Catching Up on Life

I planned on writing a blog entry solely on how I think. Most of the following is what I typed instead, so I decided to make this an entirely different entry.

I'm typing on a Microsoft Surface Pro that I bought just over three months ago. I'm on the Bolt Bus from Portland to Seattle. I just finished a trip to see family for four days. The day before I left (on May 11th), I finished my final CS250 assignment (completing my final incomplete for the semester).

I finished all five classes I took this semester and I'm four to six credits shy from being an official junior (third of four years). I need to take at least a waves/optics physics course and a communications course to be fully caught-up.

Now for some back-story...

I moved into a new apartment this semester to be closer to school and help out a friend who was having difficulty paying rent. It's been a lot easier to focus and keep my mind clear when I'm able to walk to school.

I knew this semester was going to be difficult, so I didn't elect to take physics to help ensure that the semester would go better than the last. I didn't take communications in my second semester because I wanted to diverge and take a class that everyone in my degree program wasn't taking. I took a mythology course then instead.

At the beginning of February (nearly half-way through the semester), my sister gave birth to her first child. They named her Violet Joann Bender. There were severe complications and they had to make the difficult decision to remove the baby's feeding tube and let her starve to death. If they had not decided to do this, Violet would have grown up with nearly no mental capacity and likely would not have survived long.

With the help of friends, family and faculty, I decided it would be best if I were to go home and see baby Violet before she passed. I informed my instructors and ensured that I understood that I might not pass a few classes if I left. I was gone for two weeks and enjoyed a thoroughly heart-warming experience to be near a lovely newborn who would not last long here on earth. I cried many times with family and sometimes alone.

I worried the entire time I was gone that I would return to see that faculty had forgotten why I left or wouldn't understand the situation I was going through. I found that most were very understanding (a few had issues communicating with me), but my game project team was not. They wanted to fire me because they were afraid that I would "drag down the team's productivity."

This upset me greatly and instead I left the team to work with one other individual. We worked hard on our little game project and sacrificed nearly all other classes to complete our project with a satisfactory grade. I spent some time studying math and programming my calculator for the final exam, but other than that, I did no other homework.

Near the end of the semester it was easy for me to see that I might need to get an incomplete extension for two classes. I would have gotten an extension on the other three classes if it would have helped significantly. I was able to pass two classes with a lot of help from my game project partner, Kyung-Hun Kim. I owe a passing grade in networking and Game 250 to him.

I passed math solely on my own merit. Dr. Ton Boerkoel would return extremely few of my messages (email and phone). I didn't work on any of the regular homework, but I studied hard in class and reviewed all of the homework that I had missed.

I finished all four of my incomplete assignments in data structures in six working days and all three of my graphics assignments in three additional days.

While I was visiting family, I checked my grades and was very pleased to see that I had passed all of my classes. I got straight C's (some plus, some minus). I look forward to doing much better in the fall, but it bothers me when I think that I might have just as difficult of a time with next year's assignments.