intelligence

I.

iap ended last weekend, and it was pretty good 🙂 some things i did include

• learned a ton from weblab (mostly react). i didn’t get as much of the site done as planned, partially because my teammates were busy and i became very busy in the last week of iap, but it wasn’t a particularly good idea to begin with
• read the first few chapters of “convex optimization” by boyd for drp (directed reading program for math). learned a lot of more obscure linear algebra and stuff about convex shapes 🙂 separating hyperplane theorem is the best
• tested out of 18.06 (linear algebra) yay
• arranged finalist hosting for battlecode, which overall went alright, but was a disaster in many ways so i’m quitting this semester. also committed to taking a break from mitso this semester and to quitting hmmt next year
• cooked almost every day with my roommate (specifically: a lot of mostly interchangeable green vegetables, eggs, chicken, steak, soup, rice, and potatoes). in particular one of our meals was 6 mashed potatoes and 3 fried potatoes because we ordered too many 😐 
• saw a lot of people at winter sparc 🙂 
• discovered zombo.com

as seems to be a trend with these posts, i watched some more things, though most were not traditional movies. namely:

1. some episodes of rick and morty. it’s very entertaining and degenerate so i doubt i’ll watch more unless i’m bored and prompted by a friend, even though i think it’s well-made and high quality
2. 5 cm per second was pretty touching and sad. there seem to be a lot of complaints about the first section of the movie (slow pacing, minimal plot, excessive narration, etc.) but i think that’s completely intentional and necessary as it helps demonstrate the progression of the narrator, who is an immature kid during that part of the movie. anyway the second and third parts were fine, and the ending scene + song is great 🙂 would recommend as it’s only ~50 minutes total anyway
3. weathering with you had some really pretty frames and a few good songs and good dialogue 🙂 plot was ok but i would’ve preferred if the movie ended around 15 minutes earlier at you-know-when moment because everything after the climax just feels kind of dumb
4. i did not watch rise of skywalker, because jeffery yu had already watched it before iap and i lost all my willpower as a result 😡 
5. dear basketball was really well-done and touching in the wake of kobe’s death 😦 i’ve never watched him play basketball because the only basketball i’ve followed has been in the past ~2 seasons but still felt like i could relate regardless, and i think this is the single greatest thing about modern sports
6. joker was disturbing in (imo) a good way. everything was pretty good except that a few parts of the plot were slightly unbelievable, though it’s possible i’m being biased because i loved the joker from the dark knight. also, the amount of bass in that ost was ridiculous

II.

as i alluded to slightly in my previous post, i had an amazon internship interview on 1/3, and on 1/8 i got an email saying i’d been “waitlisted”, the concept of which i find really stupid given that we’re not doing college apps anymore, and then on 1/15 i got an offer which i eventually accepted 😐 me from a year or even six months ago wouldn’t have been excited at all if you gave him an amazon offer- company culture/work seems not very interesting and ethics are very questionable- but after receiving infinite rejections in the past few months it seems like i’m really not going to find a better place this year at least 😐 i’ve already decided that spending this summer on research is suboptimal, mostly because i have the ability to do research over the school year and plan to do so this semester as my schedule is lighter. so i’ll be in seattle most of this summer; i definitely won’t be at mop this year and will do my best to visit sparc but yeah this does feel like game over in some sense 😦 i think the only thing i can do to “win” at amazon is to learn as much as possible about software and industry and etc.

i looked at my journal from the past few months and realized how inconsequential most of last semester was; the only really interesting days were related to {travelling, people visiting, ohms}. cat mostly unintentionally roasted me for this at winter sparc, but it was a good wakeup call anyway; she made me realize that i was well on my way to becoming a (subjectively) boring person. somewhere along the line, probably early last semester, i got the impression that i had spent enough time on introspection and that it was time to start doing a lot of distinct things without thinking through them that much, but in fact what i really needed was to do a lot of things while also being deliberate about all of them. otherwise i’m going to end up wasting another semester of college and feeling very sad at the end of it

the process of learning amazes me. i used to take the ability to learn new things for granted, but after not doing that much learning over the past two years (i think the majority of the things i did in 11th/12th grade were just applying knowledge i’d already acquired earlier) i have an insecurity that one day i’ll lose the ability to continue learning new things. learning still doesn’t make sense to me at a fundamental level- like how is it possible that after not knowing something and being confused over and over, i can eventually understand that thing and use it to solve new problems without having anyone tell me how to do so? this is why i was so shocked when i learned enough bio over the summer to be able to answer questions that i hadn’t already been fed the answers to, and why i was happy when i felt like i finally understood react for weblab after being confused about it for a solid week. thats also why i need to learn as much as possible- about myself, about the world, about technical fields- otherwise i’ll have failed like i did last semester

III.

so these are my classes now:

• 6.08 (Embedded Systems): class where you make and program things using arduinos. it seems cool and fun, although i’m pretty bad at C so far. definitely my hardest / most time-consuming class. prof is funny though we only see him for 1hr/week
• 7.03 (Genetics): class is boring so far, but it will definitely get better 🙂 i more or less remember everything i studied in preparation for testing out of intro bio over the summer, so this shouldn’t be too bad either. maybe i should’ve taken a harder bio class, but this one is required for a bio minor and idk if i want to go for that or not. also the professors are both pretty famous for bio research apparently so it should be cool 🙂
• 18.102 (Functional Analysis): so i’ve never actually done or learned analysis, but taking 18.675 (grad probability) in the fall definitely helped a ton 🙂 i don’t think this class should be that hard, though maybe my lack of experience will trip me later. 
• 18.218 (Topics in Combinatorics): i feel kind of bad because in the first class the professor asked how many undergrads/grad students there were and implied that he would probably make the class easier because of the number of undergrads? but regardless it should be a lot of new content 🙂 this class is very little work though, probably just 2 psets the entire semester and no exams
• 21w.022 (reading and writing autobiography): this class is pretty good and i’ve already learned some things just through the first week. the assigned readings/drafts are pretty frequent and will probably take up a lot of time, but i think i’ll enjoy most of the assignments because they’re autobiographical (as opposed to last year where a bunch of the world music essays and readings were incredibly boring)

so idk this schedule has the potential to become pretty hard later if 7.03 and 18.218 get a lot more difficult, but otherwise it should be fine