Last week of 10th and final semester

After almost 10 semesters of university, I'm heading into my final week.
A range of emotions come into play, like this time in any semester I'm glad it will be all over soon and looking forward to the summer break.
But at the same time I find it sad that my days as a tertiary student are almost over. Last week and the week ahead will be spent on polishing off a project that has taken 3 semesters to complete.

In my first week of my first year in 2001, I wrote the following program, which I dug up from my archive of every assignment / report I have done

class ExerciseTwo {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
  String str1,str2,str3;

  str1 = new String("This is my first try");
  str2 = new String("at programming in Java");
  str3 = new String("It is fun!");

  System.out.println(str1);
  System.out.println(str2);
  System.out.println(str3);

  }
}

Now it's my last week of my final year, and the team I am in has almost completed an application (also written in java) that has taken 3 semesters to get requirements on, design, refine, write and test with thousands of lines of code and over 50 different types user defined classes.

I have come to realise that university has recently failed to challenge me like it once did and it's time to move on.
Reports and presentations are often mundane, and don't motivate me to do my best, as I have done so many of them that I feel like a factory that just spits out another report/presentation.

But having said that I will no doubt miss the lifestyle of being a university student, every day of the 5 years has been worth it. Sitting around in the hire centre, drinking coffee (originally at Melbourne Centre at Between Takes, before it was renovated, and more recently at QV at Espresso Bagels), and of course the heated discussion with mates about some trivial topic.

It's not quite over yet, but the end of classes at the end of this week will be tinged with some sadness as this chapter in my life closes (for now at least).