Halfway Point

It's hard to believe it, but the first round of exams are mostly behind me. As always, they were very challenging. I still have to take the XML one and I'm sure that'll be just as tough.

I've gotten the second round of projects done and turned in for most classes also. As I've mentioned before, I really enjoy doing the projects. The projects are finally starting to get bigger in scope, which is great. For example, the latest PHP project had us playing a game of tic-tac-toe and storing the game to a database. Then we needed to be able to choose which game we wanted to replay and show a replay of that game, move by move.

The next round of projects has us building a shopping cart (PHP) and retrieving and working with data from a database (VB.NET). While we've been reading databases in PHP since last semester this is the first time we're really getting into doing that in VB.NET. It's similar, but different and I'm looking forward to it. While these projects are in many ways small in scope compared to those in the real world, they are definitely the types of smaller building blocks that we'll be doing someday on a professional level.

So far I'm still on track to keep my 4.0 GPA. It's getting tougher each semester though as the classes get more in-depth. It's my goal to keep that GPA until I graduate, but I know realistically it will be a tough goal to accomplish.

Last week was the IT Career Fair on campus. It was great to visit the booths of many of the areas companies. While several are not looking to hire programmers in the .NET or PHP areas at this time, it was still great to learn more about them and talk to their representatives. There were also some other companies that had potential positions and I look forward to talking with them more in the future.

It's getting to the point in the semester where there is no longer a clear busy period and then a lull. It's basically a fairly constant busy, yet manageable period. This should continue until early December when final projects are due and final exams come up. I can't believe how fast the semester is going, but I'm still enjoying learning everything they can throw at, so I guess that's a good sign!