1. Writing is hard, like really hard

Since the last time I wrote a blog, I've: turned 18, graduated high school, started college, started learning a new language played a lot of TFT, graduated college, and went on a 6 week trip to Asia. Since then, I've attempted to write three blog posts: one after my freshman year recapping what happened, another after my sophomore fall, and finally another right after finishing my sophomore spring. There's over 15k words just stored on my computer that'll never see the light of day 🥲. In fact, I started writing this exact blog in May of 2023 (more than two years ago) and I finished half of it before not touching it again until now.

For each of those posts, I spent probably ~5 hours each just writing a summary of the past few months. But after writing much of it all out and then looking back at it, I just... couldn't bring myself to edit it or even publish it. I got all of my thoughts out, effectively ranting onto the screen, but after doing so, I felt empty and didn't want to publish it. There was no coherent story, just a bunch of random stories that dragged out too long and to be honest, I didn't want anyone besides myself knowing. I don't regret spending the time writing those posts, because even the attempt at formulating those feelings into coherent thoughts helped me organize my thinking and reflect on the past. But it is unfortunate that the result is a blog that has gone two years without an update 💀.

One thing I did realize is that the blog posts I was previously writing were all effectively just telling a story of my life. I was just talking about myself over and over again, narrating events with a bit of commentary in between about my current thoughts. But when I read those drafts over again, it just didn't sound like myself. When I read those posts, it just felt dry, deadpan, and just plain boring. There would be the occasional quip thrown in, but it just didn't satisfy the light-hearted nature or spontaneity that I feel characterize my ideal writing style.

As a result, I decided to do something a bit more creative / freeform: a list of random things. This way, I can jump around random topics and not worry about maintaining some overarching narratives. For people that have hung out with me a lot, I think it better fits my personality since I feel like I'm rather random / just say spontaneous things sometimes.

For this post, I'm just taking what I wrote two years ago, and just finally clicking the upload button (with some edits here and there). The original title to this was 17 things I learned, but I think I only wrote 9 before I gave up so I think it's better to just hit publish now before I end up taking another 2 year hiatus!

2. I can't decide on colors

If you're one of my friends (or just happen to be a random person who happened to visit this website), then you might know that this website used to be a lot more... yellow (in light mode). If you knew me all of the way back in high school, you might also remember a very different website. Back in high school, I used a Jekyll based website that I honestly just didn't like the structure nor color theme of. During college, I thought about making my own website filled with animations, custom elements, and my own custom color theme. That's when I made this website back in the summer between freshmen and sophomore year (which ended up taking me 4 months to make because I barely worked on it during the semester). I ended up choosing my own colors, and I chose this pale yellow and darker brown as the main color scheme. But after living with that website for almost half a year... I just wanted to throw up when seeing that brown color. It just bothered me, like an annoying itch in the center of your back. People I asked about it said it was fine and that it looked nice, but to me, it just... bothered me? Who makes a yellow website?? Why does my website look like it was written on parchment paper like the Declaration of Independence???

As a result, the most recent iteration of this website uses a light blue theme instead, which at least to me, is a lot more soothing. But I feel like in a week, or a month, it might just look awful to me, like a winter wonderland or something. We'll see though, but one nice thing about making my own website like this is that I can change the colors as much as I want by just changing a single file. Previously, I would go scrounging trying to hack css selectors to make something change colors just to find that it changes everything except for the background of the table of contents heading when your cursor was hovered over it (this didn't actually happen, but things akin to it did).

3. How to ride public transportation

This is kinda an embarassing fact considering I grew up in New Jersey and New York City, two states with a ton of public transportation, but: up until college, I had no clue how to use public transportation. In fact, before college, I could count the number of times I've been on public transportation on a single hand. And all of those times, my family or friends had ordered tickets and consulted maps for me so I didn't have to do a thing. As a result, when I moved to Boston / Cambridge, I had absolutely no idea how to read the subway station map. I figured it out eventually by just copying what my friends were doing, but it took me a while to realize that when I was going on the red line, the words "Alewife" or "Ashmont/Braintree" that were printed under every station entrance told me which way the train was going. Fortunately, I realized this before I had to go on the subway for the first time by myself, but I remember my freshman self getting so confused at first just following my friends and hearing them talk about how we "entered the station wrong." In retrospect, it's obvious, but you would be surprised how clueless I can be sometimes (or if you know me, maybe you're not so surprised).

