Adventus

Today is officially my last first day of school! Well of school at UCLA anyway. Starting my spring quarter at UCLA as a senior today seems unreal because the last four years have gone by in the blink of an eye. In my head, I still sometimes think of myself as a freshman, in a brand new school with a million things to do and no clue where to start. Fast forward to this year where I’m wrapping up a graduate degree and I occasionally raise my hand to ask a question! I want to share some thoughts and emotions as I begin the last chapter of my college experience.

Welcome to Cisco! My three-month internship at Cisco concluded a couple of months ago and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my experience there. For me, work has been a source of great enjoyment and learning, even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and at a climax of racial tensions across the United States. Thankfully, I’ve had the opportunity to flex my brain muscles with interesting projects and responsibilities this summer. The time has absolutely flown by, and I’ll break down my thoughts about working at Cisco as well as what I am looking forward to in the future.

This is really not where I saw this blog post going when I sat down to put my thoughts on a page. I was going to reflect on my time thus far at Cisco and discuss my goals for the rest of the summer. But I realized that I was going off on a tangent just about the differences between a “work” schedule and a “college” schedule. So, I’m using my creative freedom to dive into that. I want to explore the key benefits of each schedule and how I hope to merge the best of both worlds. I’ll get to writing about Cisco specifically later this summer!

Over 5 weeks have passed since UCLA transitioned to remote learning due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19). This is an unprecedented world crisis in a number of ways, and boy am I shocked at how much things have changed in a very short period of time. For my own historical recordkeeping purposes, I’ve listed some interesting facts as a result of this pandemic. Maybe you’ll find them interesting as well. I’ll also discuss the impact of this tragic event on the lives of my peers. After we return to some semblance of normalcy, I’ll do an update section so stay tuned for that.

Since starting college, I’ve been asked what I want to do over my career more times than I can count. I’ve developed a default answer that involves buzz words like R&D and next-gen technologies. Lately, though, my thoughts have been more and more devoted to the notion of starting a company of my own. I’ve heard many diverse opinions from students, founders, and investors whom I regard highly. I decided this would be a decent place to compose my thoughts. Here we go.

2020. Wow I can’t believe we are into a new decade! The last year and a half at college has absolutely flown by and it shocks me that I am a sophomore already. I know I haven’t made a post in a while, and I’m sorry for that. The flurry of finals and winter break swept the time away, but I’m back now and ready to type. I actually want to talk about my winter break trip and what it meant to me in this post. I was back home in Caldwell, NJ and it was one of the best weeks of my life.

As of this month, the long-anticipated data acquisition has finally been put in action! A lot of my spare time at college is devoted to Super Mileage Vehicle (SMV), an organization trying to build the most efficient electric vehicle ever designed. I’ve been working for the past few months on a system that will compile information from sensors around the vehicle so that we can analyze statistics and data from our car in real time. This is one of the more involved projects that I’ve taken on, so I wanted to take some time to consider the progress that has been made and discuss my key takeaways.

I read a memorable article last week about our modern obsession with being busy all the time. At university, it certainly feels like everyone is racing against each other to secure the best jobs, internships, and projects. So apparently the solution is to occupy every second of one’s time and attempt to edge each other out? Whats up with that?

When I was in elementary school I remember jumping at the opportunity to raid the local library for a stack of books. It was a proud day when I graduated from the kids section to the young adult section! But somehow in the years following that youthful exuberance, reading became a dreaded chore for homework. I can’t put my finger on how that quite happened but I do know that it affects millions of students who lose affinity for the written word for good.

Until this summer I guess I never really had a good idea of what being an adult was like. Adulthood was always a goal that would come later after college or even after marriage. But for the first time in my life, I got a taste of what it would actually be like. I had to take care of myself without feeling like I was in the sheltered bubble of high school or university life. And now as the summer seems to be coming to an end, I am reluctant to let go of my new found freedom.

Welcome to the innaugural post on my blog! This is something that I have been interested in starting for a long time and I am proud to say it has finally arrived. I wanted to have a space of my very own to lay out thoughts about the world around me. From metaphysics to mathematics, logics to lyrics, this will hopefully serve as an incubator. Perhaps I will even get to see some progression and growth of ideas as the years pass.