Mehdi at Strong Lifts posted a book list not too long and I took note of the mental training books. Mastery was not weight lifting specific, so I picked it up to see what it had to say about mentally preparing yourself for training that I could apply to both swimming and lifting.

To my surprise, Mastery really is not a book about training at all, but a much more general book. The book’s point is that the path you take is more important than the end goal. Mastery comes through practice, and you practice for the sake of practicing, not just to achieve some end goal.

That point, the point that the path is more important than the goal, is a very valuable lesson to me. Achieving goals only makes up a fraction of our life, while the in between time makes up most of our life. If you are constantly rushing between the in between times and only enjoying the achievement of goals, then you are not enjoying most of your life.

Mastery is broken up into three parts, an introduction, an explanation on how to maintain the path to mastery and aides to help you maintain the path.

The first part explains what the author really means by mastery, and gives some example personalities that are not on the path to mastery, and why they are not. The author dubs these non-mastery paths the dabbler, the obsessive and the hacker. This is certainly an enjoyable section where you can easily see which personality you fall into. My free time is spent as the dabbler, constantly exploring subjects that I am interested in, but never getting further than a shallow understanding of the topic before moving on to the next topic. I have gone through periods of the obsessive in the past, and am currently the hacker in several areas of my life. What I learned from Mastery isn’t necessarily that being in these states are bad, but they might be an indication that I am not doing what I actually want to do. This section also introduces the idea that to become a master, you have to love practicing the art.

Part two is all about the path, and the path is practicing. Not only is it practicing, but it is practicing the right things, focusing on the subtle nuances of what you are doing and enjoying the small improvements as well as seeing something you have seen a thousand times in a new light for the first time. This part includes both practical suggestions for finding and following the path, like what to look for in a mentor, as well as more of the metaphysical aspects, such as keeping a focused on your intent versus just going through the motions.

The final part, the aides to progressing along the path, is the weakest part of the book. There is some good information in this section, such as making use of deadlines to create extra energy and focus in your practice, but most of this section will read like a restatement of points from earlier in the book. Repetition is common in this genre of books, so I am happy that it was limited to a third of the book, but the method of reinforcement used was well done. Instead of just restating the points, the author actually refers back to the chapters where the points were introduced.

This was a very good book for me. I have always sought after goals to use as a guiding force in my life. This as been very difficult to do, as several things I enjoy doing do not easily lend themselves to goal setting. I will continue to set goals for myself, but after reading Mastery, I will focus more of my attention of enjoying just doing the activities I do, instead of always focusing on some future goal as the driving force behind the activity.

In preparation, I am reading up on Spring. If my contact does solidify, I will finally start in on Options. Either way, I plan on doing intensive studying for a while.

Only a 125 pages read so far this weekend. Hopefully I can double that before the day is over.

When I needed to learn Perl, I went the other way around. I read and worked through all the exercises in Learning Perl and then followed that up by reading the first two thirds of Programming Perl. This was all accomplished before I had written more than a 1,000 lines of real perl and I think this gave me a much stronger base for understanding the how and why of things. Of course when I learned Perl, I was able and willing to devote 80 hours a week to the task, and going through Learning Perl and Programming Perl probably only took 3 weeks.

Last year when I went to talk to by soon to be adviser about working on my Master’s thesis, he said that he wanted everything written in C++. No big deal I said, but I have never taken the time to develop a strong ground work in the hows and whys of C++. Thus I ordered C++ Primer Plus.

I was planning on reading the entire book over Christmas break, but instead spent all my free time working on my thesis. Obviously, I had waited too late to do the right thing and did not really start on the book until after graduating. I am certain that the code for my thesis could have been better, but certainly was no where near the worst that has been written. After graduating, I made it one of my goals to finish the book since I really enjoyed writing C++ for my thesis.

Reading this book gave me some insight into C++, but it is no Programming Perl. What I now have is background in C++, and know that I probably should read a book just on IO and spend a very long time working through template examples. My weakness in C++ is really what has been developed in the last, oh, 15 years.

I think the same justifications hold for a traditional CS education. You might not actually use the knowledge directly, but it creates a basis of understanding that will help accomplish what you actually do use on a daily basis.

Coding the Wheel is my favorite blog right now. I could care less about windows programming, but with his posts about poker bots, I get all excited about the neat hacks that make the windows world work.

The coolest thing for me about graduating is how quickly I was able to finish. Originally, I thought it would take 5 years to finish, and I thought that was pushing it, because one semester I would need to take 4 classes. So my class load when like this, Fall 2005: 2, Spring 2006: 4, Summer 2006: 4, Fall 2006: 5, Spring 2007: 6, Summer 2007: 2. Thats it, done! Instead of taking 5 years, I took 2.

Something that impressed my wife was that I graduated Magna Cum Laude, which means she probably graduated only Cum Laude

I went back to school because I disliked my job, and I felt it was holding me back from finding another position. I am sure this was true, but I am glad that I went back and finished my degree. I learned a lot and was exposed to different ways of looking at problems. Also, a lot of time was drudging through BS, but in the future, I will not be filtered out by HR for not having a degree, which is a much worse type of BS to put up with.

Maybe in six months I will post another graduation announcement.

Why?

A student’s GPA really only matters for their first job. A new grad has very little to offer a future employer in terms of qualifications, nor many indicators of the quality of employee they will be. What a student does have is a GPA.

