First post

 Hello, my name is Abdallah and I'm a first year computer engineer, this blog will mainly be about my level at certain skills each time I post, the idea is to keep track of my progress in my journey of learning different skills. I'm currently focusing on Calculus and Java, but I will also be posting about my level on subjects and hobbies like Music Theory, guitar, piano and both Turkish & Japanese, along with random information like books I've read.

I just finished my first semester, and I will be trying to quickly summarize how it went. The subjects I took were the following: ENG101 - HIST150 - MATH101 - PHYS105 - ART100 - CMPE113.

The first couple of days went by smoothly, I made some friends and got familiar with the university, my schedule had become tight, and I wasn't pleased with how I wouldn't have much time for other things like learning languages and music. Before the midterms started, I realized that with the amount of subjects we were covering, it was becoming harder and harder to study and I needed to change my schedule to keep up, but what me and my friends didn't realize was the difficulty of the exams, especially the Calculus. After receiving my marks, it was a shock, I wasn't used to getting such low marks, but I have to say, even though I hate to admit it, the fact that the averages were also low was comforting. Except for Calculus and Physics, my marks were good, but I had to get better marks in the second midterm.

 I started skipping some classes because it was more efficient to study on my own, the two-hour Physics and CMPE classes were a waste of time, I couldn't rely on the teachers anymore. Thankfully, it worked, my Physics and Calculus midterm2 marks were way better than the first. My final marks were also good, but I still didn't receive all of them.

ENG101 - We had to write a lot of essays throughout the semester, but overall it was nice to work on my writing skills.

HIST150 - We mainly talked about the Turkish modernization in the 19th century, it wasn't bad.

MATH101 - The difficulty of this course made me change the way I study multiple times to keep up, I found Calculus interesting as long as there are no exams.

PHYS105 - I hated this course, we had a 3-hour lab every other week, and a lab report assignment for the following week, it was time-consuming, and it was especially annoying during the mid terms. One other problem was the fact that the lab was ahead in the syllabus, so every lab we would have quizzes and write reports about subjects we still didn't cover in the main class.

Art100 - This course was interesting, we covered different subjects like Photography, Music, and Drawing. We did different things like making a presentation about ourselves, taking pictures and drawing ourselves. 

CMPE113 - In this course I could hardly understand what the teacher was talking about, looking at the code and writing it in the 3 hour labs we had every week was the best way for learning. I have to add, the fact that I watched some of Harvard's CS50 course videos and did some of the problems they offer before the semester started, helped greatly.