I quit my job at Audi. I was supposed to transition to a full-time role by February, but there were major delays because my manager went to Germany and HR was awfully slow. Furthermore, I wanted to work on something more fulfilling. My imminent role would put me in integration and development, which wasn’t exactly what I was envisioning. Lastly, the compensation wasn’t enough to support my family. Indeed, it is the “hard engineering” that I should’ve done in my undergrad where I’m designing autonomous vehicles and stuff, but it wasn’t my cup of tea anyway. Thankfully, I received an offer from a stealth startup working on more research sided things. I can not disclose any information, but the work is definitely more interesting and aligns with my goals.

I finalized my manuscript on Nesterov’s accelerated gradient descent and posted it on arXiv. The ideas are a bit rough and rudimentary, but everything came out of my own head, so that’s fine. I remember coming up with this analysis in September 2024 while sitting around in a cafe in Korea. I have no idea if it is original or not, but it was definitely a useful method. I spent my entire vacation working on this. My professor didn’t find it particularly interesting, which was exactly when I lost my interest. Thankfully, working at a SWE job and rotting my brain encouraged my to revisit old passions. I received an email shortly after from a German chess grandmaster regarding further research directions on essential equilibriums. Unfortunately, this man doesn’t know that I am not the biggest bird.

With regards to social life and recreation, I finally obtained the Advanced Lv. 10 title in Pump it Up Phoenix! Now I have to play ~80 level 23s to get the Expert Lv. 1 title. It will be another long journey. On top of that, I have successfully recruited more people to play this stupid rhythm game with me.

I started going to a run club every Wednesday to stay active and meet new people. I’ve been running an ~8 minute pace 5k each time, and it gets easier every time I do it.

Also I’ve been volunteering for my old swim coach. For now, I’m just a timer, but I’m beginning training to become a swim official. I am looking to stay at home and help out my parents in the long term, so I might as well settle down here.

One thing I do miss is teaching. I’m going to see how I can get back into that again.

There has been recently been some developments to me. Some good, some bad. Mostly bad. I will keep my updates short because I do not want to rant nor complain about my current situation to the public, but I feel the need to share this experience for those who may feel similar emotions.

My goals of pursuing a doctorate has been delayed, possibly for an indefinite amount of time. I would not be lying if I said that external circumstances affected this outcomes, but the true reason lies in the current state of the admissions process where I have yet to receive any interviews. Every time I hear that someone received an interview, my heart sinks. I do not mean such phrase to be metaphorical. I feel a tightening in my chest, and my torso becomes heavier. Whoever invented such phrase must’ve experienced similar symptoms.

It is an indeed an odd feeling. I must definitely first mention that this is a first-world problem. I am very privileged to be moping over failing to achieve this lofty ambition. That being said, my sense of depair comes from the fact that every single decision through the past three years have amounted to nothing. Perhaps I am now equivalent to a pre-med student failing to obtain admission to medical school. I would love to make a point about how I possess a more special intellect than the average pre-med student, but it appears that I am more or less the same. I have no rebuttal to such comparison. I have been skill-issued.

My experiences consisted of self-directed research, where I chose to receive minimal supervision from my principal investigators. I presumed that Ph.D. programs would appreciate the random original thoughts and questions that I asked and investigated. But this has led to a lack of materialistic productivity. I do not have a single academic paper to my name but just some manuscripts as evidence of my efforts. Beforehand, I was proud of my work. Although not journal-worthy, I have made conclusions and proofs with my own research. I thought my originality made me special. I felt proud of myself to have full-owner of my developments despite those around me. It was on judgement day when I realized that these experiences were not particularly desirable in the scheme of Ph.D. admission.

I must say that it is extremely hard for me to look back at what I did and show a sense of pride. In fact, I am shameful of my past. Decisions and efforts regarding my academics has amounted to nothing. I regret everything. I want to throw it all away. I am ashamed. I am not special. I am nothing. I am not smart. I am just an average engineering student. I have nothing to show for anything that I did. In the eyes of everyone, I am no different. My pride is proved to be a foolish lie to myself.

