Rohan's Website https://rdesh.xyz/ Recent content in Rohan on Rohan's Website Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Mon, 24 Feb 2025 10:42:32 -0800 Life in college https://rdesh.xyz/life_in_college/ Wed, 26 Feb 2025 23:06:56 -0800 https://rdesh.xyz/life_in_college/ <h1 id="disclaimer">Disclaimer</h1> <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> <h1 id="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>