2021-12-22

Retrospective: Fall 2021

Disaster

During the Fall semester of this year, I stupidly decided to take five courses: three graduate level computer science courses, one upper division computer science course, and a general education course. My rationale was that I wasn't working hard enough during my previous semesters of undergrad, so I needed to "challenge" myself. Needless to say, with all three of the graduate courses requiring upwards of 10 hours a week, I staggered through the semester.

An optimistic week from my semester. I rarely ended up following the schedule since I had too much work to do. Fridays were supposed to be free days but I generally just ended up taking a long nap.

The good

This semester heavily tested my work ethic. With the severe time requirements of each course, could I allocate enough time in my schedule? It turns out that I could, at the cost of basically every inch of my free time. I would start assignments weeks ahead and complete them a bit early, just in time for the next batch of work to be distributed. I successfully disciplined myself the entire semester, striking down one assignment after another.

Another success was my exercise schedule. I initially planned to have three nonnegotiable 2-hour intervals of time blocked out per week to head to the gym this semester. I'm proud to say that I was able to make over 90% of them, with most of the cancelled gym appointments due to miscellaneous, nonacademic reasons. Personally, I think working out greatly contributed to maintaining my sanity throughout the course of the semester.

Because I exercised consistently, I also kept a relatively consistent sleep schedule, despite the amount of work I needed to accomplish every day. Exhausting myself was a great way to ensure that I didn't stay up too late. I almost always headed to bed before 12:30, which meant that I never stayed up until the infamous crackhead hours.

Occasionally, I did have a little bit of time for some fun. Perhaps not the best use of my free time, I decided to spend the few extra hours I had on the Summoner's Rift in League of Legends.

Somehow, I made time to watch the first episode of Arcane, which aired over Thanksgiving break! I will be watching the rest during this winter break.

The bad

If I wasn't a workaholic before this semester, I definitely became a workaholic at least halfway through the semester. I actually had slight anxiety when I wasn't working because I was so scared of missing deadlines. I generally only allocate blocks of free time in my schedule when my todo-list is nearly empty, but my todo-list remained a considerable length for the entirety of the semester. I was constantly working on assignments and by the end of the semester, my social life tanked and I felt like I had finally become a zombie.

I was already losing it less than two months into the semester.

On some days, I was actually too overworked to get anything done. During the afternoons after class, I had throbbing headaches in which I was forced to take a nap in order to continue working. Usually, I would have to push back some work, which would require budgeting extra time that I didn't have.

At this point I already had my several of my next lives planned out just in case I died.

During Thanksgiving break, I was actually quite close to running out of food. Usually, I traveled with my roommate's friend to grab groceries, but since he was out of town for break, I had to live off my emergency supply of hot pockets. Luckily, my suffering only lasted about a day.

Takeaways

I found my absolute limit in terms of academics. I literally could not fit anything other than work into my schedule the entire semester.
Having a car is a real convenience while living off-campus. I took that for granted at home.
DO NOT TAKE THREE WORK INTENSIVE GRADUATE COURSES IN ONE SEMESTER.
My bench press form sucks.
I might be addicted to Argo Tea. LimeRed Teahouse and Moge Tee are pretty good too though.
Despite all my hardships, I don't really regret overloading this semester. I learned a lot about myself through my adversities. That being said, I will NOT be doing that again.
I'm lucky I received two fantastic internship offers at the beginning of the semester, otherwise I likely would not have had any time to do interviews.

After that exhausting semester, I'm so happy to be comfortably typing this out at home. It really does feel surreal to have survived the past 3.5 months. Sometimes I'll have a sudden panic that I'm just dreaming and I'll wake up to yet another day in the semester. Hopefully that won't happen... haha...

Phew, and that's all! Next semester, I will still be taking four computer science courses, but it will be a far lighter workload. I am cautiously excited for next semester!

To end off this retrospective, I'll be dropping a picture of my fabulous cat that doesn't do anything but sleep.