I also rode a non-subway train (idk if these have a better name to indicate that they're not part of a subway system) for the first time! There were two options for me returning home for holidays like Thanksgiving or winter break: train or plane. The train took 5-6 hours while a plane took 40-90 minutes (I don't know why the variance is so large), but a train was generally cheaper and allowed me to take two suitcases with me without having to pay extra. As a result, for all of freshman year, I took trains home since my parents wanted me to bring things back to school on suitcases. Taking the train is honestly pretty chill since I normally plan fun activities for me to do on the plane. In the past, I've worked towards perfection on my Stardew Valley farm, gotten huge headaches from playing Baba is You, watched the entirety of Spy x Family Season 1, and read 50 chapters of the Attack on Titan (not all on the same train ride).

Finally, I flew on an airplane for the first time since I was 5 years old. Before sophomore year, I had only been on a plane once, which was for a trip to Florida with my family to go to Disney World. As a result, I had never flown alone, but in the middle of sophomore year, I received an invitation from D.E. Shaw to come to NYC for one of their recruiting events. They paid for my flight from Boston to New York City, so I would have to go through the airport for the first time in 14 year. I had heard horror stories of TSA and was super anxious about bringing illegal items (I was super on the fence about whether or not my face cream would be thrown out by TSA until my roommate told me there was no way). The experience was overall surprisingly chill, and I actually found it relatively easy to sleep on the plane, which I heard from other people was near impossible. I'm not going to lie, as we were taking off, I watched in amazement as the plane engines roared and we just seemed to start floating away. It genuinely felt like I was a seven year old at a magic show again.

As a side note, on my return flight from New York, I sent some... interesting messages while on 4 hours of sleep.

Morning Thoughts about Planes

4. Physics is cool

When I was being interviewed during the application process for MIT, my interviewer talked about some of the classes he took at MIT. He mentioned, that he found his intro physics classes super interesting and well taught. It was only a brief part of our conversation, but after being admitted, I thought that I would heed his advice and take a physics class rather than attempting to skip them all. I took 8.02 - Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism in my first semester despite having already taken it in high school. It wasn't a bad class by any means and I definitely learned some things compared to the watered down high school version I had taken that was focused on solely the AP test and used little to no multivariable calculus. However, it didn't spark my interest at all in physics, and I just did the psets, stopped going to lecture halfway through the semester, and had no intentions on taking another physics class at MIT.

This continued until the end of my sophomore year of college until I was just scrolling through YouTube and came across a few videos talking about upper level physics classes. I was bored and just skimmed the video. I got a cursory introduction to a variety of physics topics, but one thing that just popped out to me was that one reason I was never a fan of taking intro physics or really any other science like chemistry / biology was that it seemed like they just presented equations or finding out of nowhere with no foundations they were building off of or some intuition for why they were true. Whenever I thought about upper level physics, I heard about things like quantum mechanics or relativity that were general topics that seemed to just come out of nowhere with no explanation. Learning those topics just didn't interest me because I was only consuming content on YouTube that was attempting to summarize them for the masses.

As a result, this summer, I've started going through MIT OCW lectures for 8.03 - Physics III: Vibrations and Waves to learn more about physics. To be 100% honest, the lectures are super interesting and this is the most active I've ever been watching physics videos. There's a ton of content, but it's genuinely super interesting to me. In another world where I wasn't trying to fit a double major and masters in four years, I think I would definitely attempt a physics minor (and who knows: if the masters falls through, I might cram physics classes in my last two semesters). But for now, I'm definitely going to continue watching these lectures because even if I'm not ever going to become a physicist or apply this again, seeing how the world comes together and how we can build up from core math concepts to explain these phenomena is super interesting. I'm only halfway through the 8.03 content after a week or two, but I've already learned a ton and am looking forward to watching lectures for classes like 8.04 (Quantum Mechanics I) or 8.033 (Relativity).

After watching movies like Everywhere Everything All at Once, I always wonder about what parallel universe versions of me are like, and just how many decisions would have had to changed for me to end up there. In this context, I really think that there is a version of me not too far away that would have done a major / minor in physics instead of math.

