year 2, winter quarter at UCSC
Here we are writing my year 2 winter quarter post, this quarter literally flew by and honestly not much happened. It's actually crazy how chilled out this quarter was, let's talk about that!
Living off-campus
Not much to talk about here that I haven't already gone over. I'm like settled in now and everything, like honestly everything is the same im trying to reflect on anything and like the overall update is that there's no update that's kinda the theme of this whole blog post too 💀. I have been going to play basketball a lot more this quarter like 2-3x a week consistently and the runs have been pretty good and ive met a lot of ppl thru it. My confidence is honestly not that good in the full court runs like bro I sometimes miss open layups for no reason but ive also had some highlight plays like some great help defense where i steal the ball or some floaters and jumpers. I also go on runs quite consistently like also 2-3x a week and its been nice exploring the city thru that, a couple of times i run thru local parks and hop in the courts if i see they have an odd number.
Oh yeah and I also finally got the EBT card in like February which is like government food stamps so i have like $300 every month to spend at grocery stores it actually is a gamechanger like bro it is just so fire it feels like pulling out free money and i been buying some high quality steak and eggs and everything with absolutely ZERO GUILT and for spring break I used it at wholefoods with my family and wow life is just SO COMFORTABLE RIGHT NOW like after the offer and like everything is so chill bro.
In terms of cooking its relatively the same rotation, I've added in some like steam buns or something from ranch 99 yea nothing notable.
In terms of gardening I've done absolutely like 0 work compared to the Fall quarter. There's a ton of wild grass and flowers that started growing everywhere, and I started harvesting like the stems of my garlic and using it as green onions. The garlic itself is almost ready to be harvested and some of the beans and herbs stuff are almost ready too. If we renew this lease imma start planting more stuff like potato or something idk but theres so much stuff to pull out if i have to do that like holy cow heres a photo:
You can see that with spring approaching or basically here already that these yellow flowers and some clover looking things started spawning in, absolutely undoing like all the work I did during fall quarter. You know I wonder how this stuff spreads cuz like I pulled out all the roots of most of everything like i guess the seeds blow thru the wind and it just spawns in or idk. I know dandellions work like that where after u blow it the things are seeds and yea ok lets move on to grades.
Academics
This quarter I took 3 courses:
- AM 170A (Math Modeling 1)
- CSE 130 (System Design)
- Film 80V (irrelevant async GE)
Courseload is easy. At some point I stopped going to CSE 130 lectures because he just talks too slow and the recordings exist and he doesnt record attendance. So that literally leaves me with 2 days of the week where I have 90 minute lectures and other than that I have no responsibilities. No lab, no discussion sections. My async GE i like kinda bullshtted thru the lectures and everything too.
AM 170A
Let's start off with my hardest class or most time-intensive course. This class was research methods or something and basically just taught us how to write a research paper and stuff. It was honestly pretty slow-paced and we walked thru simulating wildfire spread and then picking a topic from that, then we walked thru building SIRS model and writing a model section for that. Then the last like 3 weeks was making a presentation which was like 20% of our grade and our final paper that accounted for 40% of our grade. We didn't have any midterms, any quizzes, or any final exam during this course.
Our group chose to reserach about how fire spread interacts with terrain and it was kinda fun i lowkey got carried on the bullet points and the slides like normally im the one carrying the group i felt kinda bad but anyway i did edit our video for our presentation and bro one of my groupmates is like mexican and this guy would pause like every 2 words for like 7 seconds for no reason it was lowkey funny but this guys mp4 file was like 5 minutes long it took me so long to edit all the pauses out i lowkey caught in the flow at one point and was working like a straight MACHINE but anyway here's what we need to talk about we need to talk about the final project.
