3rd year at UCSC (Fall quarter 2025)
Year 3 has arrived! There's just so many thoughts and emotions looking back on everything like it is kinda crazy. A lot of new changes this year, we moved to a new apartment, I have a car, ICPC happened, and recruiting for next year started. Let's get into it.
Living off-campus
So our original group of 3 that we lived together with last Sophomore year decided that our rent was just too high (i was paying 1450 for a big double). Santa Cruz housing is literally so bad like I honestly believe its the worst of all UCs like holy cow it is really frustrating. Our only competent option was in Capitola. 3 beds, 1.5 baths, 3700 a month. We added a 4th housemate who transferred in and went to the same high school as my roommates and so im literally paying a little over 1,000 for a single. Everything abt this apartment was good except one blaring flaw aka being located almost 5 miles away from campus. Going into this quarter and school year I was really scared about this distance as its literally in a whole new zip code and basically a whole new city and we literally take the highway to get to school. But I do have a car which makes it easier.
So what do I start of with. The first week of school I would park at my friends place and then take the bus which is a super long process. I was trynna get a parking permit but I submitted way too late and I became like position 20 on the waitlist. Good thing tho that I submitted an appeal and literally just showed them that I lived super far away and I have roommates depending on me to carpool and it got thru and I was able to cop a permit for like $370 for the school year. So now I drive to the campus parking lot and then take any of the city buses or loop buses. I still have to leave 40 mins before my class starts but it could be worse. I feel bad for 2 of my housemates that don't have cars as they have to take like 1+ hr journeys by bus where they switch. So I tried to carpool them when I could, and luckily my mwf semi-aligned with one of my housemates.
Having a car is also just insane unlocked freedom like at night if I'm randomly hungry I can literally just hop in my car and get taco bell. And also just the UCSC bus system is so aids sometimes like its late or its full and skips the stop or theres always some bs that happens sometimes and sometimes I'm frantic and I miss the bus and just having the car parked there for me to go in whenever is honestly a game changer. Mainly just like getting food and going to events is so much more convenient like before I'd have to carpool with someone and like yea. Also going back home is super convenient as last year I'd have to take the 17 bus to san jose where my parents would pick me up.
Now let's talk about our new apartment as it's a pretty nice complex. I really enjoy being in a single like I lowkey never use my headhpones anymore I just use my speaker to listen to music which is so nice cuz like my ears get hot rly easily from headhpones somehow. My room also has this insane minihoop setup and I didn't have any downstairs neighbors for this quarter as there was ongoing construction or something.
Like half the room is just open space for me to run minihoop and I would run it so much. Like many times instead of going on a run outside I would extract cardio from doing dunk contest or imaginative 2on2s and I would legit be full of sweat and perfect for a cold shower. It was honestly unreal lmao like my indoor minihoop jumper really developed like I'm legit so accurate now. I would play 1s with my housemate evan a lot and it was rly fun. However being in a single meant my sleep schedule lowkey got kinda bad cuz like theres no roommate that keeps me disciplined and I would sometimes lose track of time and sleep at like 2-3 AM like regularly and it honestly got bad towards the end of the quarter. I was lowkey all over the place, I would just eat 1 big meal a day too as it was just way more convenient. I remember when I went home for winter break it was a really nice reset as I got a normal life pace and rhythm and health back. I honestly need to lock this in for this quarter bro.
I'm honestly super satisfied with how things turned out. With having a car the distance is not a big deal and having a single is so nice and more importantly our 4th housemate like elevated our house spirit so much. All he does is sit in the living room and play league or other video games and hes always on discord VC yelling like straight up yelling and screaming comms it was super funny. Like last year our house energy was just straight up dead sometimes like we wouldn't rly talk to each other but our 4th roommate is just super open and insanely brainrotted, like when he leaves for the weekend the house honestly feels quiet and dead like it really does miss his yelling lmao. Also our house would go out on Sundays a good amount and play pickleball then get food after, and those were honestly some of my best memories of last quarter. Idk it was just rly fun and what college is all about, and I wish I had more of this but I'm grateful for what I have.
Academics
3 classes:
- AM 129 (Foundations of Scientific Learning for Engineers)
- CHIN 103 (GE class)
- CSE 142 (Machine Learning)
So I will be fairly vague in my class reviews so I apologize in advance but like I got robbed in CSE 142 but I think this should be good enough for deans list like bro holy cow ok ill just save the ranting for following.
AM 129
This is a major requriement class and its so useless and so mickey like the first 2 weeks we were learning git commands. I met a friend and he basically said theres no reason to go as attendance is only extra credit and do we really need the extra credit. The grading was also entirely 4 homework assignments + a final project so theres no midterm and no final aka this class was so free. I legit stopped going to lecture and yea this class was so free.
CHIN 103
This class fulfills a TA General Education which was cool as I'm interested in learning Chinese. I honestly didn't learn much from this class as I didn't rly do any of the readings as I got lazy. There was a lot of presentations and attendance played a big role and just a bunch of small assignments that got kinda hard to keep track of. There was also some events across all the chinese classes department including Chinese 1 and Chinese 4 which was fun and our class had to hold weekly conversation sessions with the other chinese classes and that was also kinda fun just hearing some white ppl speak basic chinese and helping them practice and stuff.
