BPI inside

Tag: University

  • Achievement Unlocked: Leisure Time

    YES.

    Last Thursday I took the final step in my current education and science activities and finished the Masters’ degree exam. This was the goal I’ve been working towards for the previous two years. Especially the last six months have been pretty tight on time as I have been writing my diploma thesis and preparing for the additional two complementary subject exams which are part of the degree exam.

    Well, as the topic already gave away, I have succeeded and passed the exam. With that job done the only remaining duty for me at the University is to attend the Graduation Ceremony in mid-October.

    As this now frees up my spare time from almost everything I’ve been using it in the last years, I can finally begin to flesh out the many small plans I’ve collected over the years for "the time after University". These plans are manifold and cover topics spanning from finally watching movie recordings over a reboot of sports activities to even tackling some electronics projects. Also more regular activity in this blog is on the agenda.

    I’m still unsure on the order of the stuff I’m starting to burn the reclaimed leisure time. But I think I’m not in a hurry currently and may even continue to sleep late 🙂

  • Last day of lectures

    It feels a bit odd. Knowing that I’m currently sitting in my last lecture. Really, the last hour of learning for my whole Masters degree. Whew.

    What’s left are of course some lecture exams as well as writing my thesis. And finally conclude it with the exam for the Masters degree.

    The dates for the Master thesis and exam are either in June (I doubt that I’ll manage that) or in September.

    What will I do in the future with my now gained free time….?

  • Nothing to see here… Just a small Thank You

    In the past weeks I’ve become less and less active in the social networks I’m in. I’m not exactly sure why I’m currently leaning just to passive consumation of the information stream from those channels.

    Maybe there is just to much on my mind. Maybe it’s the other way around and I’m just trying to concentrate on some things while fighting procrastination with more our less success.

    What has become more clear to me is that if I have stuff to do, it’s much more probable to get done if I’m not alone but there is someone else around who also had work to do. One motivates the other. And while this approach is quite effective, at last for me, it is impossible that there is always someone available for providing mutual motivation when I need it until my studies are finished. So I still have to somehow manage to get my stuff done on my own.

    Nevertheless, I’d like to thank those people who spent many hours on the past few weekends togheter with me working on our stuff and helping me with getting my stuff forward. THANK YOU!

  • Still here

    This is the 6th posting in this year now. My output so far is quite below of what I expected from myself. While I blame stress and lack of time for that until the beginning of July, there should have been some time for an update since then. So the only thing preventing postings has been my own lazyness… Ah well…

    Ok, what’s changed or noteworthy in the last months? Maybe the most important thing for me personally is that I’ve purchased a new (used) car. I’ve been passively looking for potential new cars for quite some time now although I’ve been very pleased and happy with my car so far. But this time the costs for the required servicing and repairs approached almost 2k Euros without a guarantee that the costs will be lower for the next service intervals. So I decided to take the lemon, say goodbye to my old loyal and reliable companion and pick up something with lower regular costs. Welcome my new car, a blue Fiat Grande Punto 1.3 JTD Emotion with 90 HP. It’s in excellent shape and I hope it’ll be an as good escort as my previous Fiat which carried me over 180k km in the the almost exactly past 6 years.

    The next noteworthy news is that this year I’m a contestant in the Zwölfkampf which is organized by some friends. It is a series of twelve games where an overall winner is calculated over tracks of 4, 8 or all 12 games. The main event on Sep. 24/25th is preceded by some "sideevent" games in which I made a not too bad impression but they don’t count for the finale 😉

    Communication is the next topic. Back in May I purchased a new smartphone, the LG Optimus Speed (or P990 or LGOS/LG2X). While It worked for some weeks without a hitch at one day it began to show a very special defect where I could not place or receive calls when I’m registered in the 3G network of my provider. I borrowed some other SIM cards from different providers but the problem only exists with the network of mine. Since I’m denied service for it at my provider (it doesn’t have this phone in its portfolio) I have to handle everything myself. Currently (yes, it’s August now!) it’s on its 4th trip to the LG service from which I hope it will eventually return completely replaced. The previous three times the device was only "serviced" and at one occassion the mainboard (without baseband module) and the camera module (wtf?) were replaced. Of course without effect. At the moment my seller and I are just hoping that LG just relents to sending me a new phone instead of useless servicing of the defect one.

    On to the university stuff. Not much to report here, since the last exam in July and last hand-in also in July I pretty much left everything in a standby mode. But I’m warming up already as the next key-dates are approaching and there is still a bit of work to do, exams to prepare for and documents to hand in.

    Some holiday-related stuff now. I took two weeks summer holiday at the end of July. Originally I planned to use that time to firstly do the car stuff and to finish building some concrete walls for a terrace behind the house. The car business took sadly longer than expected as my first seller let me down and sold the car to somebody other. I could get my hands on another one as you already read above and retrospectively this was a lucky coincidence as my first candidate car was not in an as good shape and more expensive. The wall works also could not be finished in these two weeks because the bricks we ordered took longer to deliver than planned and also it rained the whole two weeks but for two days.

    And finally the work news. Project work in the company is running as usual with maybe some changes for me personally in the near future. But as it’s not complete determined, this is all I’d like to say so far. After my holiday I returned in a modified team with three new people and it’s still changing as soon one of our colleagues will change to another team and tomorrow we’ll receive assistance with another new team member. Yeah, bit of change 😉

    Well, that’s it for now. I hope that I can raise my posting interval in the future again but I wouldn’t bet on that as it didn’t work in the past six months….

