bbalfreywrit340

Tis the recruiting season. For software engineers, this also means that it is interview preparation season. Software engineering interviews are like no other industry. There is very little emphasis on soft, interpersonal skills. Perhaps surprisingly, there is also little to no emphasis on software engineering practices and the day to day work that a software engineer does. Rather, the hiring process emphasizes intense, algorithmic questions: Find the longest palindromic substring . Given an array of stock prices, maximize your return by finding the best times to buy and sell a stock. Construct a binary tree given the in order and preorder traversals. If you’re reading that and don’t understand all the jargon, I feel you. Even good software engineers, without lots of interview prep, couldn’t solve most of the problems that are asked in a typical interview in the industry. Personally, I love coding. I love software engineering. It’s like playing with legos, trying to connect lots of comp...

Reading Love, Loss, and What We Ate was challenging for me. Not challenging because Pradma Lakshmi doesn’t have an interesting story, nor because she struggles telling it. Her viewpoints on relationships and life struggles were challenging for me to read about because they made me uncomfortable. Her relationship with vulnerability is vastly different than my own. I could never write a book with such transparency detailing my interpersonal struggles. At times, I admired Lakshmi’s perspectives and felt excited by some of her experiences as a model overseas in Europe. The modeling route she followed throughout her twenties, struggling to stay afloat yet seeing the world, is vastly different than what I plan on doing. I know I will likely work a typical 9-5 and do far less exciting things than getting to know the cheese man in Paris or learning Italian in Italy. Yet her story does not make me jealous. At times I pitied her because of these experiences. Being constantly judged as a model in...

SKIING ON A BUDGET FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS LIVING IN LOS ANGELES To most, skiing and snowboarding are seen as prohibitively expensive sports. Lots of the time it is, unless you’re the typical upper-middle class family with a Range Rover that goes up to Mammoth for a short stint every winter. A lift ticket is almost two hundred dollars per day. Add rentals, gear, and lodging to that and the cheapest possible weekend trip to Mammoth can be nearly 1000 dollars, out of budget for most young college students. What if I told you that as a college student you can ride more, for less? Lift Tickets and Season Passes To ski or snowboard at a resort, you have to pay to use the lifts. A lift ticket covers a day while a season pass covers a whole season. Lift ticket prices usually are crazy. Days at Mammoth Mountain and Squaw Valley, two premier resorts in California, are 179 dollars , according to the Los Angeles Times. On good days, resorts jack up the prices even higher. When people see snow, they ...

The first thing I noticed about Padma Lakshmi, only a few pages into her book Love, Loss, and What We Ate , is how skilled she is at being vulnerable with her writing. She’s not afraid to tell it how it is, even if it’s uncomfortable for her or doesn’t paint herself in the best light. Her transformation from being the mistress to the wife of Salman Rushdie is as captivating as it is uncomfortable and sad to read about. Her reflection is deeply personal. Empathizing with a man who refuses to do so for you must be heartbreaking. Reading about his heartlessness when she has a serious medical condition to me seems unforgivable. Padma, however, has the maturity to see where he’s coming from, something that I probably would be unable to do. Once you get deeper into the book, the content becomes lighter in a sense - she steps backward and describes her childhood. As tragic as some of her stories as an immigrant child to America are, she also describes many happy memories. The book feels hones...