Do people still make New Year’s resolutions?
Thoughts about the last year and the rest of my life post-grad, I guess
My memories from the past year are scattered all over the place, but I’m confident that it will be a while before I have another year as fruitful and hectic as 2023. More so than being a year where I excelled at doing what I wanted, I think it being my last semester in college and having a post-grad summer made it possible for a large variety of activities and events to occur. I started writing this post in January, but it took me so long to publish it that it’s already February…
School
That spring was a semester at MIT I didn't precisely need, but very much desired. Coming back from a semester abroad at Oxford, where I simply hadn't touched math or computer science for at least 4 months, I felt uneasy with the prospect of being handed a degree with only a couple of non-foundational CS classes under my belt. I had registered for over 8 classes with my advisor out of indecision and was forced to “shop” my classes for the first week of the semester, eventually narrowing it down to something like this:
I’ll put some details about the random class numbers in the footnotes, but in short, I was taking more technicals than I could have anticipated [1]. Spending an entire semester not studying CS made me miss it a little bit, I think, and I returned for my last semester invigorated. Looking back on that semester now, I tried to focus on attending most of my lectures and saving homework for outside-of-class time. This may sound obvious, but it wasn’t actually all that clear to me that there was something intrinsic about my interests that I couldn’t just force. No matter how hard I tried to focus in Taxes, for example, I found it infinitely more difficult to pay attention than in Distributed Systems, which I guess my brain liked for some unknown reason. I couldn’t have guessed it either. My friend had convinced me two days before registration to take it with him, so I guess this story goes to show how poorly I know myself.
I was going to do DanceTroupe for another semester, but after most of my friends dropped the dance I was signed up for, I lost a lot of motivation to go to Sunday evening rehearsal. Maybe because classwork was more consuming, I found myself wanting more unstructured time on the weekends to spend by myself. I don’t think I did a whole lot with that time, but I got better at being more intentional at finding time to spend with friends.
I learned a little soccer, but I wasn’t great about attending all the classes. I was, however, desperate to get into sailing in my final quarter. Thankfully, I was a little faster at clicking on registration day and snagged a coveted spot. During that quarter, my friend reconnected with one of her old math course TAs who manned some shifts at the sailing pavilion and we got some extra lessons with him, who eventually granted us Provisional licenses to take out the larger catboats. Once I got the hang of the dynamics of steering, I started to like sailing a lot. It wasn’t a brainless exercise, but there were many times in the spring when the Charles River was extremely peaceful; sitting out in the middle of the river at sunset was so serene. My friend and I’s newfound skills were put to use at graduation when we took our families out onto the water to enjoy the breeze.
Running
After much haranguing from running friends, I decided that 2023 was probably the year where I should work on my cardio a bit. In the last seven or eight years I had really only played tennis, and that was recreationally at best in college. A few people I knew had signed up for the Cambridge Classic Spring 5K, and I thought that might be a good starting point for me. I ran at first once, then twice a week, to get myself into shape to run the whole thing (3 miles at the time was longer than I had ever run continuously at the time). In the fall, after moving to New York, I was persuaded to race the Brooklynite 10K and reluctantly bought new running shoes (someone had stolen my shoes in my last weeks at MIT, much to my dismay). Running in Central Park turned out to be quite fun, especially on the weekends, so I stuck with the training. Two days before I was set to run the race, it was canceled without a refund for mysterious reasons. My friend suggested I just send the Cambridge half-marathon in November. Yikes.
I ran my own little 10K in Central Park on what would have been race day and decided that if I could do the distance without stopping, I should probably just commit to the half-marathon. A month later, I was back in Boston for the Cambridge half. I was under-prepared and didn’t have a great grasp of my capacity at that distance, so I ran the first 7 miles at what I thought was a reasonable pace but immediately ran out of juice. By mile 9 I had lost the pacer and I strongly believed anybody speed-walking would have lapped me during miles 11 and 12. It was too late to walk, however, so I painfully jog-crawled towards the finish line. Despite my unfortunate splits and foot pain that would last a week, this trip was really fun. I got to see my old roommate from my junior and senior year of college and spent some time with high school friends also visiting town that weekend.
Travel
I’m grateful that I got to see a little more of the world in the past year. During IAP, I accompanied my mom to San Diego while she was on a work trip. Other than maybe Disney when I was a kid, I think this was my first real time visiting SoCal, and I loved the weather, the beach, the palm trees, everything. The only thing I have to complain about is the driving. I tried to drive to the mall with my mom on a random weekend evening and these drivers would not let me merge onto the ramp. Why??
Right before class started, I was in Italy for two weeks, touring all of the famous cities. Italy in January is quite suboptimal from a weather perspective because it's so cold, even in south Italy. However, it was a jam-packed trip with lots on the itinerary, so there was a lot of walking involved and it got quite chilly. I bought Vejas right before I left for my trip and decided to give them a shot, but it turns out they are not a great travel shoe and were ill-suited towards walking 20k+ steps a day. My favorite place from the entire trip is a little town called Saturnia, famous for its natural hot springs. The water stays at around 70F, even in the winter, and between visiting all the big cities, Saturnia was a nice break from the rush and hubbub. The town was quiet around this time of the year. With no real downtown or nightlife, I could easily imagine the lifestyle of a small Italian town fitting into my retirement plans.
