What I hope to achieve in CS3216

As the holidays draw close to an end, I contemplate about the upcoming semester. I am taking CS3216 this semester, and after hearing horror stories about it from my friends, I am highly excited but worried over it. Half of me thinks: "I have taken CS3217; I should be able to handle it", but the other half thinks: "I certainly can't underestimate it". After all, CS3216 is vastly different from CS3217, with the latter focusing more on programming and coding.

CS3216, on the other hand, focuses more on problem solving, and requires a different skill-set from CS3217. With that in mind, I will list down the things that I hope to learn during CS3216:

Firstly, through the different projects, I hope to fiddle with the API and learn how to use them. Since there will be a Facebook and a Mobile-Cloud HTML5 assignment, needless to say, I will most likely end up learning how to use the Facebook API and how to code in HTML5. In addition to that, the Saturday lectures will also teach me various topics. Out of all the topics, working with the Amazon Web Services will probably interest me the most, as it is the only topic that I have not really encountered.

Secondly, the people that I will be working with will be from different faculties and will have very different skills. In every project, we are expected to work with someone whom we have never worked with before. As such, I hope to learn to work with them, and in the process, gain an exposure to the ways they work. In addition, I also hope to challenge myself by taking different roles in each project, and hopefully, filling in the gaps in each project nicely.

Thirdly, I hope to learn to manage my time well. It is hard to juggle five modules (especially since I may be tutoring as well), and after reading about CS3216, it seems that I have to juggle my assignments within CS3216 well too. With the three projects, the seminar, and the case studies, it seems that if I don't work hard and smart enough, I would not be able to find time to sleep in this semester at all. Hopefully, after surviving CS3217, I would be better equipped to cope with CS3216, although it may mean staying in school every weekend to code.

Fourthly, I hope to learn to write better. There is a blogging component within CS3216, and while I am not aiming for the best-written blog within the module, I still hope to write well enough so that other people can understand my thoughts. To be honest, I was never a particularly good writer, but I would like to take this opportunity to figure out how to write better. (As such, this post is taking quite a long time as I read through it again and again to make sure that it is coherent.)

Lastly (and probably the most important thing), I hope to build useful things. CS3216 gives us the freedom to decide on our projects, and as such, I hope to build things that are useful, no matter how 'small' they are. Actually, I got this idea from Chun Teck, a friend of mine who took CS3216 last year, because I was worrying over the fact that I had not managed to brainstorm any ideas for the projects in this module. He convinced me to look at the current problems I face and make apps to solve them. As such, I don't believe in an app that can solve everything - there are too many problems to solve in this world, and because of this, I hope to build applications that would help solve things that may be big or small, but are still actual problems nonetheless. 

With these five aims in mind, I hope to be able to survive CS3216, and that it will be a fruitful experience for me. 

Also, to everyone in CS3216, please eat more fruits and don't fall sick during the semester! Let's all work hard together!