Okay. I have somehow survived my first semester at college. Still waiting on final grades to be posted which is stressing me out, but. I’m free! Until January… but (temporary) freedom!
I have many things to say about this first semester. The first being “what the hell was that?” The second being “who told me to major in mechanical engineering?” And in the honors college with an aerospace emphasis on top of all that?? Whose idea was this? I need to have a talk with them.
But with all this, I thought it would be fun to make a list of moments throughout the semester and do my best to assign them to LU characters (hence the tags) based on whether I think it’s something they’d do or something that reminded me of them. Because why not. Free will and all that.
Four - Spending hours upon hours coding almost nonstop, not being able to figure out why the code isn’t coding, all for it to be because of a missing ~ in a place where it doesn’t seem like it would matter. Or maybe it was a missing . on a / because /. and / work differently. When I tell you I lost my mind over this type of stuff. It was so incredibly satisfying when the code worked, but the process sucked. And we were taught two different languages at once (MATLAB and Arduino C for those who care). They’re so similar but so different at the same time that I’d get the two different syntaxes mixed up sometimes.
Wild - This may come from me playing too much BOTW and TOTK when I first got into Zelda, but the amount of times I felt the urge to climb up the buildings to glide off of them to get around campus is insane. The fact that my initial thought was always ‘well, I can’t climb a building, that’s just silly, I’ll take the stairs/elevator to the roof’ is even more insane. Genuinely took me longer than it should’ve to remember that I can’t just glide off a freaking building. And this happened the whole semester. Doubt it’ll stop.
Legend - Pain. In every single joint. Sometimes it was just one or two that would bug me, but there were days where I’d be wearing an ankle brace on one side, a knee brace on the other side, and wrist braces on both of them. And still needing more because everything just hurt. And my campus happens to be on the side of a freaking mountain, so most of my classes were in the uphill direction. Ouch is all I’ve gotta say.
Warriors - Tried keeping an organized schedule and list for my assignments. Managed to keep that up for about a month before I just kinda gave up. Tried picking it back up after another month, but soon gave up again. I’m hoping to stick to it a bit more next semester and hopefully beyond that as well, but we’ll see. Also trying to figure out if I could afford skipping some physics lectures to work on coding assignments without compromising my knowledge and grade and all that in either one. Physics is one of the few grades currently finalized (got a B, which is good for that class if you ask me) and I’m one of the top coders in my coding class with an A before the final gets put in, so I think I managed my time… decently well. Not smartly in the slightest, but…
Hyrule - I got so incredibly lost the first few weeks. First few days especially. For starters, I had to drive to campus through a city I didn’t used to visit often. And on my own. I’ve never put so much trust into the GPS in my life. Then on campus, which is massive, I had to take time to walk through my “route” for each day to make sure I didn’t get lost and accidentally make myself late. Not to mention inside the buildings, trying to figure out what floor my class was on and which room it was in. There was one day where I wasn’t in a rush, so I tried navigating from one class to the library based on pure memory. I ended up a whole ten minutes in the wrong direction and in an area I have not seen since. I don’t even know where I ended up, all I know is I probably would’ve stayed lost without GPS.
Wind - This just feels like a Wind thing, but complaining about the commute. My house is close enough that I’m able to still live at home and go to college, so I don’t have to worry about paying for housing that’s over twice my tuition, but it’s right on the cusp of being super inconvenient. It’s an hour away on days with bad traffic, 45 minutes normally. So not awful. But try driving nearly 2 hours for a single 50 minute class. Not fun. Also I’d have to be on campus up to six hours before any of my classes started (all of them began after noon) in order to find parking. No thanks.
Sky - Being so incredibly happy when I was able to sleep in. Even for ten minutes. There was a class that if I got the homework done before 10 am the day of the homework session, I didn’t have to go at all. I always got the homework done the night before (which is where the hours of coding came from (see above for Four’s bit) as well as staying up until 1 am coding on multiple occasions) so that I could get a couple extra hours of sleep in. Because I live off campus I’ll take all the sleep I can get. So yay for extra sleep.
Time - I don’t know if this is entirely related to college, but seeing stuff online about the newest trends and brain rot and stuff. It makes me feel so old, man. And one of my cousin’s oldest kid (who just turned 7) always calls me old simply because I’m legally an adult. What is this? I’m not even that old, I say as if I didn’t just talk about everything always hurting and all that.
Twilight - Best I can think of has to be what my thoughts are on my English class. I was able to get ahead with a good amount of my classes because I took some advanced courses in high school that allowed for college credit. I had calc II, physics, and what’s essentially English 2, plus my coding class which needed calc I to be taken beforehand. When I tell you that English class was the most un-English-class-like English class I’ve ever taken. Our first assignment? Have AI write a love poem for us. Granted, the second assignment was to compare that to love poems written by actual people, but still! Throughout the class we were encouraged to use AI in order to analyze it. We were even allowed to use it as a tool, which is something none of my previous English teachers ever said because they didn’t trust people wouldn’t use them to do the whole assignment. It just baffled me how it was structured. Also, what do you mean our final project could be anything we wanted? Apparently in the past people have turned in whole sculptures as their final essay. How?? Why?? Ahhhhhhh.
