october

halloween

justin scawful • 31 october 2021

i've had a pretty rough couple of days. stress from school on top of the winter causing a shift in my mood has been a lot to take in so suddenly. it's been so rainy here i can't help but feel gloomy. and it's hard to talk about because i can't really say anything's like wrong wrong i'm just feeling down and it's harder to motivate myself. i've slipped up here and there on assignments or missed a quiz and even though i came out the gate really strong i hate when i let things fall through the cracks because i don't want it to turn into a downward spiral. but also, that worrying about the contributes to the deterioration that would beget an emotional crash. i tried to let some of the negative energy out yesterday but skating five miles, to the cvs and back. it was pretty nice and helped make me feel better in the moment, but it really is like a whole energy around me now. i was sad i didn't get to do anything for halloween either. i had work all day, nicole was working til 11 and then i also had a cs project that is due tonight that was actually pretty difficult and not very fun so i struggled with it.

updates

justin scawful • 11 october 2021

this is easily one of my worst years in terms of blogging frequency, i've been so busy with school and living in new jersey that i haven't really taken the time to sit down and reflect at all. so this is my opportunity to do that. it's been a little over three months since i came to new jersey. in the time i've been here i've spent a lot of time adjusting to my new life, and i've enjoyed it a lot. i'm a bit more busy now with my fall semester of school completely online. i took 17 credit hours with classes like data structures and algorithms, linear algebra, probability and statistics, intro to music theory, western civ 2, and unix terminal bootcamp. any free time i've had when i'm not doing school work is either spending time with nicole or just trying to relax and do something for myself. i've spent some time playing video games as well as a lot of programming. i also had a brief period of creative motivation where i produced a couple songs with a new synthesizer, sylenth, that i bought and that was fun. just yesterday i went to six flags which was fun, although it was raining and didn't let up for a couple hours which was disappointing but we made the most of it. i have a season pass so i can always go back when i want to. on saturday nicole and i went to an orchard and walked around which was really nice.

i've also been applying pretty heavily for internships for next summer. i did a whole career fair and met with like 10 different recruiters, submitted my resume to a ton of places, took a lot of internship online assessments (coding challenges) which is a very new thing for me. i made a big spreadsheet of all the companies i've applied for and have kept track of it really well. i've mainly focused on applying for trading and financial companies because i've been especially interested in that field of technology as of late, but have really been throwing my resume at anyone who will take it. it's tough bc a lot of the programming i've done is for personal projects and building applications with windows and API calls from scratch, which doesn't expose me to that leetcode esque algorithmic coding that is needed to do well in the coding interviews. so it's been a lot of learning as i go as i adjust to this style of programming and the expectations that these interviews have for cs students.