I’ve only been on the Penn State campus for no longer than a year due to the pandemic, and while here, the most memorable aspect has been my experience in the Pattee and Paterno Library. I enjoy studying in this main library. Setting in a place surrounded by a group of hard-working students encourages you to keep studying, and, because of this rich learning atmosphere, I always have very high productivity and efficiency in completing my school work. This place never makes you feel tired or get bored.

As the complement of studying at the library, I always order a cup of Starbucks coffee, though it’s quite annoying that every time I have to wait in queue for around 20 minutes due to the large volume of students. Still, a cup of coffee would always cheer me up and make me highly productive for almost an entire afternoon. Thus, my experience in Pattee library is definitely the most enjoyable and memorable period of my Penn State life.

Pattee and Paterno Library

In addition to the library, our Informational Science building is another place that impressed me. Its building structure is really special compared to other buildings since there’s a long straight path running through the entire building. The interior is more modern and elegant with countless computer labs and versatile classrooms. It always reminds me of those moments that I went to the professor’s office hours and moments I design an electric circuit in the CE lab.

Penn State IST building

For my non-academic life at Penn State, I joined PyLO, which is a club that aims to teach student programming concepts through a project-based experience. I would admit that all these hands-on projects experiences greatly improved my programming skills and helped me aced those fundamental CS courses. Also, I was selected to be the treasurer of this club, managing Q&A sessions to help club members figure out bugs in their projects, and held new member recruitment sessions. Although something went wrong that made me have to resign from that position, it was still a comfortable and meaningful experience for me.

PyLO logo

Finally, the best thing about studying at Penn State is that I met a group of like-minded friends who are all computer science students. We share the same common ground, and we have similar career goals and future prospects, which makes conversation between us very comfortable and exciting. We helped each other whenever doing team projects, preparing for coding interviews, and exchange useful learning resources, etc; all of which promote us to a higher momentum both socially and academically.