January – May 2021: I moved to Somerville, a cute little neighborhood within a stone’s throw of Boston, in order to join up with the other members of the startup and continue my internship IRL!! This was my first time really living on my own (away from home and parents) and it definitely was a learning curve but it was so much fun.

Podcast rec from this era

August 2021: Pasadena at last! From a wild coincidence, I landed a summer internship at XOS Trucks in Glendale, CA thanks to an upperclassman introducing me to the company’s CTO, who was a Caltech alum! I ended up staying in an AirBnB with two other Techers, just a 20-minute drive away from Caltech campus. And I finally got to meet all my friends whom I’d only ever known on Discord :’)

Winter Term 2022: Things kinda got real this term. Classes got harder (though we were still being graded pass-fail since it was only our second term). One of my two core friend groups basically completely disintegrated. Frosh year at Caltech puts people under an enormous amount of pressure at a very vulnerable time in their lives, and it changes them. This is the way of things. I was also dealing with a separate handful of stressful personal issues which I may talk about some other time.

Life went on. I got closer with the tight group of friends I was still in touch with. (We had a group chat! And hung out often! I’d never had that before!) A couple of my friends taught me how to skateboard. I’ll never forget those “midnight skate”s back and forth across the Moore Walk and north parking lot. By the way, if you’re impatient (or have a lot of inner voices to drown out) like me, skateboarding is definitely the way to go at Caltech. It’s super convenient and made the tedious trip back to my dorm in Bechtel each night so much more bearable.

This was probably the most ahead in terms of classwork I’ve ever been, and ever will be at Caltech. At one point I was working on the physics set for the following week. Note that this is extremely abnormal and probably concerning. But evidently I managed somehow, and on top of it I somehow also had time to do a bunch of other fun activities. Take advantage of frosh year, kiddos! You have two terms of pass-fail for a reason!

Spring Term 2022: Due to a… sequence of events, I ended up moving to an off-campus apartment with 2 friends for the final term of my frosh year. It was fine. The skateboard helped immensely to get back and forth.

I had some interesting classes this term. There was Ay 1 – Intro to Astronomy – which I really enjoyed. There was ME 129 – Experimental Robotics – which sounds cooler than it actually was, since it was almost entirely python programming. But it was neat because we were programming a little two-wheeled robot which we built ourselves to follow lines of tape on the floor.

I was doing a lot of stuff this term. On top of my classes, I was also playing a part in a musical theater production! I’d never been a theater kid before, but I found my inner diva, and it was so much fun. This definitely deserves a blog post of its own, so I’ll leave you with a couple of photos for now. Oh, the musical was called “From the Earth to the Moon!” And you can watch our performance here!

I also joined Caltech CubeSat Club, and we had an epic adventure at the end of this term which already has its own blog post!

Summer 2022: I got to go back to Boston for an internship at MIT Haystack Observatory! It was seriously epic and my experience there was the final straw that convinced me to change my major at Caltech from Mechanical Engineering to Astrophysics! I’ve talked a bit more about my summer experience here in other blog posts. Probably not enough though — so much happened this summer! It definitely marked my transition from frosh to s’more. For the first time in a long time, I had a sense that I was where I was supposed to be. That doesn’t mean I suddenly had it all figured out — quite the contrary. I still feel like that Dr. Strange GIF, trying to grapple with all the possible futures I could see myself in. But mental health wise, this was the start of a new era for me : ) (Seriously though, you have no idea how good it felt to get away from campus. I didn’t realize how much everything was weighing on me while I was there, but I was under so much pressure and stress. For me it wasn’t even the classes so much (though they contributed of course), but more so along the lines of… sometimes you have to make the tough call to distance yourself from a group of people, even people you consider close friends, once you admit to yourself that the relationship is no longer a positive one. And on top of that, being constantly busy and running around everywhere to different commitments (even self inflicted ones) gets exhausting. So it was nice to have a change of scenery for the summer. But by the end, I was missing it :’) )

Also a podcast rec (I binged it over this summer)

Winter Term 2023: The physics got REAL this term. Intro to Quantum Mechanics hit us all like a bus. I actually vlogged the first week of this term, and theoretically you should see those videos coming out here real soon so stay tuned.

There were a ton of fun events that happened this term — Dabney Hovse had its initiations event, and I hadn’t actually attended it last year, so I got initiated this year. No I cannot tell you more details it is top secret. You’ll just have to join Dabney Hovse to find out! (Actually, put a pin in that — administration wants to ban this tradition too, because of the part where the initiates are asked nicely to put on a blindfold if they feel comfortable.)

Other than that, though, I was super busy with work this term. Classes were a doozy, had me truly struggling to keep up for the first time really at Caltech. A few times I stayed up past 5am to finish a problem set. This is a boundary that I do NOT cross lightly — I have never pulled an all-nighter to this day, but I did come close a few times this term. All in the name of physics 🫡. I think in the first week that I vlogged, there was a lot more time for fun stuff since the work hadn’t really kicked in yet, so watching them back, I think they’re not the most accurate representation of day to day life at Caltech. But they definitely capture the student culture really well so that’s something I’m proud of 🙂

Spring Term 2023: Spring break was fun — I went on a road trip with my friend Jonathan back to his home town in Texas. We also had time to stop at some fun places along the way. Given that, though, once we got back and it was time to start school again, I hadn’t really had a chance to rest; so unfortunately I started out the term a little burnt out.

And this term was a DOOZY. The hardest term I’ve had at Caltech thus far. It was the amount of stuff I had to do. Physics classes were tough, as always, but what really sucked up my time was the student newspaper, The California Tech. Journalism was not something I’d really done before, but it was severely lacking at Caltech, as no one was really writing for the newspaper — even though there’s definitely a lot to write about. So I decided to run (uh, unopposed) for Tech Editor-in-Chief. Which then meant I had to actually publish the newspaper every other week. I have a great team of people helping me to do this, but it’s still a ton of work. Very rewarding, especially when we get the freshly printed stack of papers with our hard work on display, but yeah. Time consuming.

I was also tied up with: Helping out with admissions events for new students; tinkering around with an old radio telescope I’d gotten permission to use, and felt obligated to now that I’d received funding from the Deans’ Office to buy equipment; starting to plan for revamping this blog website; and a bunch of other one-off stuff like planning a finals week house event, going to an astronomy outreach event at a local high school, Ditch Day of course, oh I also went on a weekend camping trip with the Alpine Club; probably other stuff I’m forgetting. It was fun, but it was so much. So much. Looking back, I do have to admit that it interfered with my academics a bit. I didn’t get as much out of my physics class as I would have liked, since it’s really interesting material, the statistical mechanics. Live and learn.

By the end of the term, I was so ready to be done and out of there. I said goodbye to my friends for the summer, and without so much as a few days of rest, I was on a plane to Copenhagen to start my summer research project… never a dull moment!

Summer 2023: I had gotten connected with a professor at the University of Copenhagen who had a cool idea for a project related to radio astronomy, and thanks to Caltech’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), I and two other Caltech students got a stipend to visit there for 10 weeks — all living costs included! (If you know how to live cheap…)

It was definitely a big transition — I hadn’t spent more than a week anywhere in Europe before, and now I was LIVING here, biking to work every day… it was wild. Perhaps I will detail more of my experiences in a followup post (because the summer definitely deserves more than two paragraphs, but I’ve been writing for a day now, and I just want to publish this post lol). Certainly took some adjusting and I won’t say it was completely un-stressful, but it was certainly a very cool experience.