The End of Midterms and UROPing

This week was a stressful week because I had two midterms that each counted for around 16% of my grade. Although my classes this semester are definitely more interesting, I miss PNR and not having to care about my grades. I read online that it is relatively easier to get Bs at MIT, but much harder to get As. Because I want to qualify for MEng, I will need to get at least one-third As.

Outside of my classes, I spent around 6 hours working on a program called audio-pass, which I am developing as part of my UROP. Audio-pass takes live sound inputs and slows it down a given percentage. It is the first program that I've worked on in C, and C is very different than Python. For example, parsing arrays is much more difficult, libraries are harder to import, and one has to consider memory allocation. Nonetheless, I am am enjoying this learning experience.

Today, I wrote tests for and improved a function that reads an array from a given index to the last modified index and writes it to another array. I also implemented a plot function that behaves like matplotlib in python, but directly calls a command-line program called gnuplot to plot data.

Here's the cute little graph that took way too long to figure out!

I am grateful for not only learning a new language C, but also for developing good software development habits such as writing tests for every function and checking for differences in code before sending pull requests on git. My UROP adviser also taught me many other useful git commands like how to deal with merge conflicts.

Life is good.