3rd year winter-quarter at UCSC
Here we have finished our Winter Quarter 2026. Our final quarter is now dawning, but let's recap how this quarter went, because as always a lot has happened.
Living off-campus
As always we start off with this category and I can't think of much else that has changed but I'm continuing the flow of living in a single and having a car and stuff. I started like highkey venturing out a lot more with the car and like some weeks I would average like 3-4 trips to san jose just like casually and ive probably been on that 17 highway like 100+ times now in my life so I know it really well. Senioritis is also starting to hit me aka not caring about anything since im graduating soon. My attention to grades and academics is continuing to dwindle LMAO dude realistlcally i averaged like 2-4 hrs of schoolwork a week max so you can imagine how much random sidequests i was doing. Made trips to big sur, the 1 high way up to half moon bay a couple of times, cupertino a couple of times, san mateo, stanford, paolo alto, monterey, caramel, big basin redwoods state park, lots of viewpoints at night (like quimby road and stuff) etc. Didn't go to SF that much tbh. Really making the most of my final 2 quarters here, and really starting to appreciate California. People say it's the best state and Im starting to rly understand why like normally i feel like theres nothing to do here and i take everything for granted cuz ive been here my entire life, but some of these drives bro like along that highway 1 jsut feel like a simulation. And when you stop by those beaches or that pigeon point lighthouse or other stuff is just so insane. Like those drives are really just so beautiful like it's so unique like I feel like I'll instantly recognize it if i get a round on it in geoguessr. I'm definitely gonna miss this side of Santa Cruz like the scenery dude like I reflect back on these moments and it legit feels like a movie like you think irl it wouldnt look this beautiful but it feels even more insane irl like it legit felt like i was in a movie no matter how cliche it is. So yeah I'm really starting to appreciate UC Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz more now, as I remember last year I hated it since there was like no boba options and no asian restauraunts, and its like isolated and horrible city for walking and the bus system is bad and campus is on a hill and all that. But this city is really starting to grow on me.
I also had an LA trip in one of the weekends with my high school friends where we watched the MLS opener game Inter Miami vs. LAFC, aka reigning champions vs. 2nd best team in the league, aka messi vs. son heung min and LAFC ended up clapping them like 3-0 or something. Messi played pretty bad and son heung min had a nice assist. It was my first live soccer game and we snuck near the front of the pitch in the 2nd half and it was really cool like insane view. We also visited UCLA and pulled an all-nighter before our return flight and that all-nighter we went on the hollywood stars and santa monica and sightseeing and random side quests lmao rly fun trip.
Recruiting
So in January with this quarter looming, I knew that at the end, recruiting would end and a lot woudl've happened regarding this. And indeed, so much happened. For the first 5 weeks I was averaging literally 1 interview a week and man I was spending so much time prepping for those. There was a really important superday that I basically spent a huge portion of winter break prepping for and I also had my first in-person interview where I drove to palo alto and got ABSOLUTELY COOKED. But I got to visit their office and my sister afterwards which was cool and good experience ig. I obvisuouly cant rly unveil much other details, but I just got cooked. I won't have a separate recruiting reflection post like I did last year so I'll do it here. But basically a ton of emotions like always. THere's a specific process where I made it insanely far and I dedicated so much time to it, just to get rejected in the final leadership round call. That was literally soul crushing and took a week to recover. And then I thought it would be fine and I would get another process, and I again thought I performed well but I just got rejected after like the 4th round or something. There's so many factors out of your control and there's just no way there's candidates that did better than me. Like I'm literally acing these interviews and it's just how life is. Just so many emotions. When you make it so far into these interviews and especially when you finish one of them and you feel like you did rly well in the interview just to get rejected. And when you make it so far you start daydreaming and thinking you already got the offer cuz you just can't help it. You think about what life would be like in that city, what you would do on the weekends, how your parents and friends will react to the offer, and just pure daydreaming. It really does hurt a lot and I think I handled it well like I really just had the mindset that it is what it is and I did the best I can. It hurts a lot like this should not be happening to me but ig everything happens for a reason.
There was a good like 2 weeks where I had like no offers and I was thinking that I might not get my amazon return offer, but I ended up getting it and im likely returning there for fulltime work after I graduate. I'll talk about more details and share life at work later on in this blog, but yeah thats all ill say for now. So yeah really happy that I ended up getting that amazon return offer as I was getting rly concerned since it was getting super late. But that's how recruiting went and finalized.
