I figured it would be a good idea to type up a post with some updates as to what’s been going on in life. This post is just going to be some random thoughts and updates as to what’s going on so don’t expect anything super organized.

My Thoughts on University (after a year)

I finished finals a few days ago (I think I kind of finished a few days early for my university so that’s kind of lucky) so my summer break has officially started. Since I’m now done with my first year of college, I think it’s fair that I can give my thoughts about what happened and maybe do some reflecting.

I would say that university was definitely a significantly different experience to what I was previously used to in middle school and high school. In some ways it was more relaxing as the classes didn’t take up as large of a portion of the day. Usually in high school I was at school from 8 AM to 3 PM, 7 hours, but with university I could spend time in my dorm and also just had less classes and that cut the time that I was in classes to 2 - 4 hours, depending on the day. This was relaxing at times and certainly gave me some time to work on other things (or to work on my homework) so that was nice in my opinion.

I would say that most of the classes that I took this year weren’t too terrible, I was able to understand the content and do the assignments on time and get decent grades on the exam. I haven’t gotten all of my grades for the second semester as of the writing of this post, but for the first semester I got all A’s except for one class in which I got an AB (even then the grade was about 92%). As for second semester, I think I got A’s in a number of classes, potentially AB’s in some other classes, but I don’t think I fell below AB for any of them as that would require a catastrophic failure on the final exam for me. So hopefully I don’t jinx that. However, I still do feel that I kind of underestimated the difficulty of some classes. I was used to somewhat easy classes in high school and when it was difficult, I was still able to get the hang of it after a couple months. As for some college classes, I still felt I had to ‘adjust’ even towards the end of the semester. Maybe it was simply because at times I didn’t put in all the effort I should have and that lead to me ‘falling’ in terms of grades and getting a little stressed at times. Essentially, I didn’t take some classes serious when I should have and I think that is a change that I need to make through the rest of college if I don’t want to completely flounder. The first year was fine, but I don’t know how much the second or third year is going to scale up.

As for the social side, one major difference was that since I’m going to a larger college, despite the larger number of people around, I feel more disconnected to my peers in my classes than I did in high school. I knew most of the people I went to school with in high school, and could recognize them in class but in college, I might be lucky to see a couple people I recognize in a very large class. I don’t really talk to others in my classes and it kind of feels a little isolating at times. However, I did still have a social life. I still spent time with people I knew in high school and I tried branching out to meeting new people. I did get to know some new people but I don’t really feel as connected with the larger community than in high school. I guess that just comes with a larger school.

Updates in My Life

Alright, so that was enough ranting about university. I don’t have to think about college for about four months so that’s nice.

As for other things in my personal life, now that summer vacation has started I do have some basic goals that I want to accomplish throughout the summer.

Firstly, I want to finish The Legend of the Lawns. I am actually getting quite close to the end of this project and I pretty much just have to make the ending for the game which is actually quite exciting. My current goal/deadline is to get the game feature complete by May 29th. If I do get the project done by that date, I will have been working on it for pretty much an entire year which is possibly one of the longer projects I’ve worked on. I’m kind of exhausted now and I definitely need a break after finishing this project. I am also excited to finally be able to work on new projects after this as well.

I also want to be able to learn some new things over this summer as well - I want to hopefully be able to expand my knowledge when it comes to computers and programming - especially when it comes to hardware and low level concepts - and also be able to continue learning a foreign language. I want to be able to retain my Spanish knowledge that I got from taking classes in high school but Duolingo is not enough so I probably need to consume some Spanish media and also find better ways to learn. I also want to get better at Italian so that’s going to require some practice.

Finally, I just want to relax. I want to be able to read some books I find interesting, play some video games (I’m currently into playing Balatro right now) and also hopefully meeting up with friends that I haven’t seen since winter break.

Tomorrow I’ll probably continue the grind on working on LotL but tonight I’m just going to chill.

Anyway, that’s it, have a nice day!