This does not mean that I will stop my research. I will continue to make time to investigate the things I find interesting. I have a glimmer of hope that someday my work can possibly bring me joy and pride.

I will leave the Publications tab, as a reminder for my own incompetence.

I should obviously leave a quote as per tradition.

“heheheha”

Good things happened.

I went to Mexico during spring break. Played Pump. The trip went great. I think it was a great relaxation break, but the issue is that we had to cook food for ourselves to save money. The beach was definitely cleaner and nicer than SD beaches. As in, there were no beach residue in the sand nor the water. The sun felt nice.

Although I relaxed well, I can definitely relax better at home. My desires for international travel wilts further.

Came back to America, then played in a Pump tournament, met a lot of cool people. I played in the lower division, then got knocked out pretty early. Most of the competitors were casual players who had rhythm game backgrounds, so I couldn’t compete in scoring.

But know, I would say that I’m officially good at the game now (no longer a noob!). In every universe, I would choose my current state of athleticism rather than rhythm game sense.

Spring quarter was very chill. I took ECE 272A, 273, 275A (all of which were free), and MATH 216C, 240C. I also had to do research with professor Nikolay Atanasov.

I got to hang out a lot of J.B. We basically went to Round1 twice a week. There was one particular day where I stayed at Round1 from 10 AM to 2 AM the next day. Thanks to F.C. for that.

There was a DRGC pool party. Was very fun.

And that’s pretty much it.

Done with coursework. Walked at Masters graduation. Got sunburnt. Went to AX. Had fun.

I landed a 6 month Co-Op at Audi. I thought that I flunked all of the interviews, but somehow I got picked. I suspect it was my enthusiastic yet eloquent speech that emitted pure confidence and competence (when in reality I was not technically competent at all!). But I probably got chosen for a reason, so I’m going to try my best to make the biggest impact.

It’s a really nice to be recognized for my efforts. I was worried about breaking into industry because I never mindlesly grinded leetcode problems, which I always found entirely pointless. It is very nice to be winning at a game with an original strategy. The last thing I wanted to do was to go against my own philosophy of pursuing a career. Contradiction is my greatest fear.

Anyways, I am now back at home, and I have successfully fixed my sleep schedule. I consistently sleep before 12. Wake up around 9. I have to be at work by 8 AM on the first day (bruh). Good thing I started working on my sleep schedule early. Been consistenly hitting the gym and getting cardio in (either run, bike, or swim). I got back into playing League again, but it’s definitely on a healthier note. I don’t feel any urges to play. In fact, I don’t feel to need to play games at all. I feel like I am progressing.

On a different note, I have learned about the plight of particular individuals who had their moralities tested in extreme situations. The boundary between rational thought and emotion became more convoluded. I claim to myself that I would not mimic their actions but always wonder if I will always align with my values if I were in those positions.

I wrote strong opinions towards the students and administration of UCSD, but I chose to omit them. I believe that I am no longer in the position to make general advice.

“When writing up a proof, I only use three words: “obviously,” “evidently,” and “naturally” — isn’t everything self-evident anyway?” - The Herta

Happy new year! I was a little busy with some fun stuff such as:

• Finding someone to replace my at my old apartment so I can move into grad housing.
• Travelling in Japan.
• Selling out.

I’ll start with my Japan trip. I left on December 16th and came back on December 31st. My 4-years of Japanese in highschool really allowed me to free roam the place. Not too shabby. It was cool because everything was so cheap, and I didn’t have to tip when I ate out.

I have recently realized that there is a little more to life than studying. Yeah, learning is cool is all, but playing PIU is really fun. To be honest, I didn’t do much in fall quarter, and I think that’s probably the burn out.

