A Really Good Week

The winter quarter has been very hectic but I am liking it due to the different interesting course material I am encountering this quarter which mainly consists of operations in MATLAB, Statistical Programming in R, and probability.
 
MATLAB is something new that I am learning and it looks to be the perfect system to do many mathematical based calculations like linear algebra, etc. Statistical programming in R is something new too. Although I have prior experience in R, it was based in data wrangling, visualization, and those sorts of areas but this time I am learning the statistical applications like histograms, distributions, etc. and what inference we can draw from them. And probability has been one of my favorite topics in Mathematics growing up, mainly because of its real-world applications and examples (the Monty Hall problem was good).
 
Two other important things happened this week. First, I was contacted by the Director of the Study Abroad program to be a panelist at the info session that was conducted this past Friday. Although the director did not know me, the previous director had recommended me as she was the one who arranged the program last summer and took the theatre class too in London. It was the first time I was a panelist and the major reason the event feels significant is not only because of the opportunity I got but knowing that the last director thought I was worthy enough of being given this recognition.
 
In the other event, I visited one of the buildings belonging to Amazon’s HQ in Seattle as a part of a mentorship program. I have been fortunate enough to have been assigned a mentor who is a Senior Software Developer and Tester at Amazon, and I along with 4 other students have the opportunity of going every Friday to the HQ and having discussions on various topics with him. It was my first time in a corporate office of this scale and it was a great experience. My most striking part was how welcoming all the colleagues of our mentor were when they interacted with us. I am very much looking forward to all the upcoming Fridays and learning new things about my mentor and the life at Amazon in general. Our mentor has been flexible and generous enough that he has already got a guest speaker for our second meeting and I look forward to that too.
 
Apart from that, have a couple of career fairs in the coming week and also, I got some major breakthroughs in getting Drupal-based website functional for the Near Eastern Language and Civilization department here at the university.
 
(A suggested article read: Pop culuture obsessed with battle of good and evil)