Hi readers,
Woohoo Happy New Year to you all! I have shared my New Year’s video in the New Year’s blog post ‘Happy New Year 2020!‘. The video is also on YouTube so if you like it, let me know by a thumbs up or a comment 🙂
How did you celebrate the New Year?
January thesis deadline
Beside the New Year celebration, all the greetings to everyone and the New Year’s video editing. My month of January has been the most fully focused couple of weeks I have ever experienced! Halfway the month the thesis deadline was coming up and I literally forgot kind of everything around me.
My daily routine looked like this: Sleep, eat, drink, travel to work, thesis write a lot, conclude a lot, double checkings, travel back home take a shower and go back to sleep and repeat.
The last days towards the deadline and it was so tough because normally I love writing. Obviously because I have written more than a couple of hundred blog posts on this blog already and tens and tens to come that are already ideas or half-written concepts. But English is not my mother tongue and Dutch is. I had to write it in Dutch so that sounds like ‘thankfully in my mother tongue’ but if you know a bit about the Dutch language… it borrows so much from other languages just the way it is or it get used to used by. The borrowing was not the problem though.
My favourite sunset photo I made during the internship
Dutch versus English and vice versa
Translating all knowledge in computer science, which is mostly given in English, to Dutch is the biggest hurdle. Terminology like Machine Learning or Deep Learning we do not even translate. We borrow this the way it is. But then we have to translate the definition which is short in English and takes a bigger explanation in Dutch and in my opinion a less accurate explanation. The same as in Dutch when something is ‘leuk’. In English you have got several translation which explain more precise the exact meaning of it. Is something ‘fun’? Or is something ‘nice’. Or is something ‘likeable’? Or is something ‘joyful’? It looks like the Dutch language, also compared to English the amount of words in the different dictionaries, is quite an abstract language. Writing from abstract to as precise as possible, as much as the translated interpretation of your mind allows you to, is hard.
Short term memory amnesia
Can you imagine like running your household and daily life and your mind is so focused on a subject that you dream about it and you can not even concentrate for 15 minutes on something else. Doing groceries to have some drinks and food during those days is hard because you forget half you have to get on your grocery list. You even forget to note things down on a grocery list half the time.
You talk to people or your closest and small social life and the next day you forgot half of what they said. You heard it but your mind was too busy or in your unconscious distracted to make some room to save it. You text with people and a couple of minutes later you get an answer. You see the notification and you think: okay, whát did I say? Did I say something? What is it all about? Unintentionally of course but this just happens around a thesis deadline. My short term memory was shut off for couple of days. Blind spotted on everything else but the thesis. And I had difficulties remembering something again in my short term memory for a couple of weeks.
February 2020 first week
But it was all worth it! 🙂 I nailed it! Completed the gradutation internship successfully! Now I only have to do a few more subjects and then I can finally graduate in the Bachelor of Applied Sciences of Software Engineering.
I am very thankful to all the people who helped me get through these weeks. And in the middle through those most toughest days of my mind in my life. This is the last post I have written about my Graduation Internship.
How has been your start of 2020?
Greetings by Sophie