One third passed

This semester has been surprisingly long, in a positive sense.

This might be the first time I could sit down and begin typing my blog post during a Monday night. I just finished running 10km on a treadmill and am feeling really good right now to write something down.

The semester has been quite long for me. Last semester passed in a blink of the eye while this semester I have experienced so much. By experiencing, I mean mostly emotionally and things happened in my head. For example, I have more responsibilities. Every week I am thinking about how to make sure APO brothers show up to the weekly service events I coordinated. It has proven that my bugging all the time works very well and a decent number of people showed up every time. The moment where more-than-expected people showed up to my events, I felt a strong sense of achievement and mostly happiness. This has been my source of motivations to fulfil my Service VP responsibilities. Apart from that, I was trying to date a girl which didn’t end up very well but costs tremendous mental energy. However, I finally have been through the experience once. It was great to get to partially to know a girl and get a better understanding of love. The ordeal has provided clarity to me, and even the most unremarkable and implausible romance plots in movies now appear plausible and sensible.

Classes

I very much enjoyed all the classes I am taking, of course except the discrete math class. My favorable class would definitely be Marxism and Society, which I decided to take out of purely curiosity. The professor was extremely good at explaining Marx’s pieces and all the esoteric concepts. To be honest, I didn’t really do the readings but every time he breaks down everything in such an organic and logical way. Mostly importantly, I got a full score on the first midterm! I know it was not a hard core midterm but I at least prove to myself that I am capable of learning something not cs. Reflecting upon the class, I realize I enjoy absorbing all the unique views and ideology proposed by Marx. Whether feasible or not, it is intriguing to get to know his theories. Admittedly, my classmates are way more smarter and insightful than me. Sometimes I could not even understand their speaking in the class. But overall it’s great to simply be with them and be exposed to a distinctive academic environment.

Similarly, my Intro to Political Philosophy class provides another whole different perspective which ironically Marx refutes about. Reading pieces from Plato, Socrates, Hobbes, Machiavelli was such a fun journey, even though it was painful when composing an academically sound paper to submit. I particularly like Machiavelli’s views and his book The Prince. Most things he stated is so true given the current political dynamics of the world.

Earth and Ocean Science is not bad at all. The professor is really passionate about his teaching and makes the lecture very engaging. I guess my satisfaction of this class definitely partially comes from my obsession with hiking.

Summer plan

Initially, it was challenging for me to come to terms with the possibility of not securing a genuine internship for the summer. However, after speaking with several friends, including those who have landed fantastic internships and those who have not, I began to feel a sense of relief about the situation. For now, I am planning to go to Berlin for a study abroad program and then come back to campus for a full-time software engineer job in a lab. However, I am still not sure if I could do both because of the time constraints. If this works out, I might even be able to go to an F1 race in Austria after my Berlin program!

Updates on my website

In addition to creating a night-mode option for my blog website and adding more content to haojin.li, I have achieved a long-standing goal by finally purchasing the domain lihaojin.com after waiting for three years. Plus, I have configured the GitHub actions to automatically build and deploy both my blog and haojin.li to my servers located in both China and the United States. Despite how it may sound, I am genuinely thrilled to have made these improvements.