Sep 3, 2017

First week at the "Software engineering and management" program in Gothenburg

The first week has gone by and I was kinda surprised to realize that it had only been one week, not longer. Maybe because we've done so many things already, it feels like it should've been longer than a week. So let me tell you a few things about the week.

New program:
This program has existed for several years, but we are the first students that will take this years program, since it has been remade. We wont have all the same courses as students in previous years, and hopefully this remade program will be structured even better than how it was before.

The math:
When I first came here I was a bit worried about how well I was going to do in the math course, and of course since we've so far only covered the very first topic of the math course (which was "Automata"), it's still to early to say if I will fail or succeed in it. But, atleast it started out well.

The school gave us a video to watch about automata (dfa's to be specific), and I didn't understand anything. I tried looking in the book, but still didn't get it. So instead I went to youtube and found a bunch of videos on the topic that explained stuff in a way that I could understand.

So the next day when I came to school I was actually the one helping a fellow student understand some of the concepts, which felt good for someone with such low selfconfidence in their math-skills such as me.

So atleast this week, math has been fine, and it has even been fun! Automata is really interesting.

The programming (Java):
The programming course has also gone fine for me. I am really happy that I at least have some experience with programming in Java. Since I am not sure how well or fast I would be able to grasp some of the concepts if they were explained to me here.
I feel like I am not a very fast learner when it comes to some things, so it has been really good for me to come prepared.

This week in programming we used things like String, int, char, Scanner etc. Basically just very easy programs where the user enters some input and we give back an output.
Next week we will start doing loops and stuff like that.

About the computers:
It's only been a week, but so far I like the school and the campus. The only downside is that we have to bring our own laptops to the lectures and study-sessions. We need them mostly for programming, but also for math since they post exercises online.
So for the past few days I've been breaking my back carrying my 17.3 inch 3+kg asus laptop around, along with other things that we need to bring to school. It's okay, I can manage it of course. But since it is not ideal, and not something I wanna do for the next 3 years, I decided to buy a smaller laptop.

I hope in a few says my second-hand macbook air will be at my door, so I can leave my asus at home. Macbook is new to me, and I don't like the OS that much since I don't really know how to use it. But I think it is quite impossible finding anything slimmer than a macbook air, so it was my number 1 choice!

About the name of the program "Software Engineering and Management":
I chose this program because I want to learn programming, also, the international setting of it really interested me. Meeting people from all over the world, speaking English and all that, is really fun!
But even though I felt like I did a TON of research about the program before choosing it, turns out I did not understand everything about it after all.
Its's called "Software engineering and management", which I thought meant "The engineering and management of software". But no. The "management" part does not stand for the management of software, but for the management of people. They will in this course teach you how to be a manager (basically the person in charge of the team) as well as software developer.
Therefore we will also have many courses that aren't necessarily related to programming. Which is fine by me though, since those courses also sound interesting!

Anyway I am going to wrap it up here since this post is long! Let's hope next week is as good as this one was, and that my second-hand macbook wont be a piece of crap (cuz I can't afford a new laptop)!

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