Junior year of UCSD in review

What all happened during my junior year at UC San Diego?

Fall was my first in person quarter and it started off very good. I was finally meeting UCSD students and got to see the campus. In person school finally made me realize that my professors are real people. I didn’t know you could just interact with them. School in person is so much better than online. For the first time, I finally know my way around campus. I discovered I don’t like being on campus since everything is so oversubscribed. The library is useless as it is so busy, unpeaceful, and has bad wifi. I ended up spending a lot of time in my lab room doing work.

I was looking forward to my first all in person quarter of university… which was cut short by the graduate student union strike during the fall, which forced classes online. Instead of my tuition money going towards TAs, it funded UCSD’s union busting.

Here is my schedule from the past year. Deep learning was very interesting and implementing deep learning models from scratch got me to learn things better than any online course could. The operating systems course by Joseph Pasquale was the best constructed course I have ever experienced. The content was so interesting and has definitely revolutionized how I think about computers. Lastly, History of Mathematics was a hidden gem. The professor Adam Bowers brought joy to the class and reminded me why I love math.

I also joined a natural language processing research lab and contributed toward two papers. It was enlightening to see inside the processes for producing academic papers.

I volunteered for the local robotics team.

I switched my interest to Operating Systems.

Got sick for the first time during university. Falling behind even by a bit is extremely punishing under a quarter system.

It was the inaugural year for the classics club. It was exciting to see all the people interested in classics. However, I was not able to be an active member as it conflicted with the club I am active in, Triton UAS.

TUAS plane crashed, so we were not able to go to competition.

I went to UCSD’s Sun God and animefest.

I got a car and a job.

Went outside more on hikes and runs.

My review of 3 years at UCSD. Overall, I am quite happy with UCSD. Almost all my professors are amazing beyond belief. The weather, location, access to public transport, and campus are all nice. Being at a school of 50k students is good because there are so many resources, but it means you basically never see the same person again, making it hard to interact with people.

Goals for the upcoming year. I would like to solidify some post-grad plans, finish exploring the main SoCal attractions, and continue whatever I did this year, better.