Academics
4 classes:
- AM 147 (Computational Methods and Applications)
- AM 112 (Introduction to Partial Differential Equations)
- AM 160 (Machine Learning)
- SPAN 4 (Second-Year Spanish)
SO I took 3 AM classes for my major and a P/NP Spanish class for fun. May look like a hard courseload but realistically its mickey, mickey, mickey, and mickey. Somehow my most demanding class was Spanish like im not even trolling.
AM 147
So we are starting off HOT with my first ever B at UCSC and we had this midterm quiz where there was a window between 8AM to 10 PM on a Friday and I was planning on doing it at like 8 PM but bro I ventured off onto random sidequests after class like I think I was hooping and stuff and then I ended up getting food rly late and I was all over the place and it was like 10:01 PM and I parked back my apartment and then it hits me like BRO I MISSED THE MIDTERM QUIZ and its closed on canvas and everythig and i email the professor saying i had like heavy traffic coming back from an event lmao bro but long story short the professor is the type of professor to just copy paste generic response saying that the window provides flexbility in itself and its up to students responsbiility and stuff. So yeah like I wish the window was at 12 AM because 10 PM window is so dumb bruh on a Friday but nonetheless its my fault.
This professor is seriously rly bad like I can start a whole rant about him but I'd rather not waste my energy like it will just make me mad like I've had him previously and I was even a grader for him last quarter and I've seen his workflow. Like the final project wasnt even a final project like every person in the team had to turn in their own code and he just selects a random person to represent the grade for each team like its so bad.
This was one of my favorite classes tho for the reaosn that i met a new rly rly rly special classmate here and also two of my brainrot indian friends that watch flightreacts was in this class and another one of my brainrot friends was in this class and we had a grouop chat on instagram where we would legit just start rage baiting each other and fighting over the attendance code like it was seriously so funny. ANd then for the final we set up a zoom call to try to study but it ended up just being straight brainrot and spamming flight quotes and rage baiting each other and crashing out until 2 am like dude i cant emphasize how much I was laughing from some of these instagram chats like my stomach would start hurting and during random intervals throughout the day I would just think about the chats and start laughing nonstop. DUring spanish class one time I spent half the time just ragebaiting on instagram on my phone and not paying attention and I was legit laughing so much like my classmates and professor definitely saw me laughing and stuff lmao.
Anyway I didn't mention much about workload and thats cuz it was pretty much nonexistent like were skipping lectures and just griefing attendance codes from my friends plug and studying the day before for the midterm and stuff and honestly most the material was self explanatory once you study the concepts and thats how i was able to bs through those exams with 80%s. Getting a B rly leaves a bad taste in my mouth cuz if I did the midterm quiz I woudlve got a 95% but its whatever. I definitely wont be able to get the top 15% cum suma honors thing i forgot what its calle dbut its aight.
AM 112
Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) is a pretty daunting topic and many AM majors say its the hardest class. I went into it expecting that I needed consistent practice every week on the concepts in order to get a good grade and it didnt start well since I had so much recruiting and interviewing stuff giong on. I started skipping a ton of lectures but I started realizing that this class is super mickey because the first midterm wasnt even a midterm it was basically a quiz and the professor literally gave us the exact structure of the problem it would be and i got near 100% on it. So basically this class ended up being skipping every lecture and last minute studying every exam since she gave the topics and exact problem structure. For the final there was literally only 2 questions with multiple parts and once I drilled it down with the help of chatgpt explanations its literally so free. And then on top of that SHE ROUNDS THE FINAL GRADE UP TO THE NEAR PERCENTAGE like if u dont get an A in this class you literally have the iq of a puppy ant like sometimes academics at UCSC be so free this is unbelievable. I'm forgetting all these concepts because the learning curve is literally a one time thing with absolutely 0 review.
AM 160
This class was so free like the strucutre is literally all offline 4 homework assignments and a final project and optional lectures. This summary is this short beacuse that's how much time I spent on this class. 💀💀
SPAN 4
Like I mentioned earlier I spent the most time somehow in this Spanish class rather than 3 of my upperdiv major requirements. I took the placement exam during Fall quarter cuz I was thinking about it and I initially took it expecting to drop it cuz I didnt think I would have the courseload for it but as I started going to class I was like yknow this is a pretty good class. There were only 4 students so there was a lot of practice and feedback and the structured way we learned grammar was actually very useful. So I took it as P/NP and literally went to every lecture except one on a friday before my LA trip.