Most of the class are international ppl from China which I was surprised abt as like why r they taking this class but yea many of them r doing it for the GE too. I made some good friends thru this class and the Professor Ting Ting Wu was honestly a really good professor like she was just super nice and taught things really well and I did enjoy this class a lot. For the final project I pulled an all-nighter making a video: video link. I originally had it on YouTube on my channel and it got like 300+ views before being taken down because im ngl half the footage was taken from this Red Bull documentary thing that I just snipped up but like that was annoying. I reuploaded unlisted and they still copyright took it down like wtf. Thats annoying that I have to have this masterpiece on google drive but whatever at least I can say it kinda blew up.
CSE 142
This class was pretty similar in AM129 as in the entirety of your grade is like 5 projects + a final project and async final. Lecture attendnace was also not even mandatory as we could just watch the lecture recording and get the code from it since the attendance quizzes would stay up for 2 days. That made things very convenient and I was at like a 98% in the class before this professor gives me 25/60 on HW4 like huh?? I emailed them a crazy amt during finals week as thats when the grade came out and they never responded. I pinged them in the class discord and like one of the TAs responded that it was the professor that graded the assignment and I like kept following up and this dude ignored me. So this quarter (Winter 2026) I pulled up to his lecture and said I sent him emails abt this and he said "oh just send me an email I'll look into it" and this mf just doesnt look into it. Like what am I supposed to do like I can just exert all my energy and escalate thru the administration or something or go back to his lectures this quarter and get him in-person again but like I already spent so much time emailing this dude like maybe I just take the A- and it is just so frustrating. I had a friend that had a very similar experience and in the end this professor just kept bullshtting. Like I'm trynna get the cum saumma laude or whatever its called like top 5% and this A- might make a difference. It's just so frustrating like at this point im prob just gonna leave this as what it is ig.
Tutor/Reader
I'm officially adding a new subsection because this quarter I've began grading for like $22 per hour LOL but its pretty vibes i just open up grade scope and im assigned evens or odds or a problem. And then i usually multitask while watching NBA or watching YouTube and its all asynchronous so its pretty nice to have. I'm a grader for AM 30 (multivar calc) and CSE 16 (Applied Discrete Maths (basically like proofs and probability)). It's cool seeing the insider look of like entering grades into canvas and seeing students submissions as some ppl straight up just write down "i give up"on the last page or something and honestly professors are so lazy like one of my professors messed up the rubric and he didnt care and said just keep it that way and the other one was like "just grade for completion" when we were scrambling to grade a hw one time.
Conclusion
So that was my quarter. There was like a 2-3 week stretch during ICPC szn where I was in insane stress grind mode. Like I had an interview which had system design so I had to study that and then at the same time our ICPC team had 4 hr practice sessions 2x a week and I was just at insane busy-ness. Let's quickly summarize how the ICPC regionals went because we did not advance. I'm really proud of my team like truly like our chemistry was so well and we rly did bond through our practice sessions and we were lowkey popping off in our practice sessions like our new Freshman teammate would throw out an idea for this hard question and I totally didnt consider that and then I would use that to further reduce down the problem and the chemistry and teamwork was rly just clicking. Like I was honestly impressed and I liked our team better than last year despite all we did was just replace one of our teammates. During regionals, like the first 3 hours went rly well as we got like minimal bugs and we were floating in the top 6 and even in the top 5 for a good amt. But then the final 2 hours we crashed into a wall and there was this problem about like basically u reduce it down to u have a list of numbers and in an operation u can choose a numnber and either increment or decrement it by 1 and so one way what I thought up is just storing it in a hashmap and using prefix/suffix sums to anchor it along each value that appears in teh arr. But really u can literally just take the median and that makes recomputation way easier and its hard to explain but man we just fixated so hard and overcomplicated the problem. We honeslty knew we were recomplicating the problem but we couldn't htink of any alternative way to do it. We literally were implementingn ternary search for our approach. When the contest ended we thought we choked bad and that if we got that question then we prob wouldve advanced to nationals but bro we solved 7 problems which is normally very good but like you needed to solve 9 problems to advance. So like we really had no chance and the standards and competition in our region is just so insane. UC Davis didnt make it this year it was the normal suspects taking the top 4: UW, UBC, Stanford, Berkeley, and then SJSU snuck in the 5th spot somehow like idk what master they hvae in that school. And then OSU got 6th and we were 7th and uc davis was 8th. We really did have no chance and it was just really humbling and crushing to me like the competition is just so high. I felt like I failed the team because I'm like the oldest and if I was a master instead of an expert then we probably coudlve had stronger consistency because the other teams that advanced had like 3 masters of 2 masters and a CM and our team was master, an expert, and like a sleeper pupil/specialist.
I think thats a wrap on ICPC. If we made nationals I would've gotten back into CF and grind phase but like man I had these dreams of making it back and it was just so cooked like all in all I was really proud of how we performed like we had 7 problems down and 2 of those problems felt super hard to do and we ended up figuring them out...but it still wasn't enough. Just nothing you can do about that. This might be my last ICPC season and I just feel like I failed the team and especially the Master on our team like he honestly deserves better. He's so cracked and I wanted to advance so bad for him because he really deserves it. Really does suck.
Anyway tho, what a quarter like bro curriculum wise it was litearlly 2 mickey classes that i didnt even show attendance to and then Chinese class which was pretty free too like if anything there was just a bit of quantity but nothing was rly that difficult. This next quarter that I've currently started (Winter 2026) will be interesting. Recruiting will likely wrap up before this quarter ends and man I just really hope I get one of these processes I'm in. I'll see you then!
[editors note: i finished writing this post in early january, but procrastinated taking photos of my room lmao]
Lyric(s) of the Post:
"
Future bass wedding
We all know where this is heading
Living in the past
Thinking destiny's unsteady
We all know where this is heading
Living in the past
Thinking destiny's unsteady
"
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