adulting

Going from undergrad to grad school has been a rough transition for me, one that’s actually been far rougher than even the initial pandemic. I have a pretty strong fear of wasting my day to day, and in grad school, that fear is stronger than ever as classes feel pointless and I can’t seem to find ways to have fun, or at least more fun that I would have had I stayed at Columbia.

I was pretty sad earlier in the quarter about all this—I’ve realized recently that this is in large part due to the fact that I didn’t really feel that intellectually stimulated/that I was working on anything that mattered. To combat that, I’ve slowly been adding habits/small things that I used to do on a regular basis that I know boost my happiness: going outside more, attending classes, socializing, working out, picking up cool new hobbies that I never used to have the time for. But the one thing that I’m most excited to try out is a sort of challenge for myself (I hope that it ends up being doable)—to combat my fear of wasting my days away, I’m going to try to consciously pick one thing to do every day that I want to do. It’s not really going to be anything big most days—perhaps it’s socialize with a specific friend, or go somewhere new to explore, or even just go for a run/workout. I don’t know, but I think I’ve realized that adult life is far less passive than undergrad—so many things are just there for you in college that you can just kind of go with the flow and have lots of fun. Adult life, with all its freedoms/time, is also a desolate place if you aren’t proactive about doing things.

I’m going to try to keep track of the one thing I consciously pick to do every day. If I end up putting everything into my blog, this turns my blog into more of a conventional blog—there’ll be a lot more about day to day stuff rather than my introspective thoughts on macro changese in my life, but I think it’ll be a fun experiment/hopefully one day I can look back at all the memories I’ve stored!

spring break

I visited my friends in NYC! Too much stuff happened to recap every detail for the week, but it was really nice.

NYC

3-28

It was the first day of classes, and I ended up doing something for pretty much the entire day until I went to bed. I was really tired, but it felt really good to be busy again/feel like a student.

I ended up going to the Stanford Mall after the gym with my friends—I got this one photo with my friend that I thought was super funny because we look identical (and he hates it when I take photos of him, which naturally encourages me to take more).

andrew