And that ends the short entry. I have fallen behind on a lot of work, but I have realized that I need to strongly reconsider the people I choose to be around. I have grown defensive and succumbed to the sunk cost fallacy of a relationship, when truly I am the one being drained. Not just of energy, but my precious time. In such scenarios, it is important to take action. The severity of the action is my choice, and I have chosen to make a drastic one. I look forward to pursue further endeavors as I rid my path of obstacles.

“Pain happens when you care”

At this point in time, I don’t have a nice record to apply to PhD programs, so I will apply next cycle. To be honest, I want to go work because I did all the theory and some projects, but not really anything else. I guess technically I can just do my own projects.

ECE271A

Nuno went off on the graduate students for being noobs. Here’s an post-midterm Piazza post:

The exam is graded and the TAs will release it in Gradescope soon. I wanted to leave some comments here.

• in general, my strategy of “you only have to be above threshold” backfired. I was expecting that there would be less people with weaker scores, because there was less pressure to complete the whole exam.
• what we found out was the opposite, there were more students with weak scores than what is usual. In fact, the scores were so low that I had to spend most of last week working with the TAs to find ways to give you more credit.
• Even after this, we had to lower the P/F score from the initial value of 35 to 30.

This is not a good outcome. There are only two possible explanations.

• we have an unusually number of students this year that are not ready to take a class like this
• you did not take the exam seriously and did not study as much as you should.

I will not make further comments regarding this issue, but I find it funny that this is a graduate-level class.

Arcane

I recently watched Arcane Season 2. It was pretty good animation wise, but definitely there are plot holes and poorly written script. Still, there were some good themes:

“They want better lives, but emotion clashes with reason. Humanity’s self-corrupting contradiction.” - Viktor

The main issue is that Viktor accepts the beauty of imperfection. However, all this will do is leave the audience to be content. Indeed, imperfection is acceptable, but this dismisses the pursuit of perfection, which is practically fuels progress. At the beginning of Arcane, we have Jayce and Viktor obsessed with progress, but with Viktor conceding, we just have imperfection and lack of progress. They should’ve concluded with balance: a healthy balance of pursuit of perfection and contentment of imperfection. They don’t even portray this. But then again, this show is for the general audience who need validation for complacency, so I will not meddle further. I am just extremely dissatisfied with the overall themes of the show.

This brings me to my disappointment in my quarter so far. To my standards, I have failed. I actually wrote an entire paragraph on why I failed to manage my time poorly, but I deleted it all after a realization. It’s weird how when someone fails, it is the flaws of the person, but when I fail, it is the fault of the environemnt. All of my shortcomings are due to flaws in my character. I will now try my best to fix them.

Modern humanity lacks persistance, but it is a natural consequence of prosperity. However, behavior in the presence of contentment is the purest reflection of someone’s character.

I will try my best to update this blog weekly.

COSMOS: That was a fun month. All of the groups got their projects done. I’m happy for all of them. I decided to make some lecture notes for the students, but I never got to finish it since I was lazy. I WILL finish them and send them to Sahar. I feel like I should finish what I started. Otherwise, it was really fun!!! I’m glad Karcher told me about this. I got to learn how the optics lab equipment worked and met cool people.

Rhythm Games: For the earlier part of July, I went to Round 1 twice a week with T.L. and K.W. CONSTANTLY. Feeding my rhythm game addiction. Also met some more cool people DRGC. Then I started Pump it Up… There was a machine to play at Corvette Diner, which was pretty close. T.L. basically drove me there two to three times a week, until I realized that I can trolley + bike. This was a 25 minute commute, which was not bad. You can assume that every single day I had free time between 11 AM and 6 PM, I went to Corvette Diner to play Pump. I officially started around July 15th playing level 5 and 6s. I have a clear memory of failing Hestia S7 or something. Then I beat Euphorianic S8 on July 22nd, basically a week after. I think all of the DDR grinding transferred a little bit. After two months, I play level 14-16s. I’m getting pretty comfortable with doubles, too. Hopefully I can reach level 20 by the end of the year. All of my progress is tracked on my YouTube channel, so go check that out!!! (I am addicted please help me).