I needed an 76% on my final research paper to get an A in this class. Now I THOUGHT I already ahd it secured and I thought the professor said she would take the max of the rough draft and the final draft but apparently she meant something else about the score is higher or something like idk but my groupmate literally said that that was the case to me. So I already got 55/70 on the rough draft so in my head I'm like thinking I'm chilling and I'm procrastinating and I think that I can theoretically not turn in a final draft and get an A. But I pushed through this entire quarter to just not do a final project like I personally wanna get that feeling of completion and resolution to this course so yeah I DID end up doing it but you know it was literally at 11:30PM when I started doing it LMAO I remember I went home on Monday and it was due on Friday 11:59 PM. And that week I just kept procrastinating it and playing basketball and playing among us at night or something so I literally had to hop off of othe vc on Friday at 11:30 PM to do my final draft like it just feels completely wrong to not submit a final draft.
So I used my professors comments and stuff and she told me that I need to make a model to describe my intro and im just like HELL NO 💀 i aint got the time to boot up matlab for all that so I just fixed all the wordings and the structure and combiend some stuff and it was a timecrunch at the end and I was definitely not satisfied because i was missing like 2 models she told me I shoudl add in and she told me to fix one of the models and I'm really not trynna boot up matlab and in my head I already secured the A in this class so I'm just like vibing.
BUT THEN I END UP GETTING LIKE A 60% ON THE FINAL PAPER 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀 Honestly VERY deserved because its so obvious I didnt do her feedback 💀💀💀💀 and I submitted with like 2 min to spare but my final grade showed up as like an 81% and im like YO WTF so I email her about the grading thing and she told me that "report grade would be larger in numeric value (not necessarily) percentage point than your draft grade. " Idk what that means still but yea basically now i have to settle with an A- which makes a big difference because I was relying on this class as an A so I could make the Dean's honors list just so I can keep my streak alive. Now I'm pretty sure having a 3.8 gpa isnt good enough so rip my deans honors all over me fumbling the final report like if I actually tried and applied all her feedback and took a lot of time revising everything I couldve definitely easily got above 76% bruh. And it is pretty cringe that I choked with this class ONLY NEEDING AN 86% for an A and an 80% for an A- like the class is literally supposed to be a free A with a grading scale like this like I've never seen a grading scale like this before so for me to fumble it like this is honestly pretty embarassing like yea. Well whatever like man this is such a fumble. You know like realistically this makes absolutely 0 difference like that def makes me feel better but it is still embarassing for me jsut considering that 86% is an A and everything and now I dont have this perfect record of deans list stuff even tho its all meaningless at this point.
CSE 130
alright for context i have now resumed writing this post 2 weeks later i left off here lmao ok anywaythis class is one of the hardest cs classest and it started hitting from assignment 1, where it just took hours of debugging and asking gpt whats wrong with my code and learning a lot on my own and in office hours. It would only get worse from there. Those assignments were really 'tortorous' like yea theyre definitelly the reason why this class is so difficult. Apart from that there's no midterm and only a final and so that made this class really chill cuz once u finish the assignment youre basically free and you can just completely omit this class from your mind. I also like stopped going to lectures after like week 4 or something, I used to wake up early and go to the 10:40 lectures and go hoop afterwards but at one point I realized I would go to lecture just to have no patience because hte professor talks so slow and then go on my computer and scroll thru twitter or something lmao
FILM 80V
This class was my canvas async online GE class and it was pretty annoying honestly. We had these journal things every 2 weeks which were like 400+ word essays I recall and they were so annoying. Then our final project was this game proposal that required like 1000+ words and a moodboard and yea its just so much busy work. I skipped thru all the async lecture videos and the readings and would just like bullsht cite them and yea it was annoying class but at the end of the day its async and i got the same amt of credits from it as any other class so ig it does warrant the time but like its so bullsht the content lmao. Also the async online GE im in now in spring quarter is like MUCH easier and lighter workload its honestly unbelivable how light this workload is yea but ill talk more about that for the spring quarter wrapup.
Conclusion
So yeah I started writing this post abt like 3 weeks ago on 4/5 and then I finished the rest today, Apr 24. Not much else to talk about this quarter I kinda lowkey just wanna press post on this and get it over with LOL. You can see that unlike previous quarter wrapups I just put all the subheadings in a big "living off-campus section" cuz like I said there wasn't much to talk about this quarter.
Well there's my winter quarter, I'll see you for Spring quarter where we wrap up my Sophomore year in college. That's honestly crazy to say, I honestly need some time to think about that bro like wow.
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