I don’t think I’ve ever had midterms like I did this week. I guess I’ve always had some kind of mid-semester tests, but it seems like this week everyone scheduled their tests for the same week! Well, somehow I made it through it. A more in-depth summary follows….
Monday I had my CprE 308 (Operating Systems) midterm. I did spend some time Sunday night studying for it, and I think I did pretty well. I tend to memorize lists (like 4 conditions for deadlock) and then never need them. This time I had one question exactly from a list… so that was pretty cool. Tuesday morning I had a CprE 532 (Information Assurance) midterm. Like 530 last semester, it was open book/open notes so I wasn’t too worried about it. There was a lot of writing (at least for my rambling self), but again, I think it was pretty simple, and I’m not too worried about it.
Wednesday brought up my VHDL midterm in 483. Yikes! We had no idea what we were expecting because we were never told… and since we only heard in lecture what we’d already done in lab, we just assumed it would be a VHDL problem. Well… it was. The first half (in-class) was just defining a system in blocks and specifying what each wire meant. The we’d have all spring break to develop the VHDL. After spending 15 minutes of him explaining the problem to us, and another 30 minutes of me scratching my head trying to figure out how the heck I would implement this, I only had 5 minutes to scribble some wires out before time was up. I just hope my implementation next week makes up for this bad half.
To make matters interesting, Thursday was the day for my senior design group to present to the class. We practiced on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning. Thankfully we knew most students didn’t pay attention to these things, so we weren’t too nervous. One of the instructors, as it turns out, wasn’t paying attention either…. great. All-in-all, I think we did really well, so maybe we’ll survive the Industrial Review Panel next month.
Friday I thought I was home-free until I got an e-mail saying I could move ahead in the interview process for one company… which meant a 3-4 hour programming exam… Friday morning. Well, at least it worked well with my schedule. I wanted to kick myself about 5 minutes after I left when I realized I did one of the programs wrong, but hopefully they’ll see that I approached the solution correctly. The math/logic problems were actually kind-of fun, and I think I answered them correctly and quickly.
Next up is spring break, where I’m supposed to code up this 485 midterm and also complete Project 2 for CprE 308. *Sigh* I didn’t know what I was going to do these days anyway. (Since I’m writing this entry a week later than the posted date, I can say that I really only spent two days working on these before I finished them, so I did get some relaxation in!)