Blog - /Personal

Much to my annoyance, the undergraduate Programming Languages class has been canceled. This marks the 4th straight semester where it has not been offered. I'm running out of time to take it, so I'm going to try to convince the professor of the graduate level Programming Languages course to let me in.

The first step — visiting the Grad Program office — was painful. Initially I brought forms for two different graduate level classes (the other was a Distributed Programming course). Annoyingly, the guy in charge of approving the class mainly focused on my grades, rather than the courses that I have finished or my initiative in working on Lisp projects outside of class or my willingness to prepare for the class by learning ML. So now it's up to the professor of the class as to whether I can take the class.

I decided to retract the form for the other class and just focus on the Programming Languages course, since it is the thing that I most desire to get into. The guy I talked with seemed somewhat relieved that I dropped the other class, so I might have made a bit of progress there. I wasn't terribly happy with being reminded about how low my semester averages were. So I feel both challenged ("I'd bet against you", eh? What an encouraging thing to tell someone.) and depressed.

I'm hoping that by taking the week off from all programming, I can throw myself into study until I feel up to par again. I really want to improve my semester GPA this time — can't afford to have it be monotonically decreasing until I graduate.