Towards the end of last semester I undertook a long-form article about the sophomore slump. It was published in Post- magazine this semester. The Post- has a great website, so I figured instead of posting the original I’d just re-direct you there. The piece was originally entitled “The Dip”, had a different ending, and had footnotes.
Click to read the article at Post- magazine.
Oh, and one more thing: I have a small surprise coming up for long-time readers. As thanks for sticking around.
Author note: This one is from the archives. Hope you like it.
Glitches in code, or bugs, are the bane of a CS student’s life. Debugging a program can take even longer than getting a package from JWW . Often the long-suffering CS students resort to seeking the help of more experienced coders — the TAs. The TA hours for most Brown CS courses are held in CIT 271, fondly called the Fishbowl. This is the archetypal tale of a CS student’s journey to the Fishbowl.
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The problem begins, as all coding problems do, in the Sunlab. Our humble hero, Sam, has just encountered a nasty bug that is causing his program to crash with a NullPointerException. The error message printed in virulent red would scare ordinary students, but Sam is a hardened CS veteran; he has duelled with this bug before. “ So we meet again,” he solemnly tells the screen. Continue reading
Somewhere in the middle 