On Mundanity
It is currently week 6 of the fall quarter. I have some respite from my midterms for at least 2 weeks, hence the post.
Coming back to school after interning full-time has been interesting. It feels as if you've been sent back to daycare after an attempt at trying to do meaningful work. Except for a few classes where you can try and push yourself to learn more than what the syllabus covers, school does not feel as if it's doing what it's supposed to do — push you beyond your limits, to think, to suffer, to truly grow as an individual.
It's not as if I expect my classes to 'entertain' me 24/7. Clubs, research, and extracurricular work exist. Yet they're supposed to supplement, not substitute for, rigor in classes.
After being here for over a year, I'm inclined to attribute this feeling to the atmosphere of ambivalence. People hold beliefs for the sake of holding them. Rarely are people willing to work harder than anyone else, when no one is looking, because they believe in something others dont. Everyone wants to do 'just enough' to get by. Rarely do people stop to think what this implies for life later down the line. This mimetic behavior is a seductive trap, and I have to keep reminding myself of what's outside this small college town to make sure I dont fall into the same situation. (Thus, I will be applying to transfer this year)
But, I digress. The great thing about having people whose only aim to get by is that the curves are terribly generous, which allows me the liberty of slacking off.
My high school was an intense atmosphere. Egos were built and destroyed over half a point on whether an ion was incorrectly represented over a shift reaction in organic chemistry. Your status in the pecking order wasn't determined by money but rather by your E&M grades. I'm not sure if I miss that cut-throat environment, but it's safe to say it made me who I am today. To know that the small things matter.
I miss having that sense of competition in my classes. Where is the incentive to pore over Strang over and over when half the class can't successfully take a cross product? Sometimes, I do find myself thinking what would happen if my courses here looked like what they did in high school, over 50% of the class failing, having to study day and night to scrape through. After all, one doesn't know their limits until they're close to breaking.
The thing I'm most concerned about is becoming like everyone else here. Ambivalent, okay with whatever life sends their way. It's one of my biggest reasons to transfer. I like to think I'm here to do something meaningful, to be an outlier, and this environment isn't really conducive to supporting outliers, but maybe that's more a reflection of my IRL social circle and less about Davis. Twitter is great for that, seeing papers published every day, a new RL framework every other week is a good reflection of how fast the world works.
One thing I see with myself is that the second I have too much free time is I start stressing about whether I'm doing enough. I'm grateful for this feeling of stress, even though I uh, might have more gray hair than I'd like. It makes me who I am, for I'd rather have this drive of needing to do more, constantly. Just not to the point of breaking down. I dont see this in the people around me. Maybe it's a good thing? Maybe they're already doing all they can, hence they're content.
I dont know when I'd fully ever be content with my work. Maybe when I help come up with a drug that saves millions of lives? Maybe it's when I build a company with a billion-dollar valuation? I'm not sure yet. I think there's an ideal state where you're satisfied with how you're better than your past self, but still want to be better.
Anyways, that's enough of a Socratic seminar with myself. To keep myself busy, and productive(and thus, happy!) I'm going to continue protein engineering, learning how to train and fine-tune better PLM's, become great at linear algebra, recruit for next summer, and do more strength training. As well as eat more ice cream :)