Pathway Reflection

Kunling Zeng

Computer Science

I became an INTO-Mason pathway program students two months ago. It’s only been a short time, but the year before that I was preparing for TOEFL, GRE test and applying for the schools. My English grade was high enough, but my undergraduate GPA wasn’t quite high enough for direct entry. When my friend asked me if I really wanted to spend the extra semester, I said, yes, because I’ve done something wrong (not working hard enough to get a good GPA. Now I had to do extra work to make up for that. The INTO-Mason pathway program turns out to be very helpful.

I have two pathway classes, EAP and PROV, two major classes, CS530 and CS531.

EAP is a class which help us develop skills for research. In the first stage of this class, we focus on CPP project. And now we are focusing on our final project MCP, which is also stepping to the final stage. So far, I have been doing good in this class and got an A- for the midterm grade.MCP is a challengeable project for us who has never done a research project. The most difficult part for a novice is, as far as I am concerned, finding a suitable topic for the project. At the beginning, I totally have no idea but just pick up the two papers I have read for my undergraduate thesis to start with, which focus on Quantization for Nearest Neighbor Search(NNS). But as project goes on, I turned my focus on k-means algorithm, which is one of the most well-known solution for clustering. But I am still no sure about the exigences, purpose et al. these necessary elements for a research. The pivot that everything got clearer came after I consulted the professor in my major filed and he enlightened me that “motivation is the most important driving force behind any research”. Professor Zhao suggested me to explore the potential clustering solution for web-scale or large-scale data, then it will make more sense that I focus on K-Means algorithm since it is the most well known solution for clustering and has been extended to many different fields[1]. So, right now the purpose of my MCP project is exploring the potential solution for web-scale clustering, we focus on variants of K-Means algorithm regarding to web-scale data. And with a clear objective, we are now forwarding to the end.

CS530 is “Fundamentals of Systems Programming”, “This course is a hands-on in-depth introduction to the structure of the Unix operating system with emphasis on the system libraries using ANSI C.”[2]. Since C is developed from UNIX, to get started, we need to have an overview of C, and then we start connecting C and UNIX system. Programs and system communicate via systems calls, to begin, the most often used functions in C I think is the printf and scanf, which need to call the system calls to deal with I/O. And the UNIX system treats devices as files, it is very import to have a clear acknowledge of the file concept in UNIX. So I/O seems is a very good start to get C and UNIX connected. Above is a little thought when I reviewed for the midterm and try to clear the development of this course firstly, which is what I usually do when reviewing for any courses. I think it helps me have a clear picture of the whole course, what we learned, why do we learned that, how to connect them.

Since I majored in Computer Science in my undergraduate, the first stage (Review for C language) was kind of pretty easy for me, I got the 9.5/10 for the first assignment and 24/25 for the midterm, which are good scores. Of course the content about Unix system interests me more, our second assignment is writing our own system_531() function, including some basic signal handling, and I got 14/15 in this assignment. We also have a final project which we need to give a technical report in the class, as for this, right now I am thinking about cyber security since I always think it is kind of cool knowing how to defend a system from internet attack and how to find the security issue of a system then fix it. I also have another thought in my mind, “the philosophers’ problem”, which is about concurrency of progresses and threads, a very important issue in system programming.

I would like to talk some about class PRO-504-P05 in the end, which help us acculturate and adapt to the academic life in Mason. We did a lot of reading and then discussed in the class to help us solve many problems from living issues to academic stuffs, while always improving our English in the meantime. The topic “Critical Thinking” impressed me most. I have heard critical thinking long before I could remember, but I never truly thought about it until having this class. Critical thinking is not just a concept by talking, it is very important. We can and we should make effort to practice critical thinking and so to be a critical thinker. It is not easy, because thinking process is just like culture, we are always thinking and we don’t really realize that. So, the very first step to cultivate critical thinking is to realize you are thinking, then learn to control it under certain standard that will help you make more accurate decision or find a better way to solve problem step by step.

The study in pathway program is really productive, I feel more and more prepared during the study. And I am confident I can make it, whatever study or job   in the future.I am interested in the system programming and Software design and implementation, I will put more effort in these two area during my study in Mason.

[1]Anil K. Jain, Data clustering: 50 years beyond K-means, Pattern Recognition Letters, Volume 31, Issue 8, 1 June 2010, Pages 651-666

[2]Hal Greenwald,GMU_CS531_Syllabus_Fall16