Unfortunately the beginning of this semester has not been like the rest. In a word, stressful. Nothing was through any fault of my own… I think.
Here’s a short backstory, almost two months ago.
I picked intended class in early April, and as what happens in the OMSCS program, when you pick a class, you join a waitlist if the class capacity is full. You may wonder why not register early to get a slot. Well, students are assigned time tickets that give them a specific time window of when they can register and or pick a class. In all my semesters at Georgia Tech, I have always been on the waitlist of a class, but I’d always get a slot. This semester broke my perfect pattern. Summer being the shortest semester in the year, and my new job, I was hoping for an easier class; so based on the reviews from AI Ethics former students, I settled on that as my Summer 2o21 class. I was actually really looking forward to it and picked it as soon as my time-ticket was valid.
The beginning of the semester was quickly dawning and I was still no where near the top of the waitlist. I was beginning to stress out, and I don’t handle stress well unfortunately. Anyway, I still had a little hope that in a week, I’d move from 60’s or was it the 50’s to the top and register for AI Ethics and Society and have an easy semester.. hopefully. On the day that class was expected to begin I was still on the waitlist. Now I was really freaking out. But there was still a glimmer of hope. During the first week of the semester, all waitlist holds are opened and students are free to register for their classes. The email informing students of when the waitlists would open was sent out and I immediately set a reminder on my phone because I’m on EAT and Georgia Tech is on the UTC timezone. I didn’t want to even be a second late. As soon as my clock hit 4pm, I switched to the registration portal and well, registration for that class was closed. At that point I didn’t even care anymore. Stressing wasn’t going to solve my problem.Long story short, I settled on a Networking class because all my other alternatives were closed, and it seemed doable during this summer semester. Definitely not my first, second or third choice and it will need more effort, but I intend to get the most out of it.
There’s more…
Having settled in the class, registered and all, I had a week’s worth of content to get through in just a weekend though that wasn’t new to me. I am guilty of pushing lectures a day to their deadlines. The second bump on the road was my laptop.
I have an M1 MacBook Pro. I got it for the sole purpose of having a laptop good enough to get me through all the heavy school projects I’ll have, so the irony is that this class’s project cannot run on my laptop. The project runs on a virtual machine and as it is, M1 chips are not yet capable of running the virtual machines we are used to. VirtualBox and VMware. They are the most common and reliable that’s why most class’s virtual machines are built to run on them.
No more problems I hope
The end to this first part of semester 4/10 is that I managed to get my hands on borrow a Windows laptop with good enough specs to efficiently run Virtual Machine and I’m now happy to say I’m on my third week of class with a project deadline slowly creeping up and I have’t began yet 😟😟😟😟
Wish me luck.
Good luck