2020 Year in Review, pt. 1: January-May

the flowers on the tree are finally blooming

Context

The review of all of 2019 can be found here:
http://www.alanzhu.me/2020/01/j-year-in-review-2019.html

A Year In Review document has been produced every year since 2016, miraculously. I wrote in January, however, that the format itself had seen better days and felt less than fit for its intended purpose. This is my first at producing a new version of this document; one part for each segment of the year—spring semester, the summer, and then the fall semester. The reflection questions, if still relevant, will probably still fall at the end of the fall document. We'll see how it goes.

A Brief Summary of Events

January

I started January at home, relishing the last few days I had at home with friends after a break that was just the right length to prevent me from lapsing into boredom. Eventually, time came for me to return to MIT.

My time at MIT was mostly spent working days starting at 8 AM at an externship with Brain Power, a startup in Kendall Square. I mostly spent the time learning and writing React, which was quite an interesting time. Some days each week, I cooked with and/or for a couple friends (funded by H-Mart certificates) both on Putz and in Next, which was quite a fun experience, and I also spent some time reading and meeting about applications for Think, a high school research program run by techX. There were some fun events as well: lunches with friends and with fellow externs, teaching my fifty-minute class on South Dakota in twenty minutes to MIT students, creating catholicgayanswers.com with a friend for Bad Ideas Weekend, The Importance of Being Earnest performed by MIT's Shakespeare Ensemble, and so on.

The big items I'll pick out, I think, both happened towards the end of the month: I drove to Yale with Quiz Bowl for regionals, where my team did very poorly, but we still had quite a lot of fun. I also attended Mean Girls, which was at the Citizens Bank Opera House, and ended up being really good, perhaps because I had forgotten a lot of it before seeing it again.

February

February started with me picking out classes for the semester and joining the Next House CPW committee. Week 1 was mostly spent adjusting to classes—which I was very excited about—and managing the Think students who we had invited to campus.

From there, the classwork sort of just picked itself up and started running. Assorted events: another Quiz Bowl tournament, this time hosted at MIT, where we played as a house team; some close conversations with friends about life including one where I laid on a carpet for probably three hours; rewatching Love, Simon with Next 4W; spending some with RSI folk, including some from Stanford and some there for HMMT; volunteering for middle school Science Bowl and high school Quiz Bowl tournaments; attending a concert at Harvard where my high school friend was playing after a full day watching robotics matches where my high school team was playing.

My favorite events: a visit to the Boston Children's Museum with a friend in 2.00B, where we had a lot of fun despite (or perhaps because of) it being a children's museum. I also judged a lot of debate rounds, which involved taking a lot of public transit early in the cold, but also listening to a lot of cool arguments and getting paid by Harvard. Some friends from Quiz Bowl and I also watched a horrific movie for Spanish after dinner together, after which, due to our collective terror, we had a sleepover in East Campus.

March

March started with some good news! I had gotten some solos in both Asymptones and Concert Choir that I was quite excited about. We had also started submitting CPW events and had also just bought Mario Kart for the wing, which was quite exciting.

Then, the news started. On March 5th, they cancelled all events over 150 people, which was essentially all of my concerts and Campus Preview Weekend. This, as you all now know, was not the end of the story. After an intervening weekend where I got a book for free, watched a movie with some friends, and hosted my friend from high school who was visiting from Minnesota, including a long walk to Seaport and a dinner with some friends near Harvard, my parents informed me that they wanted me to come home for spring break. The very next day, March 10th, they informed us that we would be going home for good.

Time became sluggish—packing, the last Concert Choir rehearsal, the last Quiz Bowl practice. At the last Asymptones get-together, they accelerated the leaving timeline, making me the last person in my friend group and my living group to leave. I packed and waited and I packed and I waited and I left on Sunday, March 15th, just a year and a day after I had been accepted to the Institute.

I was quarantined for a week—during which I watched a lot of opera, mostly. In-person RSI was canceled, ending my dreams there. I prepped for the semester to start back up again. The only interesting "events" were walks with my family, although some reading and preparations for Next House CP★ began.

