Personal Development

Over my first semester at The Ohio State University, I have greatly improved upon my time management skills . Because everything was on a set schedule before college, each day was pretty simple for me to plan out. I would go to school from 7:00am to 2:30pm, have practice from 3:00 to 5:00, go home, shower, eat dinner, do homework until about 9, watch a TV show with my family, then head to bed and do it all over again the next day.

Now in college, things are much different. The coursework is more rigorous, the class times are more spread out, and no one is telling you when to do what. There is not a set time to go to practice or workout, and there are not parents or teachers making sure you go to every single class and get all the homework done.

Because of this independence, however, I have found that I gained a lot of responsibility. I make myself get up to get to class on time; I map out what busses I can take there; I plan out when the best time is to workout; I find what extracurricular events I want to attend, and go to them on my own.

Time management was not easy for me in the beginning of the semester. It took me a little while to adjust to all the extra free-time, and all the extra work to do. I found myself creating to-do lists constantly, which eventually turned into my nightly routine. Making lists keeps my organized, and helps me focus on what I need to accomplish day by day. I now have adjusted to college and love the flexibility of each day. Time management is an important tool that I know I will use throughout the rest of my life. I am thankful that college gave me the opportunity to discover time management techniques that work for me.

HackOHI/O

HackOHI/O 2018

From 7:00am on Saturday October 27th until approximately 6:00 am on Sunday October 28th I was in the Ohio Union ballroom with about 800 other students from all over the country coding and working to create high-tech solutions to challenges given by large scale companies.

I created a team with some of my friends from my computer science engineering Java class, and we worked all night. The beginning of the day went by very quickly. Enterprises such as Honda, Chase, and even the Ohio State environmental council first presented their challenges. Then we, the students, got time to brainstorm ideas and decide whether we wanted to try to build a solution for one of the companies or if we simply wanted to build something else (like a game) on our own.

My friend Annabelle and I decided we wanted to use this time to further learn about the functions of Java, so we chose to build the game Mastermind while other people in my group got a start on the layout of how to create a program that uses algorithms to detect fake news. The start of the Mastermind  project went very smoothly. We used our knowledge from class to create methods and an outline for the game. This only took about an hour. However, it took about more 8 hours, much research, determination, and some expertise from a Google worker to work out a single issue in the code. The expert fixed our problem using a technique we have not learned yet, which made me feel better about not getting it right away, and made me happy to learn something new.

Although this is much longer than I would have ever expected to work on a game, I can truly say I learned so much from that experience. Despite the frustration, I never gave up. I didn’t ask for help from an expert until I had exhausted every other idea in my head and option on the table. The satisfaction of the game working properly now makes all that time and effort worth it.

HackOHI/O 2018 was a fantastic experience, and I cannot wait to do it again next year,  and see what I learn then.