6 score and days ago (clever huh? ) I was preparing for a new semester at the University at Buffalo.  Little did I know what I would be getting myself into.  I was enrolled in 17 credit hours (8 undergrad, 9 grad) with a really split schedule.  This and an unexpected Teaching Assistant position pretty much took all of my energy away for most of the semester.  Included I’d like to provide some tips after looking back that might help others facing similar schedules.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my schedule in such a way that I could have classes in a long solid chunk like I have had in past semesters.  I wasn’t expecting this to be hard to handle, but I was expecting a bit of lost time throughout the semester.  This is because most of my work is project based and I’m not very efficient with doing work when I have an hour here and there to do the work.

The reason why is because it takes me a good half hour to an hour to get into an efficient working rhythm.  I prefer having a large chunk of contiguous time to handle any chunk of work that I need to get done because I enter a mood and I work very quickly and efficiently.  Programming is one of the huge tasks that I do that requires large chunks of contiguous time.

During the semester I couldn’t find large chunks of time to get work done and this probably hurt me a little bit, but I did get through it.  I managed to get by through losing the concept of a “life”.  Most of my weekends were spent working on projects that were due, and I was limiting my sleep to 6 hours a night.  During the last 2 weeks, I had so much work left to do and so little time that I finally gave up on the concept of getting it all done in time.  I switched over to a “best effort” approach and started getting my 8 hours of sleep every night again.  This probably saved me the most because I quit worrying as much and I started being more productive.

After adjusting, I did start a paper todo list.  I found this to be very helpful compared to my computer based todo list because I could cross stuff off and it would still appear on the paper.  My computerized todo list removes my items from the list so I can’t see what I’ve accomplished.  This was a huge set back for me until I realized it was happening.  I will hopefully have a solution to this problem in the next few weeks to prepare for next semester.

Here are my tips: If you are in a situation where you don’t have enough time to do all the work, I recommend taking the stress out of the picture and start sleeping again.  I found that losing sleep wasn’t helping the problem at all.  I just couldn’t focus.  I also admit that I didn’t get everything done, but the tiny details were the things that I left out.  In my best effort approach, I quit doing the stuff that wasn’t worth a lot of points for my time and that was a huge help.  Another huge thing that helped was a todo list on paper.  This managed to keep me organized until I could finish and proved to me that I was moving forward.

All in all, I did enjoy the last semester.  I learned a lot from it in many aspects that I can hopefully take away into future tasks that I need to handle.  I would like to thank everyone who had to put up with me last semester, I probably wasn’t in the best of moods most of the time

Anyways, I have a short rant about the bookstore on campus.  As you probably know, most bookstores for colleges are a huge ripoff operation focused at making maximum profit because they know they can do that and get away with it.  Anyways, I thought I’d just talk a little bit about my experience every semester and what I started doing this semester to fix the problems that I’ve noticed.

The first semester I came here, I wasn’t sure about what books I needed until the final week, so I figured that I would get them from the bookstore.  That semester, I know I spent close to 500 dollars.  That is just outrageous for a mere 4 books.  Pretty sad, isn’t it?

After that semester, I began planning ahead and finding my book titles / isbn numbers out ahead of time.  The bookstore isn’t very helpful with this either.  The bookstore hates to post the book picture on their online store, so I end up always going to the bookstore about a week before class with a pen and paper to write down everything I need.  This works fine unless the professor hasn’t yet decided on the book they wish to use.  I’ve found that the bookstore also hates ordering books early, so they rarely have all of the books until the first day of class  (even when the professor ordered them ahead of time).

Unfortunately, the first semester I took this approach, I ended up spending top dollar on 2 books in the bookstore 4 days after the first day of classes, I also waited in line for a solid hour, something I rarely do because I plan ahead to avoid it.  I have learned that professors don’t really expect students to have the books until a week into the semester.

After that semester, I took a slightly revised approach: look on the professor’s site for the isbn, etc ahead of time, and use the bookstore as an aid on the last day before classes.  For the past few semesters, this has worked out really well for figuring out what I have to get.  I then normally go on ebay / amazon and pay for 2-3 day shipping guarantees.  This hasn’t failed me yet, and the longest a book ever took to get to me was 4 days into the semester.  It was also about 75% cheaper than a bookstore only option.

One word of warning with buying books online, normally online books are cheaper and can sometimes come as an international edition.  The international edition is normally the same as the edition in the bookstore, but normally paperback and smaller.  There are always 2 versions of a book, an international cheap copy for third world countries, then the US version which is expensive and sold in the US.  Using the internet, you usually can find an international copy that is located in the US so shipping is still fairly fast.

I haven’t had an issue for international editions that I’ve been able to get, but I still watch out for online homework keys.  These are normally packaged with bookstore books.  Unfortunately, I have found out that when you have to have these keys separately, they end up being as much as the book in the bookstore with the key.  So, if I know about online homework (I usually have a clue on the first day of class or bookstore “bundles”), I will wait for the first day of class to verify that before I get a book and get suckered into buying a key from the book publisher’s website.

In addition to my programming class, I’m taking French, Algorithms, and Probability.  Of the three, French takes about 3 hours of my week for homework, probability takes about 4 hours of my week reading the book so I know whats going on, and I put about an hour a week into my Algorithms course so I know something when the test comes later this month.

Now that you have an idea of what I’m doing for college, lets move onto AdminReference.  In my free time, I’ve been looking at numerous design ideas for the site.  I’ve pretty much made up my mind that it will contain a main site and a forum.  The main site will simply be an introduction to what the site is about, while the forum will be where community members will be able to interact with each other.  The service will be free unlike experts exchange because I want an easy reference thats freely available to anyone who needs it.  Initially the site will be ad free, however if traffic grows so much that I need to put a lot of funds into the site, I may insert an ad or two although I am not a fan of advertisements on websites (I feel they slow the site down and hurt its appearence).  Eventually after some content is added to the site, I may work on making a wiki-like interface where tutorials on the forum (or whatever guides are posted) will automatically be tied into a dynamic electronic reference manual that is easily searchable.

Thats all that I really have time to blog about for today, so stay tuned for the next blog within a week