CMU Week — Sleeping is a Luxury
May 23 ~ May 29, 2022
Hi 👋 I’m Sunny. This is CMU Week!
Last week, CMU Week — Why Was 1st Week of Class Kicking My Ass?, we talked about how excited I was battling through the first week of 15513, which was the summer course I was taking in advance, and the mindset I gained.
This week, it was even tougher!
I had been watching sunrises for the past 10 days, due to the extreme work loads from 15513 , and still had to get up in the morning for my full-time job. Despite working remotely, I obviously hadn’t been having enough sleep lately.
The lack of sleeping is literally affecting my mental health.
OK. This sounds a little bit dramatic.
It’s actually more like “Fuxk man! I’m so tired. I want to sleep!”
Still, there’s a limit to a human’s tolerant level.
I knew something had to change. Glad that I was introspecting. It helped me find the problem early and make actions before things get too ugly.
What have I learned?
- Finished 9 hours of lectures: 15513 had approximately 4 lectures per week and each lecture took around 1.5 hours to complete. Yet, it took me 9 hours to complete the weekly lecture. Why? First, I had some technical difficulties during the first week, so I couldn’t start studying the lectures until this week. Secondly, I was still working on lab0. Finally, and also the actual reason, I was overconfident and started the courses late. I thought I could finish the lectures on a whim and tackle the lab0 easily. What a huge mistake! I had been working my ass off to keep up.
The first week was about “Bits, Bytes, Integer and Floating Point”, which wasn’t too bad. However, the second week jumped to “assembly”… Yeah WTF??? The professor kept on saying, “Assembly is a language humans understand.” I was like, “Ok, apparently, I’m no human.” I learned to re-evaluate my confidence level. It’s a different world now. - Bits, Bytes, Integers, and Floating Point: Finished reading 120 pages of the textbook. Even though I didn’t finish all the practices, I tried to absorb as much information as possible and felt satisfied with how much I had learned. The progress was EXTREMELY slow since I was terrible at English reading. There were a couple of days that I tried to beat the sunrises to finish the chapter. I just kept on telling myself, “Bitch, you can do it!” Sometimes, it’s that simple. Suck it up and keep going!
- Lab1 datalab: Ok. This was really a TORTURE!!! It’s about manipulating bits and they probably chose the more difficult questions. I felt sooooo stupid working on this assignment and I was apparently not the only one.
- I thought about dropping the course already because if every assignment came after being the same or more difficult, I didn’t think I could make it. Luckily, the reddit post also indicated that this assignment might be one of the hardest with crazy puzzle problems, and the rest would be more straightforward. Also, after seeing this post, I made a reasonable move to work on to the next assignment, since we had another assignment due on the same day (WHY???). However, I was very glad that this post popped up since I was really questioning myself. I realized that I should not give such a hard time to myself. Maybe everyone was feeling equally stupid.
- Reaching my limits and learning to slow down a bit: I was pushing myself too hard, which was an old habit that I’ve always been working on. I knew that it was going to be harder for me since my bachelor degree wasn’t in Computer Science. The curriculum was planned for the students to have the knowledge of CS undergrads. And I was fully aware of having to fill up the gap, a big one, and extremely motivated to do so. Yet, it was still burning me out.
I still loved every moment learning 15513 and loved my job as a software engineer. They were exactly what I was passionate about, but there’s simply too much on my plate. I even dropped 1 kilo within a week due to not having time to eat! Thus, I had to make adjustments, and pace myself a bit before I exhausted myself entirely.
Conclusion
For the past week, I had learned a big chunk of knowledge from 15513, which was such a great course. They were all pure hard work. In the meantime, I had been pushing myself too hard and needed to slow down a bit. I knew that this week’s topic was a little heavy, but the intention I started CMU Week, Why I Started CMU Week?, was to openly share EVERYTHING: the learning, the hard work, the lifestyle, the mental health, and the happiness fighting through the journey. I was still confident that I would finish this fantastic course. I also had a strong belief in the process of hard work. It was not a guarantee, but it was never in vain.
