First online semester at UIUC

This is Minh, a Computer Science freshman at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Having just been through a really ‘odd’ first semester, I want to reflect on what I have gone through and what I had learnt.

The above picture marks one of the proudest moment in my life until now. Given that, I had had lots of plans for my freshman year: make many friends, join school clubs, do research with professor, get an internship in the summer all at once 😎. But well, that’s “in theory”!

Though admitted on Fall 2020, I decided to take a gap semester and start from Spring 2021, hoping that coronavirus would be somewhat gone by then. Unfortunately not, so I took my first semester online.

I made myself believe that remote experience is going to be just like “normal”. It was a big mistake! At the moment, if any international student asks me whether he/she should study remotely, I will most likely advice them to take a gap year — I’m saying this as a student who survived the semester with a 4.0 GPA. Online study? Possibly doable, but not worth it for me!

This article contains two parts: my pains and gains throughout the semester.

Pains

The first and most furious issue with remote learning is time difference. I’m living in Vietnam, which is literally half an Earth away from USA. So my schedule would start from 9:00 pm to 3:00 am local time 😢. Before the semester started, I told myself that I was a nocturnal who would sleep at 2 or 3 am, so I should be fine. And I was NOT. Converting time alone was an annoying task. You had to always have 2 timezone in your head to organize your tasks and collaborate with others. And hey, watch out for Daylight Saving Time ⚠️. In addition, studying remotely means that you have to adapt to the life of both timezone. Classes stopped at 3:00 am did not mean that I would be sleeping at 3:00 am. I had homework to do, I had to socialize, I had to go to office hours. So sleeping time during the semester really varied. There were even days that I slept at 0:00 am but also days that I slept at 10:00 am. This was brutally unhealthy, I was craving to take a nap…, and at some point, I even slept during lectures due to exhaustion. I also had to adapt to my family schedules, avoid sleeping in the “noisy” time. The apartment on top of mine was drilling during the day, and it was a disaster.

My advice here is to make a plan or somewhat a pattern of sleeping.

Personally, I felt that it was really challenging to make new friends in a virtual environment. In Zoom meetings, no one wanted their camera on! And it was hard to really be closed to someone just by talking to them over the internet. At some points during the semester, I was isolated, not connecting well with local friends, not making many new remote friends. (Disclaimer alert: I’m an introvert.) Whatsoever, I did try really hard to connect with other students by joining clubs, working on projects together, participating in student programs, etc. Still I struggled socializing, I barely talked to other teammates after the events were over. Fortunately, I did make one closed friend, and I would not have made it through the semester without him.

Other things that I struggled with were difficulty in managing information from course websites (10 websites in total for 6 classes 😅), office hour queue took forever, etc. It would be way too long to list all of them!

I would usually not recommend others to study online like this. Given the above-mentioned issues, it is really likely that someone might suffer from mental breakdown or something like that doing school remotely. However, if you truly believe that these 2 main issues that I mentioned will not be a big deal, maybe give remote study a try! Some of my friends who went to different schools enjoyed their experience.

Ah, enough complaints! Looking back, I’m glad that I made it through the semester. I had some interesting accomplishment too, though did not quite match with my illusion before college.

Gains

I’m more assured of my interest in computer science, particularly software engineering.

I took a class called Software Design Studio where students got to the surface of making a fully operating software. We learned a little about OOP, testing, and design patterns. I really enjoyed it despite the fact that assignments took me 12–24 hours weekly (Students complained like hell about the workload). It should not have taken that long, but I realized I love spending time redesigning my program in different ways and documenting my code.👌 See my final project! I eventually got some opportunities out of the class, one of which is gonna be my internship this semester. Although the class size was huge, Professor Woodley was very responsive and closed to his students.

I got into a bit of computer theory by taking Discrete Structure, most importantly learning some proofs. I don’t know if I’m going to enjoy theory or not, but I did quite well in this class, almost got an A+. However, I don’t think I’m the theory guy though. Noteworthy, I really appreciated Professor Fleck lecture style and how she made new concepts so simple!

I contributed to an Open Source Project for the first time thanks to HackIllinois Open Source Fellowship program. Our team worked on the transcribe feature for Apache Tika. Thanks Tika team, amazing experience! Happy to contribute to more open source projects in the future.

Trying to finish my first actually ‘helpful’ project for the community

I and a team in the Women in Computer Science club had been working on a Course landing page that will help students put information from multiple course websites into one place. This would help students like me manage our course schedules and information better. We could not do much during the semester since everyone’s schedule was messed up. Right now, I and one of my friend is still working on this project. Let’s get it done by the end of summer!

Failed to ask for a research opportunity!?

So basically I emailed a professor whose area of research (audio computing) sounded really interesting to me to ask for research assistant position. I was so surprised receiving his reply. It was no news that he rejected (since I’m a completely newbie). But he offered guiding me to get used to this area, and then consider me for a position in his lab. So I have been getting to meet him once after a while to learn, so it is definitely a gain!

My first internship opportunity

I literally failed almost every programs / interns I applied to. But finally, I got an unpaid internship offer! I’m helping to develop an app that helps educate programmers to write code cleaner and more organized. This is professor Woodley’s interest out of class, and he referred me to the team.

An important friend

Credits to Tuan Tran for dealing with my questions and complaints throughout the semester. I would not have survived Calculus 3 without this guy.

More time for myself

This is quite surprising! When I was younger, my schedule would be filled with extra classes, so if any free time, I will rush to video games. Although I was really busy with school this semester, I had much free time alone to explore myself. I started practicing the piano more and more again and watching anime 😜. I really enjoy listening to music and play some classical pieces, especially pieces in the Romantic period. I play piano because I find peace doing so out of the stressful school work. At the moment I’m practicing Chopin Waltz L’adieu.

Anime? Well, there are times during the semester that I really hated myself for messing up everything. Watching anime is like living in a different world for me, it brought the positive vibes somehow, and allowed me to escape from my troubles for a while. Anime of the semester: “Your lie in April”, “Attack on Titans”, “Love is war”.

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I also gained a lot of skills to deal with online study difficulties, such as scheduling, writing emails, and asking for help when in need.