    P.S.: Ah yes, I’m on Google+ too meanwhile. This time with my real name, those who know me are of course invited at any time to show me their presence 😉

  • First term almost over

    Last Saturday was the last lecture of this term. There is still some work to do and some exams lie ahead but the stress has lowered a bit nevertheless. So far the exams and projects went quite ok and I hope the upcoming ones stay within the trend.

    I have to admit, that I underestimated (again) the required effort for studying in parallel to my day-to-day work. It wouldn’t have been such of a problem if my project environment would have stayed the same since I started studying. But it changed and we got very challenging projects which needed more attention and time than I expected. Today another project started which promises the same requirements, which would be sort of good because it plays in favour of our team. Nevertheless now I hope that I’m a bit better prepared for what lies ahead and I’m confident that I can pull through.

  • The university is dead, long live the university

    Yep, it’s done. As said last month, I’ve finished my bachelors exam two weeks ago. Unexpected for me was, that I finished this whole degree with good success.

    But there wasn’t much time to relax because last week my next step in education happened, the start of the Masters Degree Programme for Advanced Security Engineering. I mainly chose this degree because in my opinion it is the final part which finishes my education in IT which is already going on for many years.

    This degree will cover the timespan of the upcoming two years and I hope that I will learn even more new stuff about IT, engineering and even some management topics than I have learned during the course for my bachelors degree. The topics of this and last week were already very promising and interesting and the first exercises have been assigned.

    Looking forward for new stuff 🙂

  • Home stretch of my bachelors degree

    Yes, it’s the final stretch of my current university education. On October 1st I’ll have to pass the last and final presentation and exam of my bachelors thesises. This means in the upcoming few days I have to prepare two presentations and also have solid knowledge of my bachelors thesises topics. Furthermore I have to prepare for the third part of the exam in (again) another area of expertise.

    At work I had also the chance to take over responsibility for the project I’m currently working on in the team while the project lead was on vacation two weeks ago. I’ve had some difficulties but I think I could manage them although I still have to gather some feedback on my performance during that time. What I already know is that I have to get a bit more organized during the activities of communicating with the customer, performing tasks myself, distributing tasks to others and keeping track of all new information and agreements during that time.

    Last week I also have been to Germany and receive a training on a new hardware part which is introduced in a customers infrastructure and which we’re integrating with our services. The time in Germany was quite ok but because of preparations for the university I had only few chances to have a look around in the city.

  • Quick update

    Just a lightning-fast update that I got a call last week already that there has been a seat reserved in the Masters course for me 🙂

  • Applying for the next degree course

    Since I’m in the last few weeks of my Bachelor degree programme at the University, I’ve been applying for the subsequent programme. I’ve chosen to apply for the Masters degree in Advanced Security Engineering. For me this is just the logical consequence of my overall education path as it would conclude my technical progression over the last years.

    Today I had the face-to-face talk with representatives from the University, which is part of the application procedure. All in all it was the same talk I had when I applied for the Bachelors degree. Just that I knew the interviewer, who in fact was the one who supervised my first Bachelor thesis, I knew the difficulties and challenges when studying and that I knew how I could organize everything together with my private and work life. And it was in English of course, since it’s the main education language in this course.

    I think it went quite well and it shouldn’t be much of a problem getting accepted but who knows… have to wait for the confirmation.

  • Another university milestone reached

    Today we had to hold an official presentation of our project work and/or our bachelor thesis, which we’re currently working on (or has already been finished).

    I created the presentation over the time of last week and had it ready by Wednesday when we were required to hand it in for the official presentation preparation. The requirements were simple: it had to fit into exactly into an eight minute timespan and cover the basics, our goals and accomplishments of the work.

    Again I tried to create a presentation which was interesting and fast-paced and covered everything essential of my bachelor thesis. According to the feedback I received I managed to do this.

    I think the key for good presentations is that you intimately know everything in your presentation, each sentence and the order of appearance. It’s also neccesary to have more in your mind to talk for each bullet to be able to talk about them and not just read them down from the slides and move on to the next bullet. For me this was not that easy because my retentivity skills are not as good as I wished them to be, so it was even more essential to practice the whole presentation a few times before, preferably even over the course of several days. And it’s also important to not learn full sentences to talk but hang on to keywords and topics for each point you want to talk about. This allows you to speek freely and make a much more confident impression than hanging on to pre-constructed sentences. Furthermore, try to not stand still but move a bit, even if it’s just a few centimeters.

    Of course there are still many things to improve. This time it seems that I had problems with my gesture, keeping my hands below my waist several times which makes an insecure impression. But at least I got my Ahm’ing and Errr’ing right this time and kept it at a minimum.

    Kudos also goes to all of my colleagues who held their presentation together with me. All of them were excellent, well prepared and within the given timeframe with only minor points of potential criticism. For me personally most notably was Ellla who I remember as extremely nervous and on the edge of despair when only thinking of having to present something about two years ago. Today she was just self-confidend, fluid speaking and well prepared on stage with only very minor traces of nervosness. One of the best improvements of all of us.

    Sure, we all were extemely nervous before today. That’s because we attended another presentation of bachelor thesises about a year ago (?) and we remember those candidates’ presentations to be on the whole range from a Steve-Jobs-like presentation to almost helpless stammering (boy, this was really ugly at that time) on stage for the required length of time. And it was a much larger audience at that time because our classes were required to attend these presentations as a preparation for today. Today in contrast there were just we, our supervising teachers for the thesises and one or two more officials from the university. Small and well-known audience.

    It’s been a successful day for all of us, yay! 🙂