ECE 111: My group still needs to finish the final project, and I’ll probably crank out the extra homeworks sooner or later. I’ll be honest, that class genuinely had interesting content, but I never allocated time to actually learn it. Thank goodness the homeworks and final quiz was easy. One little grip I have for the class is the Vishal Karna is TOO DAMN NICE. I pulled an all-nighter to finish all of the homework, and what happens is that he pushes the deadline to the Friday of last week. Then he pushes it again to the Tuesday after the summer session ends. Then he pushes it again to the Friday. What a wonderful man. The final project is also going smoothly, so that’s good.

ECE 5 TA: THAT WAS SO MUCH FUN. Probably the biggest ECE 5 summer class that I’ve ever seen. I remembered how much I love teaching. This time around, Karcher let me lead the signal processing lecture, so I got to math-pill everyone. There definitely were hardships (especially for the robot lab), but all groups got their robot working. I clearly remember these two students who were doing ECE 196 stuff in their free time, and I was like “???????” This is good. We need more hands-on engineers. The students this year are very enthusiastic about engineering, so that makes me happy. I read through the reviews, and I’m glad the students appreciated me. Hopefully, I can come back for Fall 2024.

Sooooooo, what am I doing now?

Well, currently, I am in Korea. I want to grind Pump, and read some research papers for some cool new stuff. Also I need to catch up on my topology and differential geomtry stuff. I have been HELLA SLACKING. Since I am in Korea, I can’t play online games with my friends back at home. Hopefully this allows me to optimize my free time. I’ll be in Korea for around 3 weeks, and I will be skipping week 1 of school. I will have to email all of my professors quick haha.

Also, I got hired for 10 hours of ECE 109 TAing. This is epic. I’m gonna try my best to take on Spencer’s legacy. On that note, I need to brush up on my math. Luca said that it is easy to lose mathematical reasoning skills, so I need to get that together.

On that note, I COULDN’T GET OUT OF ECE 269 AND ECE 271A despite my argument saying that MATH 216ABC and MATH 240ABC are clearly better. I had to ask Nuno Vasconcelos AND Yang Zheng, and both of them said no. This is so sad, so subscribe to my Youtube channel. This makes my Fall courses disgusting:

• ECE 271A: Forced to take this dogshit class.
• ECE 276C: Look decently interesting, and also I want to be employable
• MATH 216A: Actually interested, but might have to audit instead because of 271
• MATH 240A: Need.
• MATH 250: Interested.

BROOOOOOOOOO, I’m genuinely pissed. Furthermore, the CE degree was changed drastically, which leaves CE majors in the dark. To help with this GREAT decision that the ECE department decided to make, I plan to create a supplementary document for CE course selection.

Post-finals burnout (June 15th - June 26th):

Quarter ended, but there were still things to do. I did not sleep early. On the Saturday, I woke up early to help D.W. and H.P. move out stuff. I got paid in free food. I went to the beach with some friends and just ended up sleeping on the beach for most of the time I was there. Then ate food. I like to beach for the fresh air, not for the beach part. Came back, and I’m living with D.W. for a few days. On Sunday, wake up early again to attend my friend’s graduation. I think I wrote some emails and planned out the next two weeks. On Monday, I got KBBQ and went karaoke. Ate well, had fun. My friend was supposed to drive me back on Tuesday morning, but he had some stuff to figure out. On Tuesday, it was D.W. first day of work. I got to sleep in that day. I didn’t go out. Stayed inside and planned out the rest of the summer Wednesday morning, departed SD and died for most of the ride. Stopped at a Costco and ate the chocolate chip cookie for the first time. Absolutely amazing. Then ate dosas, basically Indian fried pancakes. Pretty good. Would try again. Came home, then immediately went to Philz Coffee to study. K.C. is there. Talk a little about optimization problems. Start on differential geometry. Friend’s dad takes me to Costco. Get chicken bake. Friend grills a burger for me. Burger is amazing. Walk home, and he bikes next to me. Talk about stuff.