5. Economics and chemistry are not cool (for me)

On the other hand, in my sophomore fall, I took both 14.01: Microeconomics and 5.111: Principles of Chemical Science. I took 14.01 because all MIT students are required to do a concentration in a humanities area, and economics (for some reason) counts as one of those. As a result, it is a common "cheat" for people in CS or math to do economics as their concentration. I took 5.111 because it was a GIR (General Institute Requirement), and I had failed the test before freshman year to skip it. To be honest, I was planning on putting off chemistry until my senior year, but because my roommate and another friend were also taking the class, I decided to add it on the day before classes started.

For those who are fans of economics or chemistry, I do think the subjects in general have their highlights and merits, but they're just... not for me. The classes just kept throwing random facts and special conditions at me that studying for them felt like just memorizing facts. At some point, I just gave up reviewing material for my exams and just learned what kind of questions were asked on the practice tests and what special exceptions they could throw at me. I remember getting stuck on a chemistry pset question for hours and after asking on Piazza, the answer I got was akin to "it's a special casae so you can apply this formula." Nothing felt intuitive at all, and nothing ever clicked for me. For economics, I felt like for tests I was just memorizing terms and not really understanding how to apply anything I was learning.

After taking my 14.01 and 5.111 final exams, I just remembered feeling relief that I could stop taking these classes. That would (hopefully) be the last chemistry class I would ever take, and after my experience with 14.01, I decided against continuing my concentration in economics. I'm sure that in some other world where I am passionate about economics or chemistry, I could've put more effort into reading the lecture notes and understanding the material more deeply. But just like how other people don't share my passion for math or computer science, I just couldn't stand those classes. But at least I learned more about myself in the process!

6. Two meters is longer than you think

I don't remember how I came across it, but one day during my sophomore fall I found this:

Snorlax Plush (200 cm)

At only 60 USD, it seemed like a steal. Of course, there was fine print and stuffing wasn't included. But with stuffing, it would cost 220 USD. For a freaking 2m Snorlax. That's taller than me (and a lot of people I know). A lot of people came over to my double to visit, and the Snorlax would serve as both a couch AND an extra bed (yes many poeple have fallen asleep on the Snorlax including myself). After months of sitting on the idea, my roommate and I split a majority of the costs of the Snorlax and the stuffing, and for the entirety of spring, there was a 2m Snorlax in our room. And I'll be the first to say that I uh... did not quite realize how big it would be! Not only is 2m just in general really tall, the Snorlax is also wide. When placing Snorlax on his back, he would basically take up all of the space in our room.

Snorlax in our room (ignore how messy our room is)

But I have no regrets about buying Snorlax! Only problem is that we couldn't take him home with us (for obvious reasons) and the MIT housing staff did not seem too keen on allowing him to stay on the floor over the summer. Luckily, Omri, our floor advisor RA (?) (tbh I forgot what his actual title is) kept him in his apartment over the summer, and he was safe and sound when we came back in the fall. We ended up donating him to the floor since my roommate and I both ended up moving into singles, both of which were too small to fit a 2m Snorlax, but now he is (unofficially? officially?) our floor mascot.

7. Building cool things is fun! (sometimes)

In 2022, I interned at two companies: Conservation X Labs in January and OPT Industries over summer. Both of these companies were small startups with a software engineering team of only 3-4 people. Working at both of these companies was really interesting since I worked on wildly different projects under very different conditions.

At Conservation X Labs, I worked on the web dashboard for the Sentinel project, which combined machine learning and wildlife cameras to automatically flag and notify conservationists when endangered species were detected. A large majority of the project was completed, and my day-to-day was just taking Jira tasks from a backlog that were either: "Fix this bug" or "(Re)implement this feature." Alongside my fellow intern, I would just claim as many tasks as I could and worked on them throughout the month, incrementally improving the dashboard to get it ready for a production launch in Costa Rica. My manager was super nice and accomodating, and fun fact: before I even started the internship or had my interview, I had seen him before. He has a TikTok account with over 2.5M followers and quite a few viral videos, which was pretty crazy to learn that he was the same person I was working for!

