I recently finished my first summer semester at Northeastern University, which was all online and remote due to the current pandemic. At Northeastern University, the semester is divided into two parts, a summer I and summer II, where each part is half the length of a normal semester and you can only take up to two classes. It’s not required to take both and many only opt to take one summer semester. However, I decided to take both just because I had nothing better to do over the summer. Here’s what my transcript looked like:

Summer I

CS 3500 — Object Oriented…

This is a piece I wrote for a university English course I took that focused around how algorithms are derived and affected in the real world. The project was about gathering large amounts of data about yourself and visualizing it to show how we make choices when reading and writing online.

I’ve heard of stories where people would close out of Instagram or Twitter on their phones and unconsciously open the app right away. For me, that is Reddit. I will be on my computer working on homework, then unknowingly open a new tab and go on Reddit. What I…

I was inspired by other YouTube channels talking about the classes they took in college. I attend Northeastern University as a computer science major with a minor in business analytics, as of now. I say this because my major has switched quite a few times. I came with a couple of credits from high school, so I was able to get out of many classes that others would have normally taken.

Here was my transcript for my first semester of college

CS 1200 — Leadership Skill Development: Also known as a waste of time. This was a one credit course…

While this whole social-distancing thing is going on, I was browsing Reddit the other day, and I came across a post that caught my eye. It was a post on r/smashbros about the user training a neural network on Smash Bros professional player, Leffen. Then, the user created a Twitter account for the model, called DeepLeffen, to generate its own random sentences based off Leffen’s comments online. The original training set was all of his tweets and Reddit posts, which ultimately led DeepLeffen to post a narrow range of topics. The user fine-tuned the model by adding 1 million Reddit…

What is Stack Overflow?

Created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008, Stack Overflow is a crowdsourcing site that involves questions and answers regarding programming. The website serves as a platform for users to ask and answer questions. It also allows users to vote questions and answers up or down and edit questions and answers in a fashion similar to Quora or Reddit. Users can earn reputation points called badges for receiving upvotes on questions and answers. Users unlock new privileges with an increase in reputation like the ability to vote, comment, and even edit other people’s posts. While quite similar to Yahoo…

I like to think of “big data” as data that can’t be stored in an Excel file. Data so large that requires its own field to find ways to analyze such amount of information. In our modern world, big data is used everywhere. Google suggesting our searches, YouTube recommending videos, and advertisements that pop up on the side of our browsers are all examples of big data being utilized by top companies. While big data typically pose ethical questions, I have one question regarding its epistemic values: with how prominent big data is, do we know what we want?

Big…

This was an excerpt of a 10 page guide that I wrote for next year’s CS TA’s at my school. As shown by my last post, it’s clear that I’m quite opinionated about the whole college admissions process. By no means am I trying to undermine anyone’s successes, and I hope that I am not offending anyone with this short post. The stuff I say are not facts, just my opinions.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you also want to major in CS. I might as well include my thoughts into that as well. I don’t…