<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&rsquo;ve learned a lot about my time here, and what I truly value.</p>
<h1 id="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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t have much external influence from other people.
I&rsquo;ve always thought of myself as aspiring to be more independent, and maybe that&rsquo;s a weakness.
But I&rsquo;ve always been stubborn in the sense that I try my hardest to improve my own life independent of other people.</p>
<h1 id="things-i-noticed">Things I noticed</h1>
<p>Lots of people already want to get into a specific field.
I know myself I&rsquo;ve been looking into healthcare, but I&rsquo;m also interested in research.
Maybe I can combine the two later.</p>
<p>This really isn&rsquo;t a problem, but I&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 <a href="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>