akrish

After a grueling two and a half weeks of non-stop studying, I’m finally done with my final exams and with that, fall 2007 semester seamlessly comes to a close. In retrospect, this semester was probably the best of my college times in almost every respect. The semester really flew by; I still have vivid images of moving in and the first day of classes, but at the same time I feel like a lot of time has gone by. It’s bizarre, I know, but I can see that time has passed when I look at how I have grown, how my friendships have solidified and how much I’ve learned this semester. At the same time, each individual week seems like a blur when I think about it.

This semester was my first semester living off campus (I live in a house with some of my best friends). It was an amazing experience that certainly has helped me grow and become more independent. I have a lot more responsibilities and there are serious consequences for not taking care of them. I have to spend a lot more time thinking about what food I want to eat (if I want to eat well), along with many other financial obligations such as rent, utilities and others. In a lot of these respects, living off campus felt a lot like being an adult, or at least what I think being an adult would feel like, except for the fact that I could go “home” to my parents at will and they would always pamper me and feed me.

Despite the added responsibility, living off campus was a lot more fun than living in the dorms. It’s really amazing to live in an environment where your best friends are always around and it takes absolutely no effort to spend time with them. My friendships with my house-mates and a few others have definitely matured as a direct result of living off campus. The only downside to this is that I neglected a lot of my friends who didn’t live with me. Take my soccer buddies for example: last semester we would hang out 2 or 3 times a week, just playing soccer, or getting dinner, or something and this worked because we all lived near each other. Now many of us have moved off campus and further away, and as a result, we don’t end up hanging out nearly as much as we used to. We did have an intramural soccer team so we played soccer together about once a week, but it wasn’t the same as the late night games that we played last year. So really, living in the house had it’s upsides and it’s downsides, but on the whole it was a really good experience. Next semester there’s a soccer field opening up really close to where me and some of my soccer friends live, so I think we’ll end up hanging out a lot more.

Changing subjects entirely, the amount of academic material that I learned this semester truly boggles me. I took four engineering classes, and I enjoyed all of them in regards to subject matter. I think it may have also helped that my professors were outstanding and they all did a good job of showing their excitement in the material, which naturally got me a lot more interested in it. It also helped that my classes overlapped a bit, so I saw different sides of the same concepts while reinforcing my understanding. For example, I learned about propositional logic from a proof writing side in discrete math, from a relational calculus query writing side in databases, and we also talked about it in signals and systems. There were tons of theoretical subjects that I learned about in discrete math that I saw applications of in databases and signals and systems, which got me a lot more interested in the material. Academically, the semester was the most intellectually stimulating so far.

Carrying my trends from summer, I tried to run and exercise a lot during the semester. I didn’t find it hard to balance school work with exercise but it was harder to motivate myself to go running in comparison to the summer. In the summer I had a nice schedule that I stuck to pretty religiously, but with work varying from day to day it becomes a lot harder to maintain a schedule. Fortunately, I discovered the running club (it’s a group of students who run a lot…) and joined them for runs a couple times a week earlier on in the semester. I noticed significant progress when I tragically injured myself and wasn’t able to exercise for about a month. Now I’m starting to get back into it, and during winter break I’ll probably spend a lot of time running (hopefully).

So it’s finally over. I now have about a month of rest and relaxation and by R&R I really mean 8 hour days working on my startup. But that’s all going to be fun work so I really won’t mind it. Plus I’ll get to spend time with my family and all of my high school friends so I’m really looking forward to going home. And it all starts again in a month when school opens for the spring!

Tags: reflection, school, thoughts

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 5:26 pm and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.