April

The semester began again, and I slowly started on things again; after being quarantined for so long, I added a lot of different tasks and side projects I wanted to start getting involved in, and that pent-up energy lasted for some amount of time before petering out again. Little else of importance occurred—I declared my major, 21S (Joint Major in the Humanities and Sciences), went on some hikes in the area, and spent some time in parking lots talking to friends, a tradition which would proceed to repeat itself every two weeks from that point onwards.

The big event of this month was online CP★, where I poured a lot of my energy, from spending plenty of time on Discord to hosting and visiting almost all of the Next House events, which was honestly quite enjoyable. I burned an entire weekend on it, but clearly I must have liked something about it, since I eventually applied to be a REX committee chair.

May

May cleaves pretty cleanly into two halves. The first half was characterized by me doing my best to finish off the semester correctly—the 6.08 final project, the Spanish final project, and the real analysis final assignment each took up vast chunks of time. In the midst of it all, I celebrated my 18th birthday with both local and remote friends, and went through the Next House housing lottery, where I got a single for whenever we next have a normal housing situation.

The second half was a slide back into a sort of restful state, although my physics final briefly interrupted this. I started organizing my many, many projects for the summer, all of which I'm still looking forwards to at this moment, returned to reading more, and just sort of relaxed. I went hiking with a few local MIT friends, and as the month ended began looking and working more and more consistently into all of my summer projects. The last week was particularly hectic—I got a UROP and got pulled into and focused on the murder of George Floyd and its continuing repercussions.

Academics

This semester, I took:

6.08 Introduction to EECS via Interconnected Embedded Systems [PE]
This was a pretty interesting class, full of a large variety of content, from C++ to Python, from pointers to databases, from sensors to screens, and so on and so forth. The core of the class centered around an ESP32 microcontroller, whose capacities increased each week with new sensors and breakout boards and whatnot. On the whole, I really enjoyed it, although I don't think I put quite as much into it as I probably could and/or should have, especially in regards to the final project. The professors and staff for this class were also exceptional; they were very considerate when everything hit, and in general very passionate about their subject.

18.100B Real Analysis [PE]
This was a really satisfying class; the work was definitely hard, and of all the classes this semester this is probably the one I put the most time into. I expected this to be an introductory proofwriting class somewhat, but I think somehow I had already absorbed a lot of proofwriting skills in the past, meaning I was free to attack the content. The teacher was also just very good at explaining things and I enjoyed the lectures, even if I had to get up early to attend them. (I also ended up with over 100% in this class, which I found pretty amusing, but as opposed to the case of 6.042 last semester, I feel like I actually learned a lot.)

21G.703 Spanish III [PE]
Spanish III was pretty fun! A good portion of it was reviewing old concepts, but it definitely took a different approach to teaching the concepts at hand, which helped me get a better grasp on the subject, although I still feel vastly unqualified in the language. There were some more applied portions of the class which really appealed to me; watching and critiquing films in Spanish and writing more extended compositions, in particular. Only speaking Spanish in class was also quite a shift, although it was quite validating to be able to do it, even if I still feel like I am not quite able of speaking fluidly to the extent I want to be. The final project was pretty interesting as well, even if I felt that it wasn't perfect: see the department's press release on it here!

21M.401 Concert Choir [PE]
It was very interesting to be back in a choir after so many years outside of a choir. I'm still building my confidence in regards to singing, but the music this semester (musicals!) combined with the general vibe of the group made it relatively enjoyable, and I'm probably going to stay in the Concert Choir for at least a few semesters yet. It was obviously much harder to keep at it and pay attention after we went home, but hopefully we'll be back to normal in some capacity soon enough.

