Spring 2007 - A Look Back at the Semester

Posted at 1:25 PM, Friday, September 28, 2007

This week was one of the busiest I've known! So much work! Not that I'm complaining or anything. Dr. Kah's homework was the longest homework I've ever done in my entire life! I enjoyed doing it of course, especially reading the Standish Group article - CHAOS Chronicalls 1995. The article was all about why IT projects fail, and how to prevent failures from occuring. The part that I really like was the comments given by different IT professionals. When interviewed about why IT projects fail, an application analyst commented "Brain-dead users, just plain brain-dead users." HAHA, that's the funniest comment I've heard coming from an IT professional! A project manager described a very funny situation - "The project was two years late and three years in development. We had thirty people on the project. We delivered an application the user didn't need. They had stopped selling the product over a year before." - This is what IT projects can end up being, haha. Chaos, chaos, chaos, everything is chaos - That's what the whole article is about. I enjoyed all my classes. I think this is going to be one of the finest semesters ever! Accounting, ERP, History of Art, Project Management, Database Systems, and Statistics - all are just totally awesome! Thank you Jesus for giving me such wonderful courses AND professors I sincerelly praise God for everything in the past week and am looking forward to a good week ahead. My next entry might come sooner than Friday this time, God willing. That's cos I have very good news to share......

Anyways, moving on to the purpose of this entry ............ 

Last semester I took 5 courses - Telecommunication & Data Networks (INF 252), Introduction to Operating Systems (then INF 350; now INF 250), Systems Analysis & Design (then INF 360; now INF 260), Quantitative Business Analysis (QBA 201), and Fundamentals of Management (MGT 201). The understanding of each of these courses is crucial for an IS major. The knowledge gained here will form the foundation for many courses ahead, so I had to be cautious to carefully understand each one of them. Unfortunately somewhere in the middle of the semester I kind of started forgetting stuff in 2 or 3 courses. But thank God, I did well in all of my finals and earned my highest GPA ever! Praise the LORD God Almighty! I never thought I could do it, I just kept on praying to God to help me during the finals because that was the time that mom had passed away. I knew that I had to be just what the LORD and my parents wanted me to be, and God did answer my prayer! Isn’t that just amazing? I can’t thank Him enough. "Thank you Jesus!"

Let me begin by describing how the Telecommunications and Data Networks course went. INF 252 was taught by Dr. Augustine Odinma, one of the most highly qualified professors here at the university. He worked at Bell Labs as the Director for Africa and Europe. Now isn’t that amazing or what? I was like totally impressed when I realized that a person who had had such a high position would be willing to come and teach in our university. I really like him beacuse he is always concerned about students learning the course, and not just passing it. He treats everyone in a fatherly manner and that’s one of the things that sets him apart. I like his style of teaching cos I learnt a lot. Infact, I learnt everything so well that I remember lots of it even after such a long time. I’m sure that if I just “brush” over the course text I’ll recall everything. The course text that we used helped a lot. I think it’s one of the best (or possibly even the best) textbook I’ve read. The author did a great job. Anyways, we learnt about network connections, network cables, data & signals (conversion techniques), LANs (topologies software, & internetworking), data packets, network traffic, network architecture (OSI & TCP/IP suite), multiplexing, errors (detection and control),  MANs, and WANs. The exams and tests were done in a different manner - we had only short/long answer questions. This was great for me cos I don’t like multiple-choice questions. One of the best things about the course was the field trip we had. That's a whole new entry on its own so I'll leave the description for a later time. For now let me give a brief description of what it was all about -  we went out to town to the various appartments of the university to view the equipement kept for internet connectivity. We also visited most buildings on-campus (both temporary and permanent) for the same purpose. You can read details and see pictures in one of my later entries. On the whole, I really enjoyed the course and am looking forward to the part II of that course i.e. Telecommunications & Data Networks II.

Dr. Augustine Odinma

Moving on to the next course, Intro to OS was a very easy-going course. Dr. Okunoye took us in this course. He was a visiting professor and is not returning this semester. There’s one thing about Dr. Okunoye that you have to know, he is one of the funniest person ever! Infact, I can't recall ever seeing him upset. He always said funny things in and out of classroom. The atmosphere in his classes was one of great ease. I really miss his jokes. We even gave him a surprise birthday party organized by our classmates. Everyone (except myself and Saima) danced in the party, I think someone even shot a video of the whole event. I’m sure Dr. Okunoye must have been pleased with everything the class did for him, and we were all happy to have him as our professor  Back to the course, we learnt about different processors, comapred various OS, also learnt how to do different installations, and lots of other stuff. The best part was the group presentation we had to do at the end of the course. Every student was required to pick a topic and make a presentation. Me and my group picked memory management and gave our presentation. Though it wasn’t as good as it could have been, it was ok. The good thing was that I learnt more about memory management than I would have if I just read it from the textbook. Making the presentation required research and that’s how I got to know a lot about it. Actually, my sister Nino was taking Computer Organization and Architecture that semester and she was the one who gave me a very good source for my information. She also helped me to understand various concepts. I was really glad we had done all this work. In essence, it was a good course, and I’ll try and go over it again this Christmas holiday so that I don’t forget everything 

This picture is taken in the Mac lab, and in a very funny way. As you can see cute Patricia was going to take her own pic when Dr. Okunoye just jumped in from no where. Seriously, he is very funny and I miss his jokes

I'll write about the other 3 courses in my next entry. For now, I'm at the Admissions office for my work hours. So let me continue doing that. I only pray that I'll have enough time to do everything I want over this weekend. I'm so greatful to God that Monday's a public holiday! It's Nigeria's independence day on 1st October. My birthday will be 4 days after that, can't wait for it! Hmmmmmm, no classes today. I can relax as much as I want, yes! Thank God it's Friday!