54 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
2.6 KiB
Markdown
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date = '2025-02-26T23:06:56-08:00'
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draft = false
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title = 'Life in college'
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# Disclaimer
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I want to preface this by saying I absolutely love it here.
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Probably nothing else would be different if I went to another college.
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That being said, I've learned a lot about my time here, and what I truly value.
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# The value of solitude
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Some might simply just call this loneliness.
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For some time, it did feel that way for me.
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Not that I didn't have people to see, but it was hard to make any sort of meaningful connection with people.
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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.
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However, it did get me thinking a lot.
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About my future, and what I wanted from it.
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About how I envisioned my future self and what steps I could take to get there.
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I do think it was good that I didn't have much external influence from other people.
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I've always thought of myself as aspiring to be more independent, and maybe that's a weakness.
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But I've always been stubborn in the sense that I try my hardest to improve my own life independent of other people.
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# Things I noticed
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Lots of people already want to get into a specific field.
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I know myself I've been looking into healthcare, but I'm also interested in research.
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Maybe I can combine the two later.
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This really isn't a problem, but I've always been indecisive, even back in high school.
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Most of my friends wanted to be investment bankers, or lawyers, or doctors, and tailored their extracurriculars and activities to achieve that.
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Meanwhile, I was more-or-less just scrambling trying to do everything that interested me.
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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.
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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.
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Already I have a self-hosted [Gitea](https://git.rdesh.xyz/explore/repos) instance, as well as a Radicale instance.
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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.
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# Takeaways
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Before I came to UCLA, I thought college would be a lot different than high-school.
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It is, but in a different way - you have a lot more agency and control over what you can do.
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I effectively have free will - which is scary.
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But at the same time, you can change and truly find yourself with no stigma.
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