I took 14 credits worth of classes. Classes are listed as follows:
DEPT ### (# credits, grade): Description
Quarter GPA: 3.93, Cumulative GPA: 3.94
This was a quarter of paradoxes.
It was the freest of times, it was the most restrictive of times. Ok, I'm not the writer that Mark Twain was, but living on-campus during the COVID pandemic was quite the experience. Not that this surprised me; this was in a sense totally expected. But the manner in which this played out was not as predictable.
I think I mentioned before that one of my primary motivations for moving on-campus is to fight loneliness, having basically only being with my family since the start of the pandemic. I believe that this was a success. Although I lived in a supersingle for my own safety, I got to meet and hang out with old (and a few new) friends. The options available to us were of course limited - many of the recreational facilities were closed or at limited capacity - but outdoors was always available; grabbing something to eat at the Ave and then walking to various outdoor areas was common.
But I shan't bore you with the details of my gatherings with friends. Rather, I will expound on an observation I made thinking about my social ventures. Namely, I am not good at organizing meetups.
Let me explain. It feels that everyone but me has this down pat from high school (and honestly maybe even before then). Somehow they always have some kind of after school social thing to do. But it was difficult for me to organize, and oftentimes I could only get a get-together for a specific friend group once per two weeks or so. Maybe I'm worried too much that people will get tired of meeting up?
Another possibility my mom mentioned to me when I came back is that maybe meetups shouldn't be just for the sake of meetups, but rather should also have some goal in mind. Something like a club but a lot smaller; it gives a group reason to meet regularly and socialize without the feeling that "we literally just met up".
I don't know; maybe my fears are unfounded, and it really was just the pandemic restrictions that made socialization somewhat less frequent than I originally anticipated. I can see in-person classes leading to many more social opportunities than I had this quarter. The overall takeaway I guess I can get from this is that just being in a dorm doesn't innately lead to a lot of social opportunities; I still have to make an effort to meet other people.
Enough social though. In terms of academics, everything is going as great as it has always been; I guess the academics wasn't actually paradoxical. Of course, Chinese was my most difficult class (but a rewarding class nevertheless). Next year I'm actually planning to not take Chinese even though that was my original plan. As great as Chinese class has been, it's given me a few too many very late nights for my comfort, and overall has stressed me quite a bit. So for the sake of my mental health, I will not take the 2nd Year Chinese series. It's interesting; in high school I never really thought about this question; I've never really had late nites. I guess this is another reason why college is different; less classes but a ton more work per class. As for math, this quarter has been the most challenging yet, covering linear algebra and basic 3D calculus. Some of it I have already seen before but it's great to be continually learning new things, especially when MATH 134 was mostly review. I think it would be helpful for me in the future if I could more intuitively understand a few of these theorems we have in class - intuitive understanding is a key concept I promote all the time for secondary math as it significantly cuts down on "arbitrary memorization" - but I have also found out that intuition sometimes just comes later. For now, I'll probably go back and review my notes over the summer to make sure I remember everything. In other news, this quarter felt the most heart-warming of the three quarters, partly aided by being able to actually meet a few classmates in-person and a wonderful bird drawing Professor Bekyel made (see above). I'm probably going to take two math classes next school year: MATH 342, the "Putnam Class", and MATH 33X. And hopefully I'll be able to declare a math major next school year!
Computer Science has actually been really fulfuilling this quarter. It was really awesome to learn how the computer actually implements any code that I write, with compilation to assembly code and binary code, memory and cache management, etcetera. CSE 351 had a huge focus on making the material applicable to coding, mostly on being more efficient knowing how the internals work.
I don't have much to do over the summer, so I'm hoping to work on a small programming project where I can actually do something on a front-end and a back-end and see the two interact. And hopefully things are more or less back to normall when school starts again.