I started my junior year of college

Created in August 05, 2024

2024

A new semester has just started for me

Just two days after my research stay concluded, I started a new semester that makes me more than excited. This is my schedule:

Fall 2024 Schedule

  • Operating Systems Concepts
  • Analysis and Design of Algorithms
  • Software Engineering
  • Business Development

There are two courses that stand up to me and they are the OS and the algorithms course. It makes me happy that I am finally taking a course on algorithms, it makes me feel that I am reaching an advanced level on my degree; I have some projects in mind that I want to work on and I am hoping to do research in both of them. I know that it is hard to do any research at my department, let alone in fields that are somewhat niche –if we compare it to artificial intelligence nowadays– but I am confident that if I study hard and look at the most recent literature, I will be able to contribute.

When it comes to Operating Systems Concepts: I believe the professor will give the lectures leaning towards the practical side of things such as installing a GNU/Linux distribution, introduction to the terminal, some commands that you can run on it. I am certain that we will not write kernel modules or even write a single line of code. That is why I took the task of looking for resources where I can practice that. The one that looks more interesting is this lab from this Graduate level MIT course. It looks challenging but I think I can go through it.

I also looked up journals and conferences for operating systems and algorithms. For operating systems I looked up SOSP:ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles which is upcoming in two months and OSDI: USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation which had its last conference in 2022. For algorithms, I looked up ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, happening on January 12-15, 2025. I don’t have the knowledge to even understand the work presented here yet but I hope in the future I can at least attend to them.

Although the one that doesn’t interest me very much is Business Development, I should not take it for granted and still study for it. All of us know how tech companies shock the world and change the way we do things. Knowing the basics of a business is beneficial for my degree.

As always, I like studying from different books and for my courses but my main books will be the following: