2014 in Retrospect

Holy shit, 2014 was a big year.

March: turned 20
June: finished half of college
June-July: first intern in the industry
July: started study abroad in Melbourne, Australia
(best experience of my life, I could devote a whole blog to studying abroad, but not atm)
September: GF
October: weekend trip to Sydney
November: finished study abroad, parted with many great friends
November: 1 week trip to New Zealand (south island)
November-December: 10 day tour from Gold Coast to Cairns, GBR
December: reunited with U.S.

New Year's Resolutions: none, I'll make resolutions on my birthday, following last year's tradition

Using New Years as a 9 month checkpoint for resolutions made on my birthday from now on.

Checklist for 20th birthday resolutions:
Travel more ✔
Plan ahead better ✔
Reconnect with old friends
Start investing and saving for later
Find GF ✔

What's important in my education?

As the end of sophomore year approaches, I have taken useful technical classes included in my M.E. curriculum such as machining, welding, casting, and CADing.  I've also been coding for one year and can use MATLAB to do useful things for me.  Additionally, I've taken some conceptually demanding and important 300 level classes like fluid mechanics and 3D dynamics.

What I want to do this summer is apply what I have learned in these two years on a small, hands-on, one month project as a sort of experiment for testing what knowledge I have retained and if I know how to use my two years of college education in creating and solving a localized problem.

Upon completing this project, I will have gained some knowledge on the limits of myself and where my time investment of two years in college has taken me.  I can use this project as an intermediate data point between senior year of high school and senior year of university to track my progress, and perhaps use it as some motivation for coming up with my own senior project.

However, what is so significant about this?  By the end of senior year, will I have completed four years of strenuous education so that I could work on a senior project, get hired as an entry level engineer, and slowly climb my way up the corporate ladder?  Will I settle down in my hometown and wait out a mundane life until I accrue enough capital to achieve the American dream and retire?

No, this is not why I pursued higher education.

As cliche as this may sound, I pursued higher education and put my parents in a financially disadvantageous situation so that I can change the world in a meaningful and memorable way.  The skills I am taught in university will make me a better engineer.  How I choose to apply these skills onto the world that I perceive will determine the intensity of the impact I leave on society.

What I have to start doing is not only to continue keeping up with current events and where technology is heading, but actually take a shot at influencing the system so that I can try to shift society in the direction I want it to head in.

I need to not only think about the current big picture, but start thinking about how I will help paint the next big picture.

Building my resume, maintaining and improving my GPA, and racking up internships for the sake of approval from my future employees is just the small picture dwarfed by the importance of building my vision and gathering momentum for throwing myself into the world that has existed long before I was born and will exist long after I die.

Today

Reading through some of my older posts, I realized that I haven't been writing about anything that's happened in my day to day life recently.  For me, I think reading what I actually did on some day three years ago is more entertaining than reading some random thoughts I decided to spill out on this blog.

Today, my technical writing class was cancelled because the professor is conducting resume consultations for every student in her class.  I had mine last week.

I woke up at 10AM, took a shower, ate some cereal, and worked on some intermediate dynamics homework before heading off to office hours at 12:30PM.

I had intermediate dynamics office hours until 2PM.  The office hours aren't very helpful because there are so many students and the labs are hard.  Currently, we are working with simulink, which is a block diagram extension of MATLAB.  I wish the class delved into this more thoroughly, because the topic is useful and interesting but has a steep learning curve.  Two hours a week doesn't do solving ODEs and learning numerical methods on MATLAB justice.

From 2PM to 4PM, I had my GE class, American and Californian Politics.  The class is fairly boring, and the lectures don't even cover Californian politics.  The class seems to be mostly review from high school.  We finished learning about Congress and started learning about the president and executive branch.  The electoral college exists basically because the framers were elitists and wanted to separate the mob from politics.  There have been four instances where candidates lost the popular vote but won electorally.  Polarization of the US into Democrats and Republicans (or rather, liberals and conservatives) and the near elimination of big fringe states (like former California and Texas) has been a relatively recent development (~2000).

From 4PM to 5PM, I had my intermediate dynamics lecture.  We reviewed work/energy and kinetic diagrams (aka MKD).

After I got back, I had a phone interview for a job.  The recruiter asked non technical questions to assess my personality.  Three words that describe me are: creative, open, and teamworker.  A problem I encountered in a team setting was the lack of time and communication in a psychology project in high school right around when us poor seniors were applying for colleges.  We resolved this problem by splitting up research and writing and having one compiler for the final thing (which was me).  When I told the recruiter I might not be available the whole summer because of study abroad, she politely closed the conversation with the recommendation that I reapply for an internship next year.

Right now, my plan is to fly to Maryland to do computational research for the Army.  The internship pays well but I want to stay close to home during my unusually short summer (which is about 1.5 months).  I think staying close to home will help me start and finish some projects that have been on my mind and increase my chances of getting a girl friend.  With two cars and two drivers back home, I have more flexibility for taking girls out on dates.  Plus I managed to find/reconnect with a few cute girls that probably have some degree of interest in me.

Since then, I worked on my technical writing assignment, writing a proposal memo for a technical report on drones, installed and played some L4D2, microwaved and ate some leftover dinner from last night, watched some TV (Cosmos was on, NDT was talking about extinction and continental drift), and procrastinated some more on reddit.

The Ukraine crisis seems to be going still.  Some more Russian aircraft were shot down recently.  From a western standpoint, Putin's actions seem unjustifiable and irrational but I can begin to see why Russia has continued to act the way it has despite economic sanctions when I look at the big picture.  I can almost begin to appreciate that the United States + friends aren't the single military power in the world.  I may want to take back this statement in a decade.

There are some big projects that I want to work on but I can't when I have schoolwork on my mind, even if I have the time.  I was hoping to do these projects over the summer but this may be impossible depending on my internship situation.

For now, I have the Ski Club house boating trip this weekend to look forward to.  I haven't been piss drunk since last quarter and it'll be nice hanging out with my CPSC buds again.

Engineers and Scientists as Politicians?

Some think that electing engineers and scientists as politicians is a good idea but you need only look at a university research institution to see how much bureaucracy and partisanship exists.  Humans are ultimately humans and a person's profession does not make him much different from another.

That said, the type of people we are electing into office is not as much of a problem as how the government is set up to run.  Congressmen make decisions driven by re-election, and for re-election, they must cater to their own arbitrary territorial groups (aka constituents).  Catering to the needs of the party the congressman is associated comes second to the needs of the constituents.  The problem is that these groups of people have conflicts with the interests of other groups of people.  Everyone wants to free ride.  Everyone wants to pay minimal taxes and receive maximal benefits from the government, and they don't like it when the money goes to other people.  It's analogous to hatchlings fighting for nurture and food from their mother.

What we can take from the engineering and science community is how they approach problems: objectively.  Treat bettering the country and upholding some basic ideologies as the end goal and work towards that goal as a team.  Solve free riding problems by dissolving regional boundaries and having the nation identify as one entity composed by a diverse group of people, not a diverse group of groups.

I will come back later to contemplate on these naive remarks.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it

Except, in engineering, everything is broken and can always be made better.

Hipsters are mediocre artists at best

Here are some blatant opinions of mine without any backing or definitions:

Hipsters and folks with hipster-like personalities are mediocre artists at best because their judgmental attitude inhibits them from perceiving their reality in an artistic and creative way.

People are driven to become hipsters because they lack passion or talent for pursuing a more interesting life, including art.

Hipsters, however, have the ability discern good art from bad art just like anyone else but often times are misdirected into thinking bad art is good solely because others shy away from it.

When hipsters pursue art, it is often half-assed.

When hipsters pursue art, their methodology is often iterative reduction: erase it until it looks good.  This makes sense because hipsters are usually just science-minded people with no motivation for pursuing science and no talent for innovating things.

Good artists are passionate about their art.  The passionate but bad artists end up becoming good artists after a while.

I will not try to justify these opinions with experience or logic.  Take these opinions however you want and see if your experiences and logic agree or disagree with them.  Note that I haven't even defined what a hipster is.  Maybe its just a term for a subset of people I despise.

I've been feeling really apathetic

I've been feeling really apathetic ever since the start of spring break.  If I've learned anything from the past two weeks, it's that I've never relied on my emotions to get work done and complete day to day tasks.  This means that I show almost no physical symptoms of my emotional change.

I wonder if I've drunk too much alcohol or if this is just a part of growing up.  Maybe this is the result of my bad diet, since I haven't been eating much vegetables or fruits lately.  Whatever the cause, I feel like my mind has been copied, the original discarded, and the copy put into the shell of my body.  I feel like I've lost something that made me human two weeks ago.  I feel like I've lost my sharpness and clarity of thought.  Is my brain fried from a stressful quarter?  I don't feel concerned even though I should be because I am apathetic.

I have a hard time comprehending what I see.  It's as if my emotional center of the brain has been detached.

Edit (4/25):  I may be transforming into a sociopath.  My apathy seems normal and permanent now, but reading my past posts, I was clearly not the person I am now.

Turned 20 today, thought I'd post something

I am still having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I am 20.  My teenage years are behind me.  I've made a lot of great friends and memories.  I've traveled a fair amount.  I was successful academically, graduated Japanese school, graduated high school, and got into a kick ass college.  In college, I'm in a major I love, lead a social enough life, and am on track for a great career path.

I'd like to say that I've lived my life regretlessly so far.  But that's not true.  I've lost in touch with a lot of great friends.  I've missed a lot of academic opportunities, relationship opportunities, and I've probably missed a lot of opportunities I don't realize I've missed.

People like to make resolutions on new years.  I am making resolutions on my birthday.

Here are five.

Travel more.

Plan ahead better.

Reconnect with old friends.

Start investing and saving for later.

Find a girlfriend already, god dammit.

Peace.