Summer School

I made a couple of miscalculations this summer.

Last year I took a MySQL course, which is only taught during the summer at SJSU. It’s designed to run as an intensive 10-week course. And yep, it was intense — the kind of situation where you end up knowing about 1000% more than you did before you started, but you recognize that you’re still just scratching the surface. It was a good class.

This summer, I’m taking a front-end web development survey course. Most of the material is a review (not all of it, but I’ve been at least exposed to most of the concepts and have a little bit of experience with the code), so I was not worried about tackling it over the summer. I was so unbothered by the prospect that I added a four-week seminar that examines copyright law through the lens of digitization of special collections (also only taught during the summer, by a professor I like).

Those were both miscalculations.

The seminar, because it’s designed as a short course covering a specific (very niche) topic, required a lot of reading, a fair amount of writing, and some engaging assignments. It was heady stuff — interesting and dense, and full of important information. It ended last week.

The WebDev course is primarily taught in the Spring and Fall semesters, as a 15-week course. For the summer, that course is compressed to 10 weeks. It’s also a graduate-level survey (similar content to an undergraduate course of this type, but you’re expected to do a deeper dive and produce a more “finished” product). And as it turns out, there is a significant difference between a 10-week intensive course and a compressed 15-week course. I wouldn’t change the course structure or content; I really enjoy this kind of work — any coding, or working with data, is absolutely my jam. My primary frustration with the situation is that there is not enough time to finesse or explore anything beyond what’s in the task list, because the timeline is so compressed.

The latest example: we had to produce a navBar and style it, which I did (with flexbox!), but it’s not responsive for mobile screens (yet) because a) it wasn’t explicitly part of the assignment, b) it would have required another big technical leap (for me), which I did not have time for, because c) there was another — totally unrelated — piece of the assignment to complete.

Sometimes you don’t finish projects… you just have to end them so you can move on.

There are other things going on that are making the summer more challenging, including a bigger volunteer load and some unforeseen family stuff. It’s tempting to be all dramatic, like, I’m in hell, but that would be inappropriately hyperbolic; it’s just a more than I expected… sometimes an uncomfortable amount of more.

[Side note: almost all of the projects I do for my MLIS program in some way involve the organization I volunteer for, because there’s a lot of information floating around an environmental education organization that is responsible for animal care. These projects aren’t affiliated with the OLC, but I discuss them with the director, and if anything I do is relevant to their interests, they’re free to use my work. I strongly suggest that if you decide to pursue graduate work, you have some experience (volunteer or paid) that you can draw on; I have found it extremely helpful for contextualizing what I’m learning in class.]