← this is a picture of me taking a break from studying for MATH 140C on Tuesday morning after being awake for 40 hours.

The next few days were the same. Sleep at 1 AM. Wake up at 11 AM. Get lunch with an old friend. Go to Philz/public library. Study for 6-7 hours. Get dinner. Come home. Until the next Thursday. I’m glad most of my friends are doing well. Most of them have their stuff together, and they are growing as people. It makes me very happy. Also I got a lot of differential geometry and topology problems done. Also I played some Valorant with friends. Good breath of fresh air.

I stayed home on the 26th because I wanted to spend time with my family.

On the 27th, I sleep at 2 AM after packing. I wake up at 4 AM. My mom drives me to the airport. I only got to see her for 4 days since she flew in from Korea last week. I slept throughout the entire flight to SD is alright. I public transport my way back to my apartment. There is a control theory seminar at 12:30 AM. I’m tired. It’s okay. I chug the two leftover ProBallers and do more differential geometry. I head to the seminar. Free pizza. One of the new roommates move in the next day. I buy cleaning supplies from Target. I come back. I watch one YouTube video. My friend’s parents made dinner. I eat then directly go to the gym for a pull day. I deep-clean the entire apartment for 5 hours.

(June 28th - July 3rd)

Go to CSE 140 lecture. Do some lab training for COSMOS. Do some extracurricular math work. Research. Otherwise, I’ve be SUPER unproductive. I probably played just played Valorant until 3 AM every day.

(July 4th - )

Then I went to Anime Expo. Very fun. Standing in line wasn’t bad at all, but it was very crowded. Don’t know how it wasn’t a fire hazard. I think I spent a negotiably reasonable amount of money. I guess gaslighting myself to not buy anything for the first few days worked pretty well. I will omit further comments about the people at the convention. On Saturday night, we went to Round1, and I got addicted to DDR. On Sunday night, one of the Dance and Rhythm Game Club people drove me to R1 again. On Monday night, I went to R1 again with some good friends. COSMOS started and I had to deliver a presentation. On Tuesday night, I went to R1 again with DRGC people. COSMOS TA job is chill. I’m learning a lot since I skipped the waves and optics class. I continue to play Valorant to 2 AM each day. On Sunday July 14th, DRGC club took me to an R1 in Temecula. I played DDR for 8 hours. COSTCO lunch, Red Robin dinner. I had a triple patty burger and bottomless mac and cheese. It was amazing. That was the greatest burger I had this year. Then I played one more game of DDR. These people are very cool and nice. I will hang with them more.

I can feel myself falling out of touch with my goals. I need to get my shit together. I’m on a PC game ban for the next month. Or maybe I will just play on weekends. I NEED to get my work done. I guess I was burnt out, but I had enough time for rest. Now is the time to restore my former glory days.

Finally. I am done. What a quarter. I’ll be completely honest, that wasn’t too bad other than the finals week. Now that I think about it, I didn’t make a single big mistake this quarter. I was really on top of everything I was doing, and I made sure to stay track at all times. Now all I need to do is to get some rest for summer. The main issue with summer is that I don’t have deadlines that motivate me, so it is solely up to me to make the best of it. The best part is that I won’t be obligated to socialize, so as long as I can focus, it will be fine.

Sometimes I think about what keeps me going in these moments, and I guess it’s just my own disappointment of others. Probably the one thing that motivates and infuriates me the most is people “studying” and then “rewarding” themselves by doomscrolling. And then they know that they’re dopamine receptors are fried, yet they can’t pull themselves out of it. I don’t know whether to feel contempt or pity, but it is truly is a disheartening sight. My immediate reaction is to work harder because I do not want to look as fallible as they.

← that is a picture of me at the ECE awards ceremony winning the Best Tutor award for Fall 2023. Next to me is Bill Lin, the director of the ECE dept. I would like to remind people that I was appointed 3 hours for tutoring ECE 5, yet I voluntarily spent probably 15 hours every week tutoring the class without pay. I had research and 6 other classes to tend to. And yet, I found my priority to end up in the education of fellow students.

