There are four days left until graduation. It’s been quite the semester for Max and me.
To start everything off, Max was told that all of his band credits did not actually contribute to his hour count for his degree. Every music ensemble is listed as a one hour credit course. This includes fall marching band, spring concert band as well as orchestra and jazz band both semesters. The rule for the ENS College is that only three of these one-hour music classes may count toward your degree. Admittedly, this is stated in very fine print in the course listing book printed every two years, and has been since before we enrolled for the first time. Yet no one had brought this rule to Max’s attention until he filed for a grad check. This meant he was 8 credit hours short of a diploma. He scrambled and got two three-hour independent studies together with the music department during the spring semester. But there are still two hours he has to finish from off-campus this summer with the head of the CS department.
Then there was our Compiler Construction project. I’ve already spent way too much time covering that, and you can read more about it here.
We still had finals and papers and group projects. Computer Science kids do not work well on group work together. There is a key distinction between everyone collaborating on solutions to individual assignments and everyone trying to work simultaneously on one single project. The difference is no one touches your code on individual assignments. They can straighten out an issue in their code and then show you how they did it, then you can modify yours based off of that. On group projects, you are dealing with different coding styles, personalities, and work ethics. I had a team whose prime coding hours were 2 to 6 am. Those are my prime sleeping hours. So I’d wake up every morning to see that they’d redone some of my work or completely changed a methodology. Not the easiest thing to do.
Now we’re packing like mad. We have graduation on Saturday, May 10th, at 9 am. We have to be checked out of our apartment by 3 pm on Sunday the 11th, so that doesn’t allow much packing/relaxation time this weekend. Plus we have oodles of family coming into town. Most of my mom’s family, all of my dad’s, and all of Max’s. It’s going to be chaotic.
I’m really excited right now. We have our apartment ready to go, our passports in order, our U-Haul truck booked, and all our hotel reservations for the four day trip up there. Here’s the plan on that front:
Sunday, May 11th: Pack up the U-Haul and head north to St. Joseph, MO. It’ll only be about a 5 hour drive for the first day. Easy roads and good weather.
Monday, May 12th: Drive northwest from St. Joseph to get to Rapid City, SD. This might be a tougher day. It’ll be about 9 hours behind the wheel, but the plains can get pretty windy. At least there’s no mountains yet.
Tuesday, May 13th: Continue northwest all the way up to Missoula, MT. It’ll be the longest, toughest day. 10 ½ hours of drive time, plus stops for food and gas. We’ll also be knee deep in the Rocky Mountains. No easy feat for a U-Haul.
Wednesday, May 14th: Last real day of driving! Go due west and then north from Missoula to Bellingham, WA. It’s the closest city to the border that’s still really a city. Plus it’s only an 8 ½ hour drive. Still some mountains, both the Rockies and the Cascades, but not nearly as bad as Tuesday.
Thursday, May 15th: Crossing the border! We’ll hit the border first thing in the morning. I’m not anticipating any troubles at the border, but we want a decent time buffer just in case. We won’t have to unpack the U-Haul, which will make things easier. Then on into the city and the apartment!!!! We have movers coming at 1 pm to take everything up to the 30th floor!!
God does laugh at the best laid plans, so we’ll see how everything goes. Since all of that is as well prepared as it can possibly be, the goal now is to finish the packing! I wanted to start three weeks ago, but thankfully Maxwell talked me out of it!