There were like 3 homework assignments a week on this online textbook called VHL where we basically drilled down the grammar and its actually realy useful like its really just like drills. It was lowkey a lot of work sometimes and I skipped them sometimes hence the 80% in the class. But yeah I didnt take this class that seriously in terms of grades like I would speed through all the exams and I finished the final in like 40 minutes just so I could dip early. It lowkey felt like I was scamming the school how much value I extracted out of this class bc I really did learn a lot and improve a lot in Spanish and it's quite rewarding. Obviously I'm not like fluent yet but I definitely felt more smooth when communicating and we learned new grammar like the present subjunctive which I drilled down pretty well and actually comes in quite useful. Like "i want you to sleep" is "quiero que duermas" and like a lot of other common phrases.
So yeah I would like try to speedrun through the homework assignments and drill down the grammar and then just show up to every class and learn a lot and I didnt rly expect to rly find so much value and now I regret not taking Spanish earlier. I'm definitely gonna take Spanish 5 next quarter and I'm even thinking about maybe taking French 1 but that class is already full so rip.
Tutoring
I also wanna briefly mention tutoring cuz last quarter I was a grader for 2 lowerdiv classes and this quarter I wanted to get a tutoring position for a more interesting class like DSA or Computer Networks. Mainly I just wanted DSA because I'm just so strongly suited for it and I know it so well.
So I was getting absolutely clapped by all the tutor applications like I applied to basically every role and I checked quite often like a lot during winter break and I sent follow up emails to all the professors. So then in the start of this quarter I decided to pull up and press some professors in-person so I did CSE 13s and rudnick said hes filled so im like ight. Then I went to CSE 101 Tantalo and waited in line after his lecture and he said "go to my office hours" so I waited the next day and went to his office hours and basically glazed myself and hes like "send me an email with ur resume" so i did that and then he dned up saying he would like more readers/tutors for CSE 101 and we scheduled a call in the weekend where he basically gave me the job like letsgoooo. My efforts paid out like this is bias for action right here.
So I would pull up to this tutoring session 2x a week with like 3 other tutors during each session and students would just come in to ask questions about their programming assignments. And I got paid like 27 an hour or something before tax so like its not many hours but its still something and I liked it cuz a lot of the times no students would come so I'm just getting paid to sit there and do homework. THere was one time where I stayed an hour after cuz I was stubborn on fixing this dudes assignment and when we got it in the end it was rly rewarding.
Other than that I also helped grade the midterms and finals and two of my roommates were in the class so that was fun. I also signed up to proctor the 2nd midterm and it was a cool experience ig like I just handed out the exams in the beginning and I was standing around and asnwering questions. And then I got bored so when ppl started turning in the exams I started looking at their answers.
Conclusion
So that's how this quarter went and all in all it was the most unreal quarter ever and just Fall quarter but on steroids. And recruiting happened and meeting new people happened. One day I'll elaborate on that. Oh yea I also stopped going to the Chinese Student Association meetings LMAO yea it just got kinda boring and half of it was also i had so much interview prep going on the first half of the quarter. Easily the least amount of time I put into academics like holy cow was it so mickey and I thought the quarters before were mickey. I prob forgot some details from this quarter but its whatever I got a good amount in.
Now previewing what is supposedly my final quarter, things will probably get even more unreal and I'm prob gonna start doing more random stuff. THere's still so much left to do in Santa Cruz and nearby and my goal is gonna be to try to do as much as I can before I dip out. Gotta make the most of my time here, and that senioritis will definitely multiply. Rly crazy that I'm at this point of time now, it kinda feels like forever that I just wrapped up my internship and was scarred by my workload and now I'm basically fully recovered. Now that I look back on the internship and I hear some ofmy startup friends and other friends talking about their WLB like I think it's not that bad. Anyway tho yea I also wanna do random trips like if theres a 3-day weekend I have to take advantage of that and literally fly to another city like im gonna prob be working for the rest of my life its scary. Actually now that I think about it ill have the liberty to do that while working too so its rly not that bad.
Lyric(s) of the Post:
'Cause last night, I was all aloneBy the phone, wishin' maybe you was home
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