I will probably make another post about the cool things I learned this quarter, but I’m gonna dump a lot here. Below is the rough schedule I had for finals week.

Notes:

• Awake for 50+ hours on Sunday-Tuesday.
• Celsius count: 5, ProBaller count: 10
• Cried while eating pho. I swear, I probably produced 0 dopamine in the time until I had that bowl of pho.
• Insane headache after MATH144 final until Saturday morning. I did not take pain-killers because I’m not weak.
• My vision went black during a set when I went to the gym on Tuesday, so I did a short conditioning workout and went home.
• Some guys from Arkansas talked to us on Thursday around 11:30 when Henry and I were eating TapEx. Funny fellas.
• Went to the beach on Saturday

I will never do that again. I thought I had permanent brain damage because my headache would never go away. All of my finals went pretty well. I’m genuinely satisfied that I survived this quarter, but I don’t think I’ll be pushing my academic limits further. I will probably fly too close to the sun.

And as always, there’s more work to be done:

• Send some emails to professors and old high school teachers
• Look into PhD programs + letters of recommendation
• Research + more research
• TritonAI work

“Life is only a long and bitter suicide, and faith alone can transform this suicide into a sacrifice.” -Franz Liszt

• DRP: Presentation slides
• DSC 291: Presentation slides + report
• ECE 171A: HW7 due Wednseday night
• ECE 276B: HW3 due Sunday night + PR3 due Tuesday of finals week
• MAE 288A: HW4 due Thursday night
• MATH 102: do the HW
• MATH 140C: do HW due today
• MATH 144: HW7 + midterm Tuesday
• MATH 294: HW4 due next Monday

I’m glad I finish this week on a good note. First of all, I ran a half-marathon, an entire 13.1 miles! The course was brutal. I held a comfortable 8:30 pace until there was a 400 ft elevation gain up Torrey Pines reserve. I look back at it, and I can finally say that it was quite the experience. I would definitely do it again if there wasn’t so much incline. I had these massive blisters on my feet that finally popped, so I can walk normally. Don’t worry, all of the skin grew back already.

And I did that race right into midterm week. I actually finished MATH 140C and ECE 171A midterms, which is very good. Only issue is that I skipped two ECE 171A lectures, so I’m a little behind. In fact, I’m actually pretty behind on a lot of things. I need to catch up on probably all of my classes and study for the MATH 144 midterm, which I NEED to do well on. I realized that Fourier analysis is not something I can just use intuition to solve. Probably going to spend a good 5-6 hours on studying. Otherwise, there was an ECE 276B project due, and I actually got it done. I will be posting the report soon, but there’s some extra stuff I want to put in.

I don’t know what to say. I don’t feel burnt out (or at least I tell myself that I’m not), but I don’t feel great either. I definitely feel very satisfied, in fact, very proud of what I’m achieving so far, but something always feels missing. It’s not like I didn’t go out of anything. I made a ton of new friends and met a ton of new people this school year, and yet I don’t feel very fulfilled in one way or another.

So apparently my petitions for ECE 15 and ECE 100 did NOT go through, and they told be two weeks ago in the VAC message. I guess it is my fault, but I don’t know why they didn’t reject or close the petition on the petition portal. I was thinking that it was still under consideration, but I guess there is no one to blame but me. I guess I should actually read emails. Otherwise, I submitted another petition to replace ECE 15 with MAE 288A and ECE 100 with MATH 294. I will likely hear back this Tuesday.

One thing that I noticed is that I’ve been very judgemental lately, so I think I need to reflect on that a little more. I think I haven’t been destressing with recreational activities, but what is recreational at this point. I think that it is very hard to pinpoint what is something that I truly enjoy whether it be socializing with people or learning new things. Maybe this is indeed burn-out from doing anything, and I just need a day of doing absolutely nothing. Only problem is that this goes against my values of being productive, so this is a dilemma. Whatever my issue is, I’ll try to diagnose it after finals. There is no time to wait. I must move forward.

