sound amazing but to me it is. I am a person who knows next to nothing about computer programming and how things work on the software level, so to be able to see my work in command prompt was an amazing feeling.

The program itself was not anything amazing it just ate some numbers and spat out a table but doing this simple exercise taught me so much. I was able to better understand a basic command like “printf” and “scanf.” Not to mention that getting things to align properly can be a pain in the ass. Along with that I also realized just how important it is to keep your code organized while working on it. Sure it was only eighteen lines long but I saw some people writing well over 30 lines of code to accomplish the same thing.

It does math... I think.

I would post a picture of my actual code but this assignment is still not due and I don’t want to go around posting the answers to school work all over the interwebs.

The weekend is finally here and I am happy to report I am going into it with a huge sense of accomplishment. I will probably end up spending a lot of it with my C programming book and my math notes instead of playing video games and having awesome parties (note: I don’t have awesome parties.)

Comments

[Erbo]

They're not having you learn C on a Unix system? For shame! The history of C and of Unix are closely intertwined, and learning one without learning the other is needlessly handicapping yourself.

Back in the days when I was in school, I took the C programming class when it was just a 1-unit course, and even then, we were using Unix systems (in this case, Microsoft Xenix on IBM PC AT machines, but still, it was Unix). The following year, they expanded that to 2 units...and then, a year after <i>that</i>, they replaced it with a full 4-unit "Introduction to C and Unix" class. (Not sure what they're doing now...they seem to have replaced all the lower-division courses I took.)

Do yourself a favor: Try out a Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu. It can be installed alongside your Windows environment and will give you exposure to C programming in something more like the environment it started in. Skill in Linux will also make you more versatile, and perhaps more desirable to potential employers down the road. (Since you say you're in Redmond, I can't help but wonder if your school's CS program is subtly biased towards the needs of the dominant employer in the region, i.e., Microsoft...which is <i>fine,</i> if you want to work at Microsoft, but if you don't, you might want to learn some other stuff, too, and keep your options open...)