I wasn’t sure what would be the right song for 2015 until I set foot
on MIT. Then it was a no-brainer.
Where do I even begin?
I thought cooking was hard. Then I ended up in the kitchen on the third
floor of the west parallel of East Campus and had to produce something
edible. So I figured out how to acquire chicken and put it in a pan with
some onions and heat the whole thing up. It wasn’t even that bad! A few
weeks later, I graduated to cooking in a rotation for six people. All
this from a guy whose culinary abilities only went as far as frying eggs
a few months ago. It’s incredible where life takes you sometimes.
I thought I couldn’t productively listen to lyrical music while doing
homework, because I get distracted and/or bogged down by the feels.
Turns out there’s a category of metal songs with great atmosphere and
terrible lyrics that does the trick.
I had planned to suffer through introductory chemistry my freshman fall
and introductory biology my freshman spring, and thereafter be done with
required classes. Well, I took chemistry, but there was barely any
suffering involved, and now biology fits nowhere on my freshman spring
schedule.
I had some outlandish hopes I’d walk into college and be able to
become mildly financially independent because people would throw
high-paying jobs at me that I could learn from, but I didn’t expect it
to happen. Life isn’t that easy!
Well… it happened.
An incredible number of redacted things.
I’ve never been that kind of guy. Honest and innocent to a fault, no
secrets except those arising from paranoid self-assigned concern about
others’ privacy: that’s me. Until this year.
Oh well, I can’t blog about it.
[redacted]
But mostly, of course, I actually graduated. The teacher-appreciation
dinner happened (6/4), where I debuted my graduation song (woo!) and ate
some good cake (double woo!); senior prom happened (6/7), with some
awesome photos; and then, actually, the graduation ceremony. (6/10, same
day I realized I had recently passed 100 starred things on GitHub.)
::looks at self:: I’m actually a college student now.
Every one of these stages of life seems like it should be a big deal,
like I should pass through and suddenly know all the things about
maturity and aspirations and life that are expected of college students,
but it never happens that way.
At least, all things considered, I think this transition was very
successful at taking my mind off the angsty side of things. This post is
actually surprisingly unangsty. Sorry to disappoint if that’s what
you’re here for!
Well, there are better memory-triggering songs but I think this
pretty much sums up how I feel about blogging right now (possibly
including the very act of choosing that song.) And college apps. And
life. Plus, the music video is silly in its own incredible way.
Anyway. Around this time a year ago, I made
a post talking about how around
a year before that,
I paused my participation in big high-school competitions, for a variety
of reasons.
And then I rambled on life and programming competitions.
If you didn’t get it yet, this post so far has been written to
meaningfully echo the last one. Nothing so abrupt has happened this
year, but I just realized how nice it was to have a paragraph humorously
listing the weird stuff I had gotten myself into over the course of
2013, so I’m going to do so again, even more completely.
Random video! Although I feel that I’ve heard it earlier, my first
conscious memory of getting linked to it is from
this
post. At first I thought it would be the right background music for
this post, but upon further reflection I think it mainly suited me while
I was writing this post. Well, it’s topical if you mentally replace
“day” with “year”.
Anyway. Around this time a year ago, I paused my participation in big
high-school competitions, for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, I stopped attempting to make IMO both because I wouldn’t get
that much from the training and because other people ought to have the
opportunity. I was concerned that I might condition myself to only be
able to do math with the short-term motivation of contests. Better to
focus on college math and maybe some original research, I thought.
During the year, I did lots of the former and very little of the latter.
Meh.
As for the IOI, my obvious next target: I was tired of training and
going abroad while paranoid about whether my immune system would hold
up. I didn’t feel that the IOI was worth that. To some degree, I also
felt burned out about programming. Long story short, my treatment should
end soon, and learning Haskell completely resolved the burnout
problem.
But the most important reason, I think, was that “high school was too
short”. I started math competitions ridiculously early and didn’t spend
much time exploring other interests. I thought I knew myself well enough
that I could say I didn’t have many more interests at all, but I was
completely wrong (psych nerds will reflexively note this to be the
Dunning-Kruger
effect). I coded lots in weird languages — Haskell, as mentioned
previously, plus Scala, plus all manner of other magical command line
tools. I wrote my first math problem and submitted it officially, picked
up a new instrument, went to a debate competition, served as an
unimportant tech guy for MUN, discovered and became hooked on
Pentatonix, participated in three puzzle hunts in Australia and one in
Massachusetts, figured out my rough political stance, rode a boat, got
retweeted by @eevee and
@Kyrgyzstan_News, increased my
Neopets™ fortune by over 3400%, and lurked on FurAffinity a little too
much.