.: Purpose :.
This is the personal portfolio of Miyako Jones, a computer science honors student at the University of Michigan-Flint (UMF). While this site exists primarily to showcase my CS work, it is also the home of other academic work as well.
.: News :.
August 1, 2009:
I'm back in Flint. I have nothing substantial to do until the dorm move-in on September 1st. I participated for both days (1st and 2nd), which we didn't have last year because the dorms were new (therefore, there were no returning students). I chose the recycle monitor job as my number one again. I hope I have a different job the second day. In the meantime, I'm going to work on my PHP scripts and update my websites.
My project presentation at Georgia Tech went smoothly. I'm rarely nervous if I have PowerPoint. No one had any questions so the entire thing was over quickly. Now I have to update my résumé again.
I've been looking into grad school. I probably won't attend Georgia Tech because it's out of state and requires a decent score on the math GRE. I've heard that they will charge you the in-state tuition rate under certain circumstances even if you don't live in Georgia. I bought a GRE math workbook at the GTech bookstore in order to improve my score even though UM-Dearborn doesn't require the GRE for admission. In order to take the official test, I have to go to Troy, MI. Finding funding is going to be tough, though, because I don't think I will go for a Ph.D. Most organizations want people to go to the top. Besides, Dearborn doesn't have any Ph.D. programs related to CS (at the moment) and they won't let you go directly from a Bachelor to a Ph.D. I was still willing to attend UM-Flint's grad school even though it would take a long, long time to get the CS Master's because they favor the CIS people classwise, but none of their programs are accredited so many funding sources would be unavailable to me.
May 14, 2009:
I have recently earned enough credits to be considered a Senior. Since I will still be at UMF for at least another year and a half, that doesn't really mean much. I tried to earn University Honors again this year and I fell short 3/5 of a grade point. If I hadn't received a low grade on my midterm in software engineering, I would have had an A in the class and my GPA would have been at least a 3.5. It's as annoying as not making the Dean's List after Fall of 2007 because I was one credit short of being full-time.
I'm conflicted about my Fall class schedule. I should be taking Calculus II but I don't want to take the professor whose class fits into my schedule. I also don't want to take Calculus while I'm taking physics and two 300-level CS courses. However, if I don't, I may become "stuck." This happens when you have to wait a year for a class to be taught again because it's required for graduation and you haven't satisfied the prerequisite(s) (and there aren't enough majors to justify offering the class more often). Unlike a liberal arts major, most of our required courses are very specific. I prevented myself from becoming stuck before by taking Calculus I in Spring 2008.
I will be heading off to Atlanta for 10 weeks at the end of the month. I expect to be extremely jealous of Georgia Tech's facilities and the idea that a CS major could actually graduate in the traditional amount of time because there are more than enough people to fill the classes. The CS department at UMF shares offices with the physics department, the engineering department, and the general science inquiry and astronomy courses (there aren't official departments for these). It has become a "catch-all" and that's kind of embarrassing. Even UM-Dearborn has a School of Engineering (CS is included in this).
March 22, 2009:
My webpage resume has returned and it, as well as the DOC and PDF versions, have been modified slightly. I have added another project to the projects page and expanded upon an existing one. There is also a new link to my story LiveJournal on the links page.
December 27, 2008:
Another semester has come to an end. I somehow managed to get an A in C++ (CSC/CIS 275). It was a very challenging class, similar to Dr. Uludag's CSC/CIS 175, but instead of being assigned several small programs for homework, we were assigned one large one with several small, but important, details. I'm looking forward to taking classes taught by Dr. Turner in the future. He's a very fair grader and does his best to make sure that his students understand the material.
The class gave me the understanding I needed for advanced PHP so I'm going to undertake a few web development projects for my personal website. I've been wanting to implement templates for my main site for a long time as well as develop some sort of database-driven UI for my personal fanfiction website. More information about this can be found on the project page.