On the bright side, I think I have successfully detached from playing League on a normal basis. I don’t feel the need to play spontaneously anymore. I don’t feel stressed for not playing or anything. I think that my approach to games is just a medium for social interaction and fun rather than a coping mechanism for my stress. I guess this is good to extent since I lost an outlet for destressing. However, this is not my concern just yet.

For anyone who is wondering what I’m doing over the summer, here’s a nice list:

• COSMOS teaching/lab assistant (July)
• ECE 5 course staff (August)
• ECE 101 course staff maybe (August)
• ECE 45 course staff (July - August)
• Finish paper with Poveda
• Maybe do more research with Prof. Atanasov or Zheng
• TritonAI Boat+Drone localization design project
• Look into postgraduate and PhD programs + apply to jobs
• Learn how to draw (1 hour a day!!!)

I have some ambitious goals that I want to fulfill over the summer. I think I got this. Anyways, here’s a good quote that I thought of these past few weeks.

“I touched the stars, and saw the glorious light of a thousand suns! Now, blinded by this elegance, how could my purpose be anything… but dark…” - Aatrox

Things to do:

• ECE171A: Finish homework
• ECE276B Project 2
• MATH140C: Analysis homework + midterm prep
• MATH144: Fourier Analysis homework + midterm prep
• MATH294: Review notes
• MAE288A: Start homework early!!!
• DSC291: Talk to prof + work on presentation with M.B.
• DRP: work on project
• Graduation: talk to advisor

Cool things I’m learning this week:

• MATH140C: MEASURE THEORY (finally)
• MATH144: Proving why maximal area is attained by a circle given a fixed length Jordan curve
• MATH294: Brownian motion and stochastic integrals

BIG UPDATES THIS WEEK:

• I might be enrolling in my eighth class after my course request goes through for DSC 291. Nothing happened yet, but registrar will add it soon.
• Had 4 Celsius (800mg of caffeine) in the span of 36 hours!!
• Dumbbell shoulder-pressed 110, but then proceeded on a 4 day gym hiatus due to work (League of Legends).
• I am running a half-marathon next week. I will post about that as well.
• My petitions to not take ECE25, PHYS2C, CHEM6A went through!!! BIG W. Hopefully the same follows with ECE15 and ECE17. They’re really letting me get away with this.

Now that this went through, I think that I can graduate by the end of August 2024. My graduation alleviates the pain of taking lower division requirements in Fall 2024. This means that my coursework will probably look like this:

• MATH216A: Mathematical Methods in Data Science (interest)
• MATH240A: Real Analysis (for interest + mathematical foundation)
• ECE271A: Statisical Learning (masters degree requirement)

And I literally have nothing else. Also note that I will be a graduate student by the fall 2024 quarter. This means that tutor pay is around 40 per hour. My goal here is to TA at least 20-30 hours a week, and this is definitely doable. However, when I apply to course staff jobs right now, I will be applying as an undergraduate tutor. This is some logistical garbage that needs to be dealt with. I’m going to have to find a workaround to this since ECE dept doesn’t like to funnel hours into one person. Otherwise, it’ll probably be ECE5, ECE109, ECE196. I hope that I can be a ECE250 TA, but idk yet. I guess that’s another email I have to send. If I get everything figured out, I’ll probably audit CSE101, MATH158, MATH200.

Life became an endless stream of homework. Every single day is a deadline. I’m starting to think that this wasn’t a good idea, but then what else would I be doing if I didn’t have work? That was a rhetorical question, and the answer is League of Legends. Although I feel a little soulless, I continue to live with purpose. I guess this is fine. I can’t wait for this quarter to be over. I have 4 more weeks of hell.

Anyways, here’s a quote that I thought about this week:

“Nothing easy is worth doing.” - Piya Pal