For four years, school has been a full time job. For four years, there have been other students performing the exact same tasks. Given this situation, GPA is actually and ideal indicator of comparing the student body.

A high GPA displays two things that an employer would like to have in an employee:
1. Follows the rules
2. Out performs the average

Considering a 2.0 is the minimum required GPA to graduate from most schools, what does a GPA below 3.0 tell a future employer?
1. Does not follow the rules
2. Underperformer
3. Or both

If school is important, then GPA is important. If school is not important, then why be a student?

Of the 19 hours, only 7 hours were CS classes. Even of the 2 CS classes I took, one was a project based class, and thus my semester was very paper and presentation heavy. By the end of the semester, I had completed a 40 minute, a 20 minute, a 10 minute and a 5 minute presentation on various technical topics, and written a 21 page, a 10 page, two six page and several short papers on both technical and ethical topics. The fall 2006 semester, I took 5 upper level CS courses, three of which were hard. This semester was more difficult, not because any of the classes were actually difficult, but the sheer volume of work required.

I am happy with how the semester turned out overall. There are a couple classes I wished I had done a little better early on, but in the end, the grades don’t really matter.

What I am not happy with was what I put my body through during the semester. The semester is 16 weeks long, and for about 13 weeks my body was abused. A typical week for me included 8 sandwiches with chips, two frozen pizzas, two meals out and one home cooked meal, bottle of wine and lots of coffee. Most of the semester I didn’t work out at all, and when I did, it was no more than a single workout in a weeks time.

Now how I treated my body during the semester is actually much better than most people treat their bodies every day. But my body has come to expect certain things. Exercise is high on the list, as is vegetables. I don’t like vegetables, but I normally consumed 7 to 10 servings a week, and about four weeks into the semester I was worried that a complete lack of fiber in my diet was going to cause long term damage. Fiber and vitamin supplements were added to my diet, and as soon as school started letting up, I was back to working out.

School starts back up next week, four days a week, so my workouts and diet will be similar to the spring. Hopefully I can come up with a meal and workout plan that is a little more healthy this semester.

In 2006, I took the following classes:

• Computer Science II
• Discrete Math for Computing II
• Computer Architecture
• Music Appreciation
• Logic
• Composition II
• Data Structure and Algorithms
• Organization of Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Operating Systems Concepts
• Advanced Algorithm Design and Analysis
• Introduction to Machine Learning
• Automata Theory

In Spring 2007, I plan on taking the following classes:

• Game Theory
• Introduction to Digital Systems
• Professional and Technical Communication
• Politics and Values in Business
• Art and Science of Anime/Manga
• Data Mining

It should be obvious from my Spring schedule that I finally sat down with my advisor and found out about the classes I still need to take that I wasn’t expecting. This plan leaves 2 classes to take in the summer to graduate. Any upper level CS class and any other upper level class should leave enough freedom to graduate this summer and not have to pull a strange work schedule.

It has been an interesting year at school, and an interesting time after returning in general. I have learned that people are really lazy. I consider myself to be lazy, but a full time undergrad student knows how to waste time like no other.

I learned a lot from Machine Learning, Automata Theory and Advanced Algorithms. Machine Learning was truly a difficult class that covered a board area of topics that needed a fair bit of understanding to use. This was definitely my favorite class and I plan on taking the intelligent agents track in grad school, which machine learning falls into.

I was also looking at CMU’s degree plan. Yep, I cried. I had a director at Motorola ask me why I would spend all that money to go to school, when I could go to school locally for a 7th of the price. Of course, at the time, I was shocked, dumbfounded and had no answer. Of course I should have gone to a state school. A degree is a degree.

A degree is still a degree, but let me point out the difference in how you go about getting your degree. At CMU, if you review their plan, you have about 6 core classes. After that, you have different areas with breadth, deepth, capstone and other fancy names. They usually give you 4 to 8 choices to complete these. Finally you have your in major, upper level electives. Lots of choices, only the first 6 are actually set in stone.

UTD on the other hand has the similar 6 core classes. These are your calculuses, physics and other classes no one really likes, but everyone has to take. Then fun should being, but at UTD, their are major core classes. No choices, no alternatives. Instead of a group of classes to choice from, you have 8 defined classes that everyone has to take. No substitutions without going to the dean, which I can tell you from experience, is pretty much a waste of time. Finally, you have your in major, upper level electives. If you are in CS, this is great, but if you are in SE, you have 3 tracks to choice from, 3 to 5 classes per track. So instead of choice what to take, you are choosing the class you are least interested in.

UTD treats their student body like they are just advanced high schoolers. You should have seen the look on my advisors face when she came across a grad level class taken during my sophmore year at CMU. “But a 500 level class is usually considered a grad level class.” Man I really wanted to say, “No shit lady, CMU doesn’t baby its student like UTD,” but I held my tongue.

CMU has just as many hoops as UTD, I have no doubt. CMU offers the same piece of paper as UTD. The ROI from UTD’s piece of paper is significantly higher than CMU’s because CMU costs 7 times as much in tuition and there is no way to complete your degree while working full time, unless you are working for CMU. But if I was returning to school just for my own intellectual benefit, with no concern for money whatsoever, I would take the much more difficult task of going back to CMU.

Of course, if I would have thought about the financial consequences of going to CMU from the beginning, I would have never seen what I would be missing out on.