So, now what? I’m not entirely sure. Over the years I have had several plans for post-graduation. Now none of them really apply. My unexpected stay in Madison has kind of reconnected me to my original childhood plan of wanting to live in Madison. My uncle recommended checking out Epic Systems (which looks really cool). The job hunt will start in earnest soon. We’ll see what it turns up. (If nothing else, I need to pay for my car repairs…)

Boy, did she.

The heart of what she did is she moved the bulk of my tuition expenses over to an expense of my computer consulting business. I went from owing money to getting refunds for both state and federal. At first I didn’t really understand what she did. Then I was a little uncomfortable with it. Slowly I realized that it was a perfectly justifiable way of looking at things. (I wonder how much of the complexity of tax preparation is learning how to look at things in a different way.)

Then came the big problem; getting the e-file web sites to duplicate what my mom had done. I finally got all the numbers to come out the same way as my mom’s and submitted my taxes. Now I just sit back and wait for the money to come rolling in.

The professor mentioned to me that he was very forgiving on due dates for students that were in their CIS internship.  I told him that he really shouldn’t have told me that.  My attendance dropped drastically. I always intended on going to the next class, after I caught up on sleep or got the assignment completed.  That just didn’t seem to happen though.  (For the record, I was doing just fine in my other classes, it was just this one that I was having the problem with.)

Two weeks ago the professor sent out an email saying that the midterm was that Thursday.  Panic time.  I met with the professor.  He was very understanding about the whole thing, much more than I had any right to expect.  I did a couple of days of frantic studying and took the exam.  Then came a week of spring break.  Today I showed up for regular class for the first time in quite a while.  He handed the midterms back and I got a solid B.  Not perfect, but damn lucky.

This is the sort of stunt I used to pull the last time I was in college.  Except that I used to just stop going to class, never to return, and I’d fail the class.  So this is an improvement. Far from perfect, but at least I am passing the course instead of failing it.

We got the exams back on Tuesday and I was pleasantly surprised to see that I got a 87. The class median was 81 and only two people got a 90 or above. However, as I looked over the exam, I found a question that I was pretty sure wasn’t wrong.

To paraphrase the exam question into plain English, you have a kindergarden class of 65 students and you ask the question “What is the student’s gender” for each student. Obviously there are two possible answers, male or female. The exam question asked if you would get every possible answer at least once in the class of 65 students.

The “right” answer was yes. If you take a class of 65 kindergardeners there will be both males and females.

However our professor had spent a day focussing on how unlikely it was that our class has 4 “Andrews” out of the 20 students. During the exam I decided that even though it was highly unlikely that the class would be all male or all female, it was still possible and therefore the answer had to be no since I could come up with a counterexample.

I asked him about it after class today and got him to agree with me. The extra 3 points will get me a 90%, a straight A on the first exam (i.e. before any curving), and a nice start in the class.

*sigh*

CIS 480 is the real interesting one though. It’s basically my “internship”. I am in a three-man team and we are working on a project for a local business. Personally, I think we lucked out. The project was actually finished by earlier 480 teams and all we have to do is implement a list of 17 changes. Most of them look really easy but I might have a surprise coming… The weirdest part of the class is having to dress up in a suit.

Anyway, this semester looks like it will almost be fun. Here’s hoping.

We had to do a resume and cover letter. I’ve been meaning to update my resume for awhile now and this was the perfect excuse. Now I have a resume that’s ready for my upcoming job search.

I’ve had a lingering dread of my spring math class, especially once I found out that the required textbook is Discrete Mathematics. I went poking around on the web and I found the instructor’s homepage. It included a link to the syllabus and homework for the class. (It appears that most of the homework has been removed since I last looked.) I feel a lot better about the course now. The homework looked like something I could handle without too much trouble. It’s certainly a far cry from the ton of calculus that I was fearing.

So two of my spring courses look like they will be easily handled. That just leaves the infamous final project in my major. Well, as long as the other two don’t present a problem, I should be able to handle anything that the final project throws at me.

I took my last final this morning. I didn’t study as much as I should have and I wasn’t terribly confident about the results. But it was over. On my way home I stopped at the grocery store. I couldn’t resist sitting at the blood pressure machine and giving it a try. My systolic (the big number) and pulse were stunningly high. I closed my eyes for 30 seconds and relaxed. Then I took it again. The systolic was lower by 20 and the pulse was lower by about 15. Apparently finals stress me out more than I thought.

Back during the last time I went to college, we didn’t see our grades until they were mailed to us weeks later. Turns out things are different now. You can use this here Internet thingie to find out your grades as they are turned in. I checked a few times today, not really expecting anything to be posted yet. Surprisingly my 313 grade was posted a mere four hours after the final was over. A couple hours after that my 330 grade showed up.

They were both A’s.

That would be my first 4.0 semester in, well, in my entire life? Okay, it’s only two classes, but it’s still a 4.0 semester! That’s quite a change from my former pong ponging between being on academic probation and off academic probation. I don’t know exactly how it will affect my overall GPA but it looks like it will go up by 0.2. Not bad for two classes. And it gets me a little breathing room (and off of academic probation).

Hopefully this will silence my doubters. (That includes the little voice in the back of my own head that was telling me that I was going to fail at this… Again… That voice was wrong! HA!)