21W.755 Reading and Writing Short Stories [PE]
This class was a sort of journey. I initially thought I might get booted out of it, but from there I generally used the class time relatively responsibly, writing and writing even when it was difficult to do so. I wrote a first draft of the short story within the first half of the semester, and started a rewrite of the entire story based on some advice from the class's TA before the crisis hit and I found myself unable or unwilling to sacrifice the time each week to keep writing. I think I have the start to something that's at least decent here, but I need to keep putting the work in, and overall that was my one regret with this class. You get out of the class what you put in, and I definitely could've put in quite a bit more to read and write and develop my craft, as it were.

CC.011 Concourse Seminar [PE]
Being obligatory for Concourse students, I wasn't particularly looking forwards to this. However, there were quite a few interesting talks at the beginning of the semester, and much less reading, which I found greatly preferable. This seminar really transformed and flourished at the end of the semester though, when we started it using more as a discussion space for how we were doing and how the quarantine was affecting us, which was really nice and really helped me appreciate all of my fellow students and our professors; the shared struggles were, in some sense, deeply humanizing and made me feel more part of the community than I had before.

CC.802 Physics II [PE]
This class went fairly well; in fact, much better than it needed to go, given that I had decided to take the class on Pass/No Record already. I felt much better about not taking the Advanced Standing Exam for this class than I did about not studying for the Chemistry Advanced Standing Exam adequately; I learned quite a bit of new content or content I hadn't fully understood from self-studying AP Physics C, and on the whole the class was quite enjoyable, even if I'm not planning on doing any physics in the future.

Next semester, I am considering the following classes, with it being likely that I take almost all of them:

6.006 Introduction to Algorithms

This is one of those fundamentally important classes I need to take on my path to a computer science degree of some form, so I have to take it, and I also need the class after it, 18.410 [Design and Analysis of Algorithms], to graduate with my 21S proposal, so might as well take it now. I'm hoping to self-study some of the content this summer, but that's looking less and less likely.

6.009 Fundamentals of Programming

Similarly, this is a fundamental class for computer science majors. I'm hoping this is not particularly difficult, since I have some non-trivial amount of programming experience, and, judging from the testimonials of some friends who have already taken it, it shouldn't be. We'll see though; this being sufficiently easy may be one of the key make-or-break factors for this semester being possible.

18.03 Differential Equations

I still lack a lot of understanding of basic mathematics, and this is one of the topics where I just need to take an intro class as soon as possible. This is also on my 21S proposal, and is a requirement for at least one of the computer science major paths, so I might as well take it. This may be a more unjustified bet, but I am also betting on the math here being at least somewhat approachable, meaning I can spend my high-level mental energy on the following two classes.

18.112 Functions of a Complex Variable

Reasons I'm considering this class: it's the natural next step after real analysis, and the 18.022 [Calculus] professor I had last fall is teaching it, which is kind of exciting. Reasons I probably shouldn't take this class: the workload, and the fact that I don't actually have the linear algebra prerequisite for this class, nor do I have the time to get up to speed this summer. I will waffle on this for a while, but honestly the other question is whether or not this even fits my schedule, which I don't know the answer to yet.

18.701 Algebra I

This seems like a pretty important class in regards to pure mathematics, and honestly I'm just interested in seeing what the content is like, since real analysis seemed much more approachable (or at least, somewhat related to calculus) than the vague discussions of abstract algebra I've happened to overhear. The teacher for this semester is also going to be Poonen, who is fairly legendary, as far as I know, and also the professor in this meme:

In essence, I think that based on all information I have, this will probably be an interesting if not good class to take.

21G.704 Spanish IV

I want to be able to speak this language. Thus, more classes. Spanish IV in particular should allow me to apply for MISTI-Spain, which will provide me an opportunity to practice my Spanish in a "real" environment, although I'm not sure when the program will next be running. I also, for the most part, enjoyed Spanish III, since it was a very small class, and hopefully some of this will be repeated in Spanish IV, although I suspect that the daily homework will probably place a larger burden on me this semester.

21M.401 MIT Concert Choir

Hopefully, we'll be continuing to work on this semester's repertoire whenever we are back on campus. It's an easy class and it keeps me sane, so I'm excited to return to it and to continue to work on my singing!