At OPT Industries, the work was structured differently. Instead of having small, bite-sized tasks arranged for me that I could just claim and work on at will, I was instead given an open-ended project at the beginning of my internship: build a data analysis dashboard for our company. There was no project guidelines given to me by my manager, no templates on what it should look like, no details on what features should be included, nothing. Instead, I was given freedom to go around the company and ask different teams what features they wanted out of this dashboard, and after meeting with a ton of people, I created a proposal that I discussed with my mentor. Then, I had to implement basically the entire thing by myself which was a ton of code, and in the meantime, I was also getting other side projects thrown at me such as creating an Electron app, fixing some bugs, helping to rewrite our backend from using REST to GraphQL, etc. In the beginning, I was definitely overwhelmed, but by the end, it was actually really nice to be given so much agency over my project and work on it at my own pace. I really felt like an engineer while designing the project structure and compiling my notes from all of my meetings, and when I finished my project at the end of my internship, I was really excited to see it pushed to production. It felt like my child, my passion project that was about to be thrown into the real world. Unfortunately, my internship ended and I went back home before I could see it used in production, but after getting back in contact with the team a month later, I learned that it was actually being used in production to help spot data anomalies and diagnose machine faults!

In both of my internships, I loved building cool tools / products that had a purpose. Seeing something come to life and then seeing people actually use it made me really happy, but one thing that did not make me happy was struggling through web... dev... The amount of pain I felt crawling through the web inspector, analyzing every css rule on my components to figure out what was happening... I can't even count how many times I would just randomly throw in !important behind CSS selectors in a hopeless attempt to get them to work properly. While working over the summer, I spent a week trying to debug why two components that were supposed to be synced would just randomly lag, desync, crash the app, or all of the above. I learned a ton during the process; I learned how to properly model data flow in Angular, how GraphQL resolvers worked, and I actually ended up learning some common CSS rules by heart instead of having to Google everything every time. Some of my favorite parts of the internship was just dealing with backend code, optimizing slow queries, and building data pipelines. However, frontend development is (unfortunately) a part of the job and however painful it was, seeing the end result being used by the entire company made it all worth it!

8. Having a roommate isn't thaaaat bad (but I still want a single for next semester)

In my freshman year, I lived in a dorm comprised of (nearly) entirely singles, so while almost all of my friends were in triples, doubles, or even quads, I was all by myself. It was so calm, peaceful, and bliss... and I threw it all away at the end of my freshman year when I chose to move to a new dorm with my friends 🥲.

For my sophomore year, I lived in a double with one roommate. To be 100% honest, I initially struggled to adapt to living with someone else in the room. He frequently went to sleep an hour or two or three or even sometimes five hours before me (this happened when I played games or worked on homework until 6 am 💀) and even though he could sleep well through noise or light, having to turn off the lights and whisper into my mic while talking with my friends was always an awkward experience.

But with all of the negative stuff out of the way, I genuinely had a ton of fun with him during the school year. We took a lot of the same classes together, played a lot of games together, and generally had a lot of similar interests. We would frequently had conversations that went hours past midnight, joke around while playing games or doing homework together, and just do dumb things together. I already mentioned our purchase of the giant Snorlax, and we also invested in a rug and doormat for our room because we would have frequently have friends over in our room who would just talk to the both of us. Whenever I had a question or wanted to talk about something, I could always just turn to the other person in the room and have an hour long conversation about anything.

Next year as a junior, I'll be living in a single, and to be honest, I'll miss being able to just have someone I could always turn to and talk to. The room will definitely feel a little empty, and a bunch of my friends will still be living on the same floor. I'll probably end up camping in his room during the day, and then enjoy the peace and quiet of my single during the night so I can get the best of both worlds :3

But before my roommate reads this and develops an even bigger ego he's still annoying af sometimes 😠

9. (Some) Chinese

Both of my parents were born in mainland China and speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Fuzhounese, and English. Up until high school, I spoke none of those. My parents have pretty good English so I could always speak in English with them, and they use a mixture of Cantonese and English at home. My parents did send me to Chinese school when I was around 6 or 7, but I was a really bad student and didn't pick up any Mandarin. It was basically an extremely expensive daycare, and after failing the final test in my first summer, my parents withdrew me and my brother. Additionally, in my elementary and middle school of ~300 students, there were pretty much no other Asian children, so I never felt very close with my culture. If I brought Chinese food to eat at lunch, my classmates would complain about the smell and say it tasted like garbage. My "friends" would ask me to do the Chinese accent, something I had never heard of. This didn't make me hate being Chinese, but I had no desire at the time to learn anything about my family's culture or history.

It wasn't until I went to high school in a different district that I met other Chinese students. Other students knew how to speak Mandarin and could talk with their parents, grandparents, and friends in the language. They celebrated their culture and weren't afraid to tell other people about it. I no longer felt like part of an underrepresented minority that had to shelter their culture to avoid being called names. Instead, I could open up and talk to other people who shared similar experiences and wouldn't laugh at me. It was around this time that I finally took an interest in trying to speak Cantonese.

