Preliminary reflections
I published something almost three years ago titled “July the fourth be with you”, and I realized yesterday (!) that this year I might actually catch May fourth in time to make this pun correctly. Still not a Star Wars fan, but I’m enjoying this title anyways. It’s almost the end of the semester — my final one, if you can believe it — so I’m glad that I found an occasion to jot down some notes about it. It is possible a longer reflection will find its way onto my blog at some point, but in order to make tonight’s deadline, I’ll try to keep this one on the shorter side.
Let’s see: what have I been up to lately? The last time you heard from me, I had just returned from a semester in Oxford. Over winter break and IAP, I went to Vermont and skied for approximately my third time, I bummed around San Diego for a few days, and I did a pretty comprehensive tour of Italy. I also had a dentist appointment. IAP definitely felt really busy, but I was pretty happy to have the opportunity to get a little better at snowboarding, and I had also been wanting to go to Italy for some time. I don’t really think I had the chance to adequately mentally prepare myself for the semester, though. My plane ticket from Milan back to Boston was two days before the semester was meant to start, and I found out the morning of my flight that it was delayed over 5 hours, which also meant that I would be missing my connection in Montreal. I flew to Montreal anyway, where I posted up in a hotel, exhausted and simultaneously incredibly jetlagged, for approximately 6 hours before returning to the airport for an early Sunday morning flight in.
The nice thing about being jetlagged, though, was that I found myself on a decent sleep schedule for once. For the first few weeks of the semester, I was in bed by midnight and getting up around 7am. Like I said, though, I wasn’t mentally prepared for the storm that was about to hit me. Since I didn’t know if and when I’d be returning to school next, there were a lot of classes I wanted to try. I ended up with STAT 170 at Harvard, 6.824 Distributed Systems, 6.858 Computer Systems Security, 15.518 Taxes and Business Strategy, and Rambax Senegalese Drumming. There are new course numbers for Course 6 now, but I enjoy the traditional names for distributed and security quite a bit more. I have also been a Lab Assistant (LA) for 6.190 Intro to C and Assembly.
There’s much to say about each of these classes, but overall they made for a fascinating mix of coursework. I will admit, I felt quite overwhelmed initially because the rhythm of MIT life does feel drastically different from that of my Oxford life. My schedule often felt a lot less flexible, which meant that I couldn’t really dictate as much of my free time as I had gotten used to dictating. Once I got the hang of things, though, I did start to enjoy my classes. One of my goals this semester was to attend as many in-person lectures as possible, as I often lack the required motivation to watch lecture recordings if I skip. For the most part, I’ve been happy with my attendance. Another nice part of my schedule this semester was commuting to Harvard. I had cross-registered before, but this was my first in-person cross-registration. My schedule happened to work out so that my only class during the day on Mondays and Wednesdays was at Harvard, so I wouldn’t have to stress about getting back in time. Getting a change of scenery during the week actually began to feel like a necessity after a couple of weeks of commuting. Harvard Square has a lot of cafes and restaurants that I hadn’t really explored before, and having a reason to make the commute out twice a week gave me the chance to do that.
Around early March I decided that I wanted to take the GRE. I’d been tossing around my head the idea of continuing education at some point in my life, and the GRE is an exam that is widely accepted at grad schools. I made the decision to take it this semester because the score lasts for 5 years, and I couldn’t really imagine myself trying to study for a standardized exam down the road. Might as well do it while I’m still in testing mode. I paid a ridiculous $200 registration fee and impulsively signed up for an at-home version of the exam in mid-March. Why did I pick a test date two weeks out? I’m not sure. Thankfully, I was able to check out a few review books from the library and things turned out well.
Over spring break, I went to Puerto Rico with some friends, and it was probably the chill-est vacation I’d been on in a while, which was exactly what I was looking for. Most of the trips I’d done in the last half year felt very go go go, and it was nice to just sit back and bum around for a few days. We did still take a 10-hour day trip to El Yunque and Laguna Grande though. We did a muddy hike and I jumped off a 10-foot cliff.
I have also been wanting to get healthier. One of the aspects of my life that I have never particularly been good at is cardio, but I’ve always struggled to start because I felt like I had such a mental barrier to incorporating it into my routine consistently. I felt like I had never really enjoyed running, but for the sake of my health earlier this semester I felt that I should start to run at least a little. So I registered for the Cambridge Spring Classic 5k, which I ran (albeit slowly) recently. It was really the thought of this looming deadline that pushed me to start running at first, but slowly I also began to find a somewhat meditative state that allowed me to enjoy it. To improve the experience I have been listening to the TBOY podcast. It’s a nice way to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. I still get miserable mid-run sometimes and all I want to do is stop and lay down on the ground, but I definitely do feel the endorphin rush afterward, so that helps to compensate for the pain. My cardio is in a better place than at the beginning of the semester, but I can also see that there’s a lot to improve. Now that I’ve found a way to enjoy it more, I want to keep this motivation up to keep getting better.
Currently, I’m in a PE Sailing class, which I’ve been finding to be incredibly exciting. I tend to be a little cautious about some things in life, but I may also be an adrenaline junkie. A part of me is definitely thrilled when the wind picks up and we start zooming on the water. I almost capsized twice in the last week, but that was also kind of fun. I’m also in the middle of planning some summer travel to East Asia. More on that in another post, maybe.
I wrote late last year that I had some uncertainty about the future, and looking back, I’m not sure that that uncertainty has completely gone away. I feel like I’m standing at a crossroads, and although I know and am happy with the path I will be taking, I do feel that sometimes it’s a bit of a shame that we only get to walk down one path at a time. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve made the most of my time here, but I also firmly believe that’s a self-defeating worry, so I’ve been trying to appreciate what I did in fact do. Now that my time in college is drawing to a close, I feel both gratified and wistful. I am definitely ready to move to the next stage of my life, but I have also found joy in the experiences that college has offered me. I find it fairly fitting to describe it as the end of a glorious battle. As we begin to take our diverging journeys down these paths, I find it both incomprehensible and amazing that such young people can and will have such a diverse set of experiences.
I hope that future Jamie continues to be curious and seek out challenges. There’s so much out there to explore, and I want to hold myself accountable to explore it.
