CST370 - Week 4 Reflection

 Week 4 Learning Recap

        Week 4 was a change of pace for CST370 as it was predominantly looking back at the material thus far in preparation for the midterm. I mostly found it to be an enjoyable retrospective; a lot of ideas have fallen neatly into alignment with each other. Naturally, I don't know that I'll feel so serene once I see my grade on this exam. I have a tendency to panic that I must persistently fight to override. Instead of a swarm of fresh concepts and ideas, new material simply focused on Merge Sort as an extension of Divide and Conquer. I'll briefly run through some of my exam preparation strategy and then recount what I recall from Merge Sort.
        I first ran through all of the lectures and textbook readings before focusing in on any one topic. From there I broke up the weeks and attempted to use the module items for hot button topics to keep track of and quizzes as a guiding post for how questions might be asked. I found it especially helpful to rewrite definitions and rules in my own words--it quickly exposed where my understanding was superficial or solid. Concepts like DFS and BFS traversal order, worst-case guarantees in puzzle problems, and applying the Master Theorem felt clear enough. Merge Sort material hasn't gone too in-depth yet but it is a natural extension of Divide and Conquer. I can see how the theta(n logn) can be deduced by the inherent structure of the algorithm. Recursive structures that at least superficially appear straightforward are always welcomed.
        Again, we'll see how I'm feeling once this exam result comes out but still a solid consolidation point for the material overall. There are clearly areas to reinforce, when it came down to the time complexity analysis for new pseudocode we hadn't covered, I quickly saw I may have some things to patch up. 

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