Whenever my parents spoke Cantonese, I would instinctively understand what they said, but even just a second after they said it, I would barely be able to remember what they had just said, much less replicate it. The first time I tried speaking Cantonese back in 10th grade, I could hear noises coming out of my mouth that just... didn't sound right. Cantonese has nine different tones, and I could tell I was horribly mutilating them, but I couldn't do anything about it. My vocal cords just wouldn't do what I wanted them to, which was extremely frustrating. At the same time, it was also incredibly difficult to find any proper learning resources for Cantonese online. My parents recommended that I learn Mandarin instead since it was much easier to find resources and there were only four tones instead of nine, but I really wanted to learn Cantonese. But as the work of high school piled up and I focused on studying for math and computer science olympiads, learning Cantonese drifted to the back of my mind. I defaulted back to speaking English with my parents, and the desire to learn to speak Chinese with my parents was snuffed out.

When starting college, I saw that it was possible to take Chinese as a language class. However, I was hesitant to take the class, even if I was interested. First of all, the class would be in Mandarin, not Cantonese, and I would be starting from complete scratch. Additionally, I would have to learn to read and write Chinese characters, something I also had a) no familiarity with and b) knew was an incredibly difficult compared to learning other languages (i.e. Korean) that had had an alphabet. Finally, this would not be my first time taking a language class. Similar to many American students, I was required to take a second language in middle school and high school, and I had taken 6 years of Spanish. After all of this, the only Spanish I remember is "¿Dónde está la biblioteca?" so it's safe to say that my previous foray into a second langauge was not particularly fruitful. (My Chinese teacher once asked the class to talk about languages we studied in high school, and after I said I studied Spanish, she asked how to say goodbye in Spanish. I couldn't answer.) Because of my parents and my personal pressure to keep my GPA high (I had gotten dangerously close to getting multiple Bs in Spanish throughout high school), I decided to not take any Chinese classes.

However, as mentioned previously, at MIT, we have to do a concentration in some area of humanities, and one common option for those majoring in math or computer science is to concentrate in economics. Most of economics is math and memorizing terms, and you don't have to write essays, which is something that many CS / math students like myself find particularly attractive. But, as previously mentioned, after taking an economics class and really disliking it, I needed to find a new concentration.

One day, I was talking with one of my friends who was taking Chinese at MIT, and it then struck me that I could just take Chinese as my new concentration. It was around this time that my desire to try learning Chinese again was starting to spark up again. My parents were against me taking Chinese though. They insisted that my GPA was too important to mess up and that economics would be the easier grade. They said that Chinese would require too much work and they reminded me that I had both failed in my first year of Chinese school and that after taking six years of Spanish in middle / high school, I couldn't speak it at all and just barely scraped by Spanish III with an A-. But after convincing my parents that this was something I finally wanted to do and take a step forward in, I spent my sophomore spring at MIT taking Chinese II.

After finishing my sophomore spring semester, I can confidently say that taking that class was one of the best decisions of my life. All of my classmates and my teacher were incredible nice, accomodating, and encouraging. It was a ton of work with class happening four times a week for an hour with each day requiring us to either memorize a dialogue, learn 12 characters, or take a test. But with each day, I could feel myself making progress, which was something I never truly felt when doing apps like Duolingo or Hello Chinese. One of the most important things was also that I built up more confidence in my Chinese. When I was just learning Mandarin on my phone with Duolingo, I was extremely scared to talk to anyone in Chinese because I felt like they wouldn't understand anything through my accent or would make fun of me for messing up. But by just constantly talking with my teacher every day, I developed more confidence in my Chinese and could have phone calls with my parents in almost entirely Chinese. My Chinese is definitely not at a conversational level and still has a ton more to go, but I'm super excited to take Chinese III and IV in the upcoming semesters, and I frequently spend time now just watching Chinese cartoons on YouTube to practice my Chinese. Ever since 9th grade, I feel like I've made half-hearted attempts at learning Chinese that never got very far, but this attempt feels like I've finally gotten past a key hurdle.

As an update to the above (since I'm publishing this over 2 years after I originally wrote it 💀), I'm still learning Chinese! I feel like my progress is slower than I would have liked, but I plan on continuing studying even after college. After traveling in China / Taiwan, I definitely have a long way to go, but it feels like I'm making some progress!