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Developing good habits and a plan

Developing good habits and a plan The aspiration for this week is developing the plan. Given the choice of writing about a project and getting on with the grunt work, I very much prefer the latter. In my ideal world I'd have a subordinate who'd handle that for expressing the plan. Projects imply size and therefore large chunks of time. Accountants will say time is money, so it is a sure bet that such a commitment of time will require somebody somewhere to give the OK. Continue reading →

New Beginnings

Hello world. Over the period of the next three years, I will be posting in this little space, with (hopefully) useful insights of university life. I was born and bred in Singapore, a little country in south-eastern Asia. Climatically speaking, Singapore is hot all year round - as compared to Southampton, which is freezing (by my standards) at the moment. Journey to the UK took a killer 18 hours. That's how far away from home i am... Continue reading →

Apologies!

I'd like to start by saying apologies for the lack of posts in the last few months. This is because life has become rather complex and it has created a writers' block of sorts, but this is a long story that even in the context of blogging could be considered out of scope. Nonetheless, down to business. This post will mainly be devoted to advice for freshers. I have this habit of starting the academic year by ceremoniously snapping deep emotional ties with someone of the opposite sex. Continue reading →

Perfect Tools

About this time last year I spent some time reading these blogs here. It turned out to be a quite useful resource not only for "meeting" people from Southampton, but also getting a better overview of the course itself. Reading personal experiences may convey more information than the formal syllabus, which is abstract and does not tell the whole story (of course, I'm not saying these blogs do). Continue reading →

Intellectual Bad-Ass

I'm off on a first aid course tomorrow for my Jiu-Jitsu club. Should be interesting and I have done some basic DR. ABC before (though it's probably more like DRY. ABRCDEZ... now). Also teaching freshers (and 4th-years) some Jitsu which is giving me the opportunity to practice my ability to explain things in plain English and to demonstrate that I'm an intellectual bad-ass. Some good news: I've been offered a gig up in my hometown of Bristol. Continue reading →

Introductions

Introductions. I’ve probably done more introductions in my first week at Southampton than I’ve done in my life, and frankly, they’re not getting any more interesting. Hi! I’m Yusra, embarking on my four-year electronic-engineering ‘journey’ at ECS. (Also, now is a good time to warn you that this entry will probably be long). Normally, I hate beginnings, starting new sounds a lot better on paper than it really is. Continue reading →

First Blog

As this is my first blog, I would like to keep it short and interesting rather than oversized and boring. At some point a few months ago, I found myself digging within this student blog trying to get some answers, trying to understand what was coming, trying to be prepared; and I have to say that it was very helpful, especially because I got the answers I was looking for. Continue reading →

Reintroduction

This entry is a brief reintroduction for people who have not read my blog before and an indication to its future direction. At this point, I'm a mature student - comes with being ten years senior to most of my fellow students - studying Computer Science, and this will be my third year at the University of Southampton. I've worked in the IT industry as a developer for several years prior to my re-entry into study. Continue reading →

Royal Academy of Engineering

I wrote back in April about an award I received from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Two weeks ago, just before the start of Freshers' Week, I got to make use of this for the first time with a weekend conference in Birmingham where I got the chance to meet the other winners from top engineering departments across the country and attend a series of personal development workshops. Continue reading →

IT Innovation

As you may have read I've done a summer internship at IT Innovation. At first I did some user interface design work, followed by some business process modelling, and finally, some Twitter research! I researched how to rank users based on their influence rather than using a trivial method such as looking at the amount of followers they have. Continue reading →