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June 24, 2007 

Endings

I was never good at saying goodbyes. I have now completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Science from RIT after five long years of hard work, co-ops, and fun. And yet, I know that life will still go on. I had this same experience when some of my friends graduated before me. I had this same feeling right before I moved to Maryland. I had this feeling before I left Maryland to move back to Rochester. Still, saying goodbye never gets any easier.

I suppose it’s a good thing to reflect on the things since I was a freshman in college and see how I’ve progressed. I know that I will have plenty of pictures to remind me of all the memories and experiences I’ve had. I’ve become a little smarter. I’ve learned new things, good things, bad things, and different things. I’ve become slightly more fit. I’ve become a greater person than I was when I graduated high school, but it never really feels any different.

The epic feeling dissipated quickly after my ceremony in much the same way it did after my high school graduation. Everything passes so quickly and there is never a good chance to let it soak in. I received one of my project grades only fifteen minutes after my ceremony ended from a professor in my department who was at the ceremony. I can’t imagine what faculty feel, but I would bet it has become a very common occurrence for them.

I can’t find the right words to convey what I want. To sum up my entire college experience in a few mere paragraphs just feels too cheap to do it justice. You can’t capture that sense in recount the same way you experience life live in reality. A casual drive around campus makes me a lot more emotional than sitting here in my apartment trying to let go. All the preparation in the world can never prepare you for the reality of life. The books my mom bought me about college after I graduated from high school did not help me much at all. A lot of life I had to take as it came along and learn from it.

It was all the people that helped me grow into who I am now. Going to college was vastly different than going to high school. There were so many people from different backgrounds, and I managed to carve out my niche and find a good group of people that I call my friends. Even the people in passing, ones I never got to know very well, from jobs, classes, or clubs, contributed to the madness of college whether that madness was fun, laughter, anger, or sadness.

At the end, it never feels like I did enough. It never feels like I tried hard enough. I could have done more. I could have done better. But life will always have more time for me to make up for everything I didn’t do. I do not expect to see some people for a long time just like I didn’t expect to see a lot of my high school class for a while. Letting go is hard to do, but it doesn’t mean I have to forget. My life doesn’t have to end here at graduation. It’s just a period of transition. And life is nothing but a neverending, continuous period of transition.

June 29, 2006 

What It Is Like To Be Old

Sometime during May 2006, I randomly decided to watch Yu-Gi-Oh. I developed some interest in it my late senior year in high school and kept regular track of it into my second year of college. By that time, I stopped watching it since it had gotten so repetitive and drawn-out. Anyway, as I was waiting for Yu-Gi-Oh to come on, I was flipping through the various Saturday morning cartoons. Most of them seemed drab and unentertaining to me. Then I started thinking about all the cartoons I had watched during my childhood and even late into my adolescent years. The amount of cartoons I had watched steadily decreased the older I became. I compared these new cartoons to the ones in my past viewing experience and deemed my past better than the present.

My mind wandered to other topics such as music. Songs that were popular in 1996 (and some of which I still like listen to occasionally) are no longer played on the radio (except for very rare instances). That really made me feel old. 10 years ago I was in the sixth grade and was 12 years old. I thought about the video games I used to play and compared them to today’s games. It’s hard for me to evaluate today’s games by today’s “standards” since they are so different now. It’s easy to see the evolution that has taken place, but I find it difficult to keep up with it. As a result, I dismiss mostly every game and gamer child (anyone born in the 1