The strengths that I have identified in myself really focus on how I am able to learn through various means and specifically how I can take what I have learned in class and apply it to personal projects. This strength is helpful, since if I take a class that requires a lot of writing I am well versed in that field while I can still take that skill and use it when I need to create something for a project.

Surprises that I have encountered in the first two weeks include how easily it is to misrepresent time in my schedule and how little goal setting I have done this term. When I plan out my week, I usually block out time during the evenings that I normally do like cook and exercise. However, I have underestimated how long it takes me to complete assignments in this class. I think I am going to shift from working on an assignment just one day to working on assignments multiple days to ensure I get completed results. As well, this week we learned of one specific type of goal setting, SMART, and in thinking about how I have done goal setting in the past I realized that I haven’t done much of that this year. And while I have general big idea goals, I really haven’t broken down those goals into smaller goals like the book suggests to do. I think I am going to go ahead and schedule some time this week, probably this Tuesday and do that goal setting. One example that immediately comes to mind how I want to have no debt, specifically academic debt in three years, just a year after I will have finished this program in getting a second bachelors in computer science, but I haven’t planned to apply to scholarships or set up a schedule of how I would pay my debt as I worked.

Struggles that represent the challenges of online learning include technological problems and bad time management. I have had some issues recently on getting my web browser to correctly represent different web pages that we use in class. This week when I was navigating to the pearson online tools the pages would not appear on my safari application on my laptop. I also noticed that some of the canvas web pages did not load as quickly or ad all when I used safari. In one case, when I tried to download a specific type of files (python) for my computer science class the files would download in html instead of python. As well, during the week my girlfriend had landed a job interview in a city four hours away on Monday. I was unable to reschedule what I had planned for the weekend and evenings in order to include this new event, where my girlfriend and I had to drive there and back. What is worst, when both struggles, technological and scheduling, happen at the same time it makes getting assignments done harder. As far as resolving this for the future, I plan to only use Firefox for my online classes. I will also start completing assignments on Sunday the first complete day of the week to work on online assignments.