#university

Next quartile, I will not only be working and doing my thesis, but also taking a weekly Dutch lesson and be a TA for a Deep Learning course. Did I make a bad decision?

Today it marks the first month since I officially started my Masters project. I don’t know how I feel about it. I expected to have done more progress, which scares me a bit. But I’m positive it’ll turn out well.

The grade of my penultimate exam at TU/e was just released and I passed! I was a bit worried about that one. Now, I’m just waiting for the grades of a report delivered this Sunday and another project delivered over a month ago… After this quartile, I won’t have classes anymore 🤭

Quartile 4 is practically finished for me. After a week of 4 exams, I feel tired. I don’t recommend to anyone having to do 4 3 hour exams in a week. Nor today, nor ever.

Even though I only had 3 courses, I had to repeat an exam from last quartile which just made everything more stressfull. In Portugal, if I had to repeat the exam, it would be usually 2 or 3 weeks later. Here, I had to go through over 2 months to repeat an exam and do it along 3 others.

I’m hoping these 4 exams were good though and I really hope I passed everything now. It’s been some stressful months and the covid situation is doing everything but helping.

I hope you’re doing well :) I am going to try to enjoy next week. Because in two weeks, more classes again. I wonder how the Dutch students live with no breaks in between quartiles!

A few weeks ago I talked about being undecided whether or not to accept my MSc offer at TU/e. In the meanwhile, I’ve decided to do so. In the meanwhile, it was revealed today that Dutch universities are planning to to keep online teaching up until February 2021 which is a bit of a bummer. Moving to a different country just to stay in a house for a few months until I can finally get out doesn’t seem to be the best experience ever, nor would I get any of the benefits from an international degree. Let’s see what’s gonna happen on the next months. For now, I’m accepting the offer.

In August, I’m supposed to start a new adventure: I’ve been applying for a few Universities to do my Masters degree in Computer Science somewhere else other than in Portugal. I’ve received some rejections and some acceptances and I’m tempted to choose studying the next two years at TU Eindhoven. However, Covid-19 has just put me in a position where I’d never thought to be.

First of all, I’m feeling that I’ll never return to Lisbon which, I know, is childish. But that’s a feeling I’ve had since the moment I left the apartment where I’m living in Lisbon. Secondly, we don’t know what’s going to happen: is the exam season going to be delayed? Are we having more exams to compensate the professors that didn’t find an alternative evaluation method? I’m pretty sure I’m not going to have any more physical classes until the end of the semester so that’s not what worries me most.

Other than that, looking at Netherland’s strategy to fight this new virus, I don’t agree with it (group immunity… hundreds of people are dying there and there are barely anyone recovered) which may be showcasing how bad their healthcare system is? I don’t know because, obviously, I’m not there.

I don’t know… I just feel I should not go. Let’s wait and see what happens and if my mind changes or settles in some solid idea.

Classes are back, tests are back, projects are back. After @jlelse’s posting about his classes starting I thought it would be a great idea to do a small recap of what’s happened in the past two weeks and what’s about to start. I’m in the final year of my Bachelor’s, in the last semester. My classes started two weeks ago and from now on I have project deliveries every week until the end of May. In addition, I also have tests and oral presentations in the middle. This Friday I need to deliver the first part of a project, then Monday I might have an oral presentation, Tuesday a test and next Friday two project deliveries.

In the meanwhile, we’re also building a compiler for compiler’s course! So far, it seems to be the most interesting project we’re doing this semester. We’re definitely not building the entire compiler, there’s a lot of boilerplate done. We’re using tools such as Lex and YACC to build it. So far, so good.

Due to the workload I’m gonna have now, I also took the conscious decision to pause my work at Protocol Labs until the end of June. It’s unfortunate because that’s something I really enjoy doing. However, I feel it’s the best to focus on my Bachelor’s now.