CS 373 Spring 2022: Saran Chockan

1. Where did you grow up?

I grew up in three different countries! I was born in India and lived there for about eight years. Then, I moved to Qatar, where I lived for about 4 years attending middle school. Then, I moved to the States and have been living here since then.

2. What high school did you attend?

I went to Clements High School in Sugar Land, TX (a suburb in Houston).

3. What was your favorite extracurricular activity in high school?

My favorite extracurricular activity in high school was debate! Although I wasn’t very good at it, I did it all four years of high school since I was able to improve my fluency in English and make a ton of friends.

4. Why did you come to UT?

I came to UT since they have an amazing computer science program. Another huge factor was that a lot of my friends from high school were also attending UT.

5. Why are you majoring in CS?

I have always enjoyed doing things that are impactful for the community. In high school, coding was just a means to an end when I wanted to build products for my debate community and local hackathons. As I got more involved in learning web technologies, it bolstered my curiosity to explore the fundamentals of programming.

6. Why are you in this class?

Through my side projects and internships, I realized that I loved being involved in a team that is building large-scale software. It would be cool to do that as part of a course in my college career.

7. What are your expectations of this class?

I am expecting it to be pretty hard for the most part since developing software with unfamiliar toolsets and working with random people is challenging. But, this is the type of experience you go through when you get started at a company, so it definitely would be rewarding.

8. How much Javascript/Python/SQL/Web programming do you already know?

I have experience in a decent amount of JavaScript since I have built jQuery and React apps. A lot of my internship work involved building data pipeline infrastructure with Python. But, I have not built a full-fledged web application so I am looking forward to that!

9. How did you like the first lectures?

I was not expecting the syllabus to be with a unique grading scale and virtual tokens procedure. The lecture about Docker was pretty cool.

10. How did you feel about the cold calling?

I have taken OOP before so I was not surprised by the cold calling. I think it is a pretty fun way to engage the class instead of just lecturing from PPTs.

11. What made you happy this week?

I was feeling sick last week so I was very fatigued for the most part. I am feeling much better now and super excited about my classes.

12. What’s your pick-of-the-week or tip-of-the-week?

If you are preparing for technical interviews and want to make sure you cover all the commonly asked Data Structures and Algorithms topics, I would highly recommend going through all the problems in this list: https://leetcode.com/list/xi4ci4ig/