It’s been quite some time since I last wrote anything for this blog. To be fair, I haven’t shared any links anywhere, so there hasn’t been much incentive to do so. However, let’s dive into the main topic: my final year at university.

Academically, this year was a continuation of the same routine, so I’ll start by listing my courses for both semesters and giving a brief overview of each.

Semester I

• Management Accounting: Not much to say here. One of my favorite lecturers but I was a bit less interested than I was in my prior Accounting courses.
• Human Computer Interaction: This course was quite important to me as an application developer. Helped me reach another level when it comes to user interaction. The lecturer was stressful though.
• Wireless and Mobile Computing: To be honest, I don’t really remember much about this course. We used Java to do some Android programming and that was about all I remember.
• Business Information Systems: This one was stressful for me… Group work in the world of academia is horrendous…
• Organizational Behavior: I really don’t remember taking this course…

Semester II

• Game Programming: Interesting overall. The lecturer began the course by saying we’d use most of what we learned in previous years. He was mostly right. He messed up the grading of my extremely difficult game though. He just couldn’t hang.
• Web Programming and Technologies I: Got a pre-requisite override to do this. Didn’t know we could get that. I regret doing the entire group project on my own. I robbed my group members of the opportunity to learn. We got full marks though… so I’m sure they were cool with it.
• Information Systems Security: This lecturer just made things harder than they were supposed to be.
• Cloud Computing: I remember nothing about this course. Only the lecturer cause I didn’t like him.
• E-Commerce: Was focused equally on knowledge and application. We used WordPress and PHP for some things and I made a pizza e-commerce site using PHP. Was horrendous but the marks were good.

To sum up the grades quickly… straight A’s (including A-, A, A+). Now off the topic of academia since this year was really about that.

New Era

COVID really changed everything. My fun life at university had been replaced with a dreadful life locked up in my room doing schoolwork. To this day I don’t think I’ve recovered. My anxiety came back with vengeance and is still relatively elevated to this day. One bad year leads to multiple bad years.

I felt like the relationships I had built to this point were just being jettisoned due to the pandemic. Less physical interaction and more screens. Honestly, it was dreadful.

I don’t think I really gained much other than a degree from this year. Some may say that was quite the reward but I had so much lined up for my final year. One of these activities I had lined up was finally going to carnival. It looks like it just wasn’t meant to be. It seemed like the year was one giant experiment of psychological warfare and I was the target.

Another regret of mine was returning to Saint Lucia altogether, I should have stayed in Trinidad. With my grades and a potential internship, I think I’d be in a much better spot right now.

Bright Side?

As I said before, the one potentially bright side of this situation was my degree being completed. I finished it with a 3.81 GPA (which would have really shocked pre-2018 Antonio) but it still felt like I lost enough to make it just kind of neutral.

If, by some chance, someone is reading this, the one piece of advice I can give you is to not delay things. If you can responsibly do it now, do it. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.