Blog + Life Goals For October 2015

Can I just start by saying that September was probably the busiest/most stressful month I’ve ever had? Because geez, I’m 100% over that month and ready to jump into October ASAP! But seriously, I only posted three times last month, that’s probably a record for me. Fortunately that means I have TONS to share with y’all about what I’ve been up to outside of blogging and why I’m confident I won’t be leaving this blog behind anytime soon!

Recap Of September

BLOG GOALS

• Use Pinterest more strategically – So because I didn’t spend much time on my blog last month, I didn’t end up devoting time to strategize my Pinterest use. That actually ended up working out pretty well though, because it left me with some useful information about how well my profile does without me putting in any effort. Surprisingly, I’ve been consistently gaining 5 or more followers each day since the beginning of September, jumping up from around 1600 to 1870! Not sure how that worked out yet, but I’m not complaining!
• Start designing more blogs – Technically, this one didn’t happen, but that’s only because of another side project I worked on instead that I’ll be revealing to y’all in a bit!

LIFE GOALS

• Join one club and stick with it – I ended up joining two clubs! I’ve been attending events for both Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as workshops run by the Mobile App Development organization on my campus. There are a few others that I occasionally join in on, but those are top two.
• Attend EXPO – This past month I got to attend both the engineering EXPO and the computer science career fair at my university, which I definitely wasn’t planning on doing. I found out about the latter pretty late, but got the nerves up to talk to some great companies like Pinterest and Fitbit. Overall I’m really happy with how both turned out, and hopefully an internship will come out of my visits!
• Get back to eating healthy – So health sort of got thrown out the window last month, but I can’t do everything right?
• Attend a hackathon – Yes! I attended HackTX this past weekend as my first hackathon and got to work with a great group of guys developing a painting program with a really cool tablet that one of the sponsors brought. It didn’t turn out quite how we imagined, but it was still a great learning experience and I would love to attend more in the future!

Everything Else

With September being career fair season, updating my resume was a definite must this past month. For engineering/computer science majors, it’s extremely beneficial to include side projects alongside traditional categories, and aside from my blog, I didn’t really have any. So, naturally, I started one the weekend before EXPO.

I’m not sure why it took me so long to come up with this idea, but while looking into the profiles of current software developers at companies like Microsoft and Google, I noticed that a lot of them had personal website that showcased their skills and resume in a beautiful and creative way. I’d never created a website from scratch, but after a bit of googling, I figured out the basic steps and just winged it from there. Here’s a preview of what I ended up with after 24 hours:

You can check out the live version at jessicaslaughter.co! And yes, I’m still salty about my .com being so expensive.

October Goals

Blog Goals

• Blog when I can – I know it’s going to be another busy month, so I’m setting my expectations pretty low here. I’d love to get a post out every week, but I’ll just be going with the flow for a while!
• Promote more on social media if I can’t post – I figure that just because I’m not putting out as much new content doesn’t mean I can’t promote my old stuff, so I want to start pulling things out of the archives and sharing what content this blog is built off of!

Life Goals

• Complete half of an Intro to Computer Science course – As an Electrical Engineering major who’s way more on the software side of things, I always wished I’d gotten an Intro to CS course during my time here. Fortunately, there are tons of great resources online, and I found a course at edX.org that I’ve been following for a couple of weeks now. My hope is to make it halfway through that course by the end of the month!
• Dive deeper into learning JavaScript and Java – I’ve yet to decide whether I like front-end or back-end programming more, so I’ve been branching into both just to test out my interests. I found an online MIT course for Java, but I’m hoping to start some more projects this month so I can learn about these languages by doing rather than reading. My goal is simply to feel more comfortable with both of these languages by the end of the month!
• Help my friend create a personal website – I love getting to teach people about code and expose them to a side of programming they haven’t seen before, so this month I’m planning on helping one of my friends create his own personal website! I think this will be a great way for me to learn how to explain my own code in terms anyone could understand.
• Pass all of my exams – This is definitely going to be a tough goal, because most of my classes have high failing rates and aren’t very forgiving! I have a total of four exams this month, so wish me luck!

What are your goals for the month? I’d love to hear!