Returning to school in the spring was hard, and with a busier schedule, I wanted to go “rot on a beach somewhere” during spring break, as my friend likes to say. I joined some of my freshmen year hallmates and some new friends on a trip to Puerto Rico, where it was very warm and lovely. We had a good deal of mofongo on this trip as well, which I had never tried before. I liked the version we had with cassava more than the plantain-based dish. Most of the trip was just walking around, going to beaches, and exploring Old San Juan, but a few of us did want to go on a day trip to El Yunque Rainforest and visit a bioluminescent bay. The hike in El Yunque was muddy and wet and honestly a bit more strenuous than I thought it was going to be, but I got a little cliff diving action and a little rope swing action, so overall a very good experience. In the evening, we drove to and then kayaked out to Laguna Grande, the bio bay. The bioluminescence was a lot less vibrant than I thought it would be, but our guides also told us how the neighboring city’s lights were causing a lot of light pollution, which would make it a lot harder to see the plankton.
Over the summer, I did the whole monthlong tour in East Asia, which I wrote about in a previous post, so I won’t dive into the details. I fulfilled many desires and wishes I’d had for a long time.
Work Life
Before starting work, I was required to take the SIE (Securities Industry Essentials) exam, so after getting back from my summer travels and much procrastination, I crammed the material for 2 weeks before taking the exam. Since starting work, I’ve also had to take the Series 57 and 7, which reminded me of college exam cramming all over again.
Misc
A day after my 5K, I went and got my wisdom teeth removed, which I was admittedly pretty excited about, but the operation resulted in a few miserable weeks where I was in a sort of nagging pain and hungry all the time.
I managed to complete my Goodreads reaching challenge just under the gun this past Christmas with Shelley Parker-Chan’s Radiant Emperor duology. I had read something quite similar in The Poppy War over the summer, but overall this was still a pleasurable read. I did reviews of most of what I read in 2023 already, but I’ll throw some extra thoughts in about this duology in the footnotes [2].
Went to the US Open! A pretty last-minute decision, I only bought tickets a week before after seeing lots of friends taking their last opportunity before work started to go. I ended up getting nosebleed seats for the Djokovic vs. Shelton semifinals in Arthur Ashe, which I thought would make it impossible to see the ball, but the view was surprisingly still watchable. It can’t compare to the fancy angles and slow-mo shots you get from watching Grand Slams on television, but being part of the atmosphere and trying the famous Honey Deuce cocktails was something.
Crocheted this guy during Thanksgiving.
In the new year
I started going to the gym for the first time in October, maybe, and I was good about going regularly for a month or so until work ramped up. My resolution this year is to do something exercise-y at least once a week, so gymming is part of that, but I’d probably let myself off the hook if I went for a run or played tennis.
Although I’ve been living in this apartment for over four months now, I have yet to host a housewarming, and this is a real travesty. I would like to do so.
I did my first “wine Wednesday” in December (I think?) last year, and I felt that that was a fun way to catch up with friends in a casual environment, so I want to continue doing these. I think once a month or once every two months is appropriate.
One of the tradeoffs I made when deciding to go abroad in Fall 2022 was that I couldn’t take Prof. Sipser’s 18.404 Theory of Computation. In my final spring semester I also tried to switch to 6.888 Hardware Security in lieu of 6.5660 Computer Systems Security, but by the time I committed to the decision the class was too many labs in and the professor recommended that I stick with the class I was already in. It is a goal of mine to eventually take these classes using the online materials.
Footnotes
[1] STAT 170 is Quantitative Analysis of Capital Markets at Harvard, which was finally taught after six or so years or not being offered by Prof. Natesh Pillai, who taught us a mish-mash of things. I had never really seriously taken math in college, but I enjoyed going to Harvard twice a week and tackling the problems, which had a wide focus but all pertained somehow to finance. 6.5840 is Distributed Systems, which I got baited into taking by one of my friends, but ended up being one of my favorite courses in my entire four years of MIT. We rebuilt the consensus algorithm and system Raft. This entire class taught me a lot of the messiness of computer systems and their practical applications, and we read a ton of papers over the course of the semester of real-life systems in use today. I spent an inordinate amount of time in office hours and loved both the professors and the TAs (the Prof. Morris who teaches this course is the same Morris who founded YC and made the Morris worm). 6.5660 is Computer Systems Security, which I had wanted to take since freshman year, but I found it a little different than what I was expecting. The labs were still interesting but constructed in such a way that we would be able to “hack” them. Obviously, real-life hacks will be much harder, so I didn’t expect them to expect us to break into any complete systems, but I did find the aspect of trial-and-error of the labs somewhat tedious but necessary.
[2] Shelley Parker-Chan describes this duology as “queer epic fantasy”, which was admittedly not a genre I had ever heard of before, nor did I know this coming into this series. I think I liked this not knowing though, because it made me read it with no preconceived notions of what to expect, and I could just absorb the flow of the story naturally.
