There's snow! Patrick R. McElhiney recently received his Golden Key Honors Society Certificate for being in the top 15% of his class at the University of New Hampshire. He is currently finishing up his school projects before the Winter Break. He has one test that he plans to take during the break, due to his absences from school because of his dental oral surgery work that had to be done coming up on 12/12/2017, which prevented him from driving to the Manchester campus due to pain.
Patrick has completed work for his COMP 880 - Tableau class, as well as his COMP 851 - Systems Integrations class. He designed a new program that provides better website statistics using Tableau, comparatively to Awstats, which is common with Cpanel hosting. It allows all of the site visitors to be resolved to their GPS coordinates at the time of the site access, and provides information such as the city of the visitor, the state, the country, the ISP, and other information as well. He also designed a system that used various types of messaging protocols and software, such as OpenMRS, an open-source medical record system which was linked together using Kafka, Grafana with Cassandra, and many other tools to monitor the use of the software to identify protein sequences by the use of FASTA files, which are the genetic makeup of diseases. The program can identify what diseases a patient has by analyzing their protein DNA sequences.
For COMP 525, a class that Patrick took only to prepare for his PhD degree program, he needs to go and take his Final Exam, which he is sure that he will do really well on. He got a 97% on the mid-term exam. He hasn't started practicing to take the exam yet, however he is getting ready to, and will take it after his dental surgery has healed.
Last night, Patrick worked on several of his home computers, one of which he is repairing after a Solid State Drive died on him. He is preparing his office to have possibly one or two more computers, and it already has several, in addition to two business class printers, 3 label printers, 3 cloud storage systems, and a wireless scanner. He is intending on having a completely Linux powered server running as DMZ host on his Internet connection, so that he can SSH into it from school and have a central shell and RDP access to one server that stores all of his works, as far as his IT work and programming works. Currently he works with two different laptops, which each have a separate VirtualBox installation of multiple instances of Ubuntu Linux. It's simply too complicated to try to share instances between the two laptops, without having a physical server that hosts the virtual environment - as well as a web server for testing new applications and software.
Patrick thinks he'll be getting at least two A's now - while likely he will get A's in all three of his classes. This is based on expectations for Final Project grades, and Final grades based on an average of an A+ in each of his three classes just a few weeks ago. It would be highly irregular if Patrick would get a B in any of his classes, due to his previous standing. He has been staying up to date on his work despite his absences.
From his observation, Patrick sees that there are basically two types of students that he attends school with. The first type does the bare minimum of what is required of each assignment, without investing any extra time into what they are learning. School is like watching television to them - they get distracted, they don't follow up on every lead, they fall behind. The second type of student always wants to improve - they are obsessed with getting better, even if their grades don't reflect absolute perfection. They feel bad when they get a B rather than an A. They try to do everything they can to learn more about subjects that are often times beyond the scope of the assigned work for the class. Can you guess what type Patrick R. McElhiney is?
Patrick thought it may have been unfair to compare himself as the ultimate student that no one else he attends school with can compete with - because this is a little egotistical, even though it's probably true. However, the fact of the matter is that there are students that are perhaps more dedicated to their lives than Patrick is able to perform, such as working full time while attending school full time. Patrick can't compare to these types of students, because of his disability - however, there is probably no other student that scores as highly as Patrick R. McElhiney, at least in his programs. This isn't because of ego - it's because Patrick genuinely cares about being a perfectionist, and he is far from it. He does everything he possibly can to improve his skills, to project his success, to be the success story - because he knows what it is like to have life pass you by while you're sick and unable to contribute to society. If anything, Patrick is just trying to make up for everything that he has lost over the time periods that he was unable to contribute, and he genuinely cares about making the world a better place. He's not just looking for recognition for his works - he's actually doing the hard work that it takes to get recognized, and he offers this ability to succeed to wherever and whomever hires him in the future. Make no mistake, Patrick is a team player - but he's much more than that. He's the ultimate team leader, and he appreciates what other people do, even if he is hard on them to improve their skills and habits.
