I haven’t added anything to this blog in 365 days. I’m not going to apologize (what do I owe you, anyway?), but I am going to seize this near end-of-year opportunity to reflect on this past year in a desperate attempt to make sense of my soon-to-be-adult life.

2015: The good parts

This year, I…

  • Interviewed with eight companies for internships in a period of two weeks, obtaining one at AppNexus, where I wrote production code and then got to blog about it
  • Went to Disney World
  • Saw Cabaret on Broadway. With Alan Cumming. Twice. (And once with Emma Stone.)
  • Learned about networks from the greatest teacher alive and was featured eight times in his “Best Commit Messages of 2015” presentation
  • Realized that I really like bees
  • Bought myself a fancy camera and took some real nice photos
  • Lived in New York for the second summer and was a mentor for the coolest fellowship ever
  • Got really drunk on my first day of being 21, and got really hungover on my second day of being 21
  • Went to the Bay Area for the first time, where I
    • Interviewed with Google
    • Rented a car for the first time (it was a minivan), didn’t crash it
    • Decided I do not want to live in the Bay Area
  • Got hired by Google, and got two hoodies to show for it
  • Bench pressed one hundred pounds
  • Acquired a Raspberry Pi, hosted a Telegram bot on it, grew a weird maternal attachment for it
  • Took an operating systems class that forever changed my GPA and my faith in humanity for the worse (but NOW I KNOW HOW OPERATING SYSTEMS WORK so it was weirdly almost worth it)
  • Started a style blog with some friends (it’s open source, feel free to contribute!)

Self-indulgent reflections on senior year

This is a weird time in my life, because it’s so transitional–I’ve been living in the same building and walking the same route to classes now for four years, and now every time I do ordinary things, all I can think is, “well, this is my last Physics midterm” or “well, this is the last time I’ll watch the ivy in the courtyard of my building change color” or “well, this is the last time I make a round-trip flight back to New Jersey”.

That’s not to say that everything is the same as it’s always been, though; it’s certainly not. Many of my closest friends have graduated, and I’m starting to feel my undergraduate potential coming to an end (I should have gotten involved in research? Or joined more clubs? Or explored the city more?), and much of the time I feel the loneliness of someone who shares neither experiences nor future with a lot of the people around me (there are lots of adorable but foolish and optimistic underclassmen in my house).

The weirdest thing about it is that within the next year things are going to become even more different. The intersection of the people I see every day now and the people I will see every day in six months is the empty set. Between now and then, I’m going to have a new apartment, a new company, no homework on weekends, a comfortable income–it still feels far away, but it’s nevertheless close enough to gloomily underscore the finiteness of my present experiences and relationships. I’m excited and incredibly lucky, but I’m also sad–I’ve never been good at goodbyes.