I want to preface this by saying I absolutely love it here.
Probably nothing else would be different if I went to another college.
That being said, I’ve learned a lot about my time here, and what I truly value.
The value of solitude
Some might simply just call this loneliness.
For some time, it did feel that way for me.
Not that I didn’t have people to see, but it was hard to make any sort of meaningful connection with people.
I think eventually it came to a point where I was so frustrated of not making any meaningful contact that I sort of became a recluse, for a lack of a better term.">
<p>I want to preface this by saying I absolutely love it here.
Probably nothing else would be different if I went to another college.
That being said, I’ve learned a lot about my time here, and what I truly value.</p>
<h1id="the-value-of-solitude">The value of solitude</h1>
<p>Some might simply just call this loneliness.
For some time, it did feel that way for me.
Not that I didn’t have people to see, but it was hard to make any sort of meaningful connection with people.
I think eventually it came to a point where I was so frustrated of not making any meaningful contact that I sort of became a recluse, for a lack of a better term.</p>
<p>However, it did get me thinking a lot.</p>
<p>About my future, and what I wanted from it.</p>
<p>About how I envisioned my future self and what steps I could take to get there.</p>
<p>I do think it was good that I didn’t have much external influence from other people.
I’ve always thought of myself as aspiring to be more independent, and maybe that’s a weakness.
But I’ve always been stubborn in the sense that I try my hardest to improve my own life independent of other people.</p>
<h1id="things-i-noticed">Things I noticed</h1>
<p>Lots of people already want to get into a specific field.
I know myself I’ve been looking into healthcare, but I’m also interested in research.
Maybe I can combine the two later.</p>
<p>This really isn’t a problem, but I’ve always been indecisive, even back in high school.
Most of my friends wanted to be investment bankers, or lawyers, or doctors, and tailored their extracurriculars and activities to achieve that.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I was more-or-less just scrambling trying to do everything that interested me.
It’s weird since I do want to try to get into a med school, but I also have interests in CS and more specifically developing FOSS software to help scientific endeavours.</p>
<p>My love for FOSS caused me to set up this blog, and once I can figure out how to get the website working without people having to be on the UCLA vpn, I can do a lot more interesting things.
Already I have a self-hosted <ahref="https://git.rdesh.xyz/explore/repos">Gitea</a> instance, as well as a Radicale instance.
One of my interests once I get into a research lab here is to figure out how to design publishable, interactive databases for findings and host them on my website and put the code on my own self-hosted instance.</p>
<h1id="takeaways">Takeaways</h1>
<p>Before I came to UCLA, I thought college would be a lot different than high-school.
It is, but in a different way - you have a lot more agency and control over what you can do.
I effectively have free will - which is scary.</p>
<p>But at the same time, you can change and truly find yourself with no stigma.</p>
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