21W.757 Fiction Workshop

This is the logical next step to Reading and Writing Short Stories, and will require me to actually put in effort which will be examined, meaning that I might be more motivated to perform in this class. Obviously, its efficacy will seriously depend on whether or not we're online next semester, so that is a factor to consider, but on the whole I ought to write more fiction and keep at it, and this class will help with that.

24.900 Introduction to Linguistics

I am interested in linguistics. I also know nothing about linguistics. I need to take a Communication-Intensive [CI], Social Science class at some point. Guess what class fills this niche perfectly? This one! I'm not sure how I'll feel about the papers in this class (all CI's require a certain amount of writing), but hopefully it'll be fine, and in any case at least my writing skills are reasonably up to snuff, as can be attested to by my performance in my freshman fall CI.

Summer Plans

My primary jobs this summer are as the Systems Manager for RSI 2020 and as a UROP on an interdisciplinary project analyzing images of prehistoric artifacts and cave art to see if the geometric and/or symbolic patterns have any behavior similar to that of modern human language. I am excited for both, although I am concerned for the former over the logistical nightmare that is managing students on three continents and for the latter over the fact that I have zero previous experience in image analysis. I imagine I will learn a lot though, and I am getting paid, which is also exciting.

I have a few small side projects which I'm also working on. The ones I most expect to follow through with are the following:

• Reading an organic chemistry textbook with my mother; I think we're about 1/4 of the way in already.
• Teaching an HSSP class on history between 1949 and 1989 based on the lyrics to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" with a close friend from high school.
• Chairing the Next House REX Committee as we prepare for whatever outcome administration chooses for our on-campus status in the fall.
• Finishing up the edX version of 8.03, which I haven't honestly absorbed or memorized too much of, but which will at least give me a glancing idea of the concepts which may be useful in the future.

Other side projects which may or may not actually be done, depending on how well I can manage my time [based on previous experience, not well at all]:

• Working on a small research project that my dad needs done for his labwork.
• Studying the materials from this semester's 6.006 [Introduction to Algorithms] so I can have some amount of a headstart on the material going in, alleviating the load somewhat if possible.
• Writing a variety of ongoing series of blog posts about cleaning my room and honestly, just generally cleaning up the main blog.
• Writing more of my short story and/or my ongoing novel project.
• Continuing to read new and interesting books!

2020 Goals, Reviewed and Amended

Ratings on a -2 to +2 scale.

1. Have an evolving set of goals throughout the year which more closely guide me towards achieving what I want. [0]
   
   I think the specific goals are not really helping me that much and I'm still mostly just moving in a sort of Brownian motion, randomly moving and bumping into/responding to the conditions around me.
   
   
2. Maintain a consistent system for keeping track of events and activities that is not abandoned on a whim in favor of using your brain, which is occasionally forgetful. [+1]
   
   Todoist worked reasonably well first semester, although I honestly think the problem may be just motivating me to actually act on the items on the list than anything else. Events are hard to remember, but moving into the summer I've started using spreadsheets and scheduling, which may end up being more effective.
   
   
3. Get good grades. (There exists leeway in the word ‘good’, obviously—I don’t yet know how hard it is to set <x> as a cutoff, so we’ll have to wait and see.) [0]
   
   Well, so far, so good, since this semester was also on Pass/No Record and I passed all of my classes. I still don't have a good measurement of what 'good' means, but this semester seemed to be fine. I think it's somewhat problematic that this is one of my goals instead of learn the content in your classes but it's not totally ignoble.
   
   
4. Choose to take classes simply because they are interesting, and do your best to not shy away from challenging classes as well. [0]
   
   I suspect that it may be difficult for me to live up to this one. My class selection approach continues to be somewhat focused, at least, on meeting degree requirements, although there are a few classes in the list above which I'm taking solely for interest. I also think that part of it is that even if you are interested in some class, taking it to meet a requirement sort of takes something away from it, and I still need to work my way through my feelings there.
   
   
5. Continue to be involved with music in various ways—pit orchestras, singing, learning to play some additional amount of piano on one’s own time, etc.—find things that are challenging but you do because you enjoy them. [-1]
   
   Singing is happening, although not as consistently at home. Piano was happening, and violin has long since fallen by the wayside. I think if I had any particular task to pick, this could perhaps occur much more consistently, but I just haven't found something that I enjoy enough to keep working on. I ought to play something eventually, but alas.
   
   
6. Take up additional writing projects—complete the NaNoWriMo story, and move on to create new and different forms of writing, whether through the means of your classes or on your own time.  [-1]
   
   So far I have made zero significant progress on the NaNoWriMo story; maybe I'll pick it up again next NaNoWriMo, or just whenever I feel like it. I do need some more writing projects in my life though, and as of yet this goal has not really been acted on, apart from the short story for 21W.755.
   
   
7. Don’t get stuck in doing the same things—try new activities, meet new people, etc. [0]
   
   
   I think I did a few new things in the spring, but honestly I think my friend group has somewhat stabilized and I didn't have too much time to get into new activities before being sent home, where, unsurprisingly, I haven't picked up too much or met too many new people. We'll postpone this goal for when it is actually actionable.
   
   
8. Read 20 books outside of class, possibly following the suggestions of MIT Reads. [+2]
   
   Haven't hit 20 yet, but I finished 9 within the given timeframe (and an additional three recently), making it very likely that I'll meet this goal, even without the help of MIT Reads.
   
   
9. Attempt to maintain some level of fitness, via exercise, consistent sleep, and adequate food consumption. [-2]
   
   I have very much not done this, especially since getting home. *sigh.* I just don't have motivation to exercise (especially with everything on my mind), and I think that wreaks havoc on the other parts of this goal, leading to an overall failure.
   
   
10. Have fun! [0]
    
    I think I did plenty of things, at least in the first half of the semester, solely for the purpose of fun. Nowadays, there's not much opportunity or just cause for fun.

Most Impactful Previously Unexperienced Media

(i.e. musicals, podcasts, music, film, books, etc.)

• Hadestown
• The Band's Visit
• Pachinko [I started this in May, but finished it in June]
• Chico Y Rita
• Spirited Away [I watched this over Zoom, so I should probably watch it again]
• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (book)
• Ben Platt, Sing To Me Instead
• AJR, The Click

Blog Statistics

Between the months of January and May, I kept up the daily writing streak, and including non-standard posts wrote around 96000 words. Based on self-reported data, on average, the happiest month of the year so far was January (take that, seasonal depression), and the least happy month of the year was March (not a surprise).

Similarly, based on time-tracking data (which excludes the back half of March), the month with the highest average hours per day was April (7.45) and the lowest was May (5.24) [I suspect that the lowest is actually March, but I don't have the back half of that month tracked]. Finally, the month with the most average words per daily post was May (773), and the least was January (505). 

Places I Visited: 4 States

1. SD — Unfortunately, this is my current residence.
2. CT — Quiz Bowl @ Yale
3. MN — Flights to and from home.
4. MA — Home!

101 Things To Do Before You Graduate

I feel kind of sad that I won't be able to check off all of the summer activities on this list this summer; it would've been really nice to get some of those out of the way. In any case, here are the items I did second semester. Note that I'm being particularly strict with some definitions (play on an IM sports team, for example—I was on the Next Foosball team, but I didn't get to play in a game). 

1. Go to Toscanini's for ice cream! Yum! (January w/ TrSh, JeLi, and KeQi for LaLi's birthday, #7)
2. Take a stroll through Little Italy in the North End. (February with Think, #14)
3. Collect 25 free T-shirts. (God knows I have too many, #77)
4. Visit the Mapparium in the Mary Barker Eddy Library (March w/ GaSp, #85)

This is kind of a disappointingly small amount, so I suppose I will have to step up my game next semester, if I'm on campus at all. We'll see how it goes.