October 2025
(An on-time monthly recap??? Impossible!!!)
College started a month and a half ago. And that's shaken the core foundation of my life. I eat different, I sleep different, I write different, I think different, I act different, and while I enjoy the freedom, I feel lost in the sea of possibility. Perhaps I've just spent too much time looking upwards at what could've been with me and my time that I've forgotten about who I am and what I like doing. Like writing, I suppose.
So it's been a hectic October. I'm still learning the ropes of this college business. Still figuring out how to best "manage my time", whatever that means. Still figuring out how I work - how I do things, what I actually like doing, how to avoid getting into 'failure' conditions where nothing gets done, and how to make friends. You would've thought that making friends is a solved problem but as almost every college freshman can attest, "just talk to them" is somewhat unhelpful making friends actually is much harder than making friends theoretically.
Anyways, if you asked me what I did at the end of each day this October, this is probably how I would respond:
10/1 - Emailed professors.
10/2 - Speedran the first ECE 5 Lab.
10/3 - An introduction to Analog Horror (via my roommate).
10/4 - Beach vibes <3 (just kidding I was contemplating my life).
10/5 - Called a good friend of mine for some advice on this college thing.
10/6 - Contemplated my life at night with the moon (and missed out on buying mooncakes).
10/7 - Pesto pasta lunch exploded in my backpack.
10/8 - Firmware meeting with Daniel. Great guy, great talk, great trees.
10/9 - Fell asleep in both classes (this is recurring from now on).
10/10 - Lost 0-10 in sets in ping pong to my roommate.
10/11 - "Sad like a willow straining in the wind :("
10/12 - Learned soldering from IEEE meeting :>, started reading Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
10/13 - Crashed out over the easiest test ever (ECE 3 Quiz 1).
10/14 - Chopped the top part of my helmet in the rain :(.
10/15 - LC/RLC circuits.
10/16 - "no math no programming // no life"
10/17 - Talked and walked with Joseph. Had a great conversation.
10/18 - Saw my dad (he swung by) :).
10/19 - Spent an hour trying to look for the online quote about force multipliers in some college advice I read and still came up short (this was from ~12:10 - 1:10am).
10/20 - Naroditsky's passing o7. I remember seeing him (and maybe even playing him) at the Mechanics Chess Club in SF.
10/21 - Evan Chen's Monsters handout.
10/22 - Learned about satellites from an IEEE group.
10/23 - Started tackling differential equations!
10/24 - Locked in on my jumping frog project proposal ~ 2.5h of LaTeX for a piece of beauty.
10/25 - Bike trip.....to nowhere. Also poker with Daniel.
10/26 - It's cold at the ILP right before dusk. Lesson learned.
10/27 - Rome, the Game. Unfortunately, since this took up my headspace for the whole day, this is really just what the day was about. (This is some GE I don't care about.)
10/28 - "Almost nothing if you ask me".
10/29 - Snow Crash is AWESOME. Great writing.
10/30 - 4a midterm. Start of minesweeper addiction.
10/31 - Nerdsniped; first by the ArXiv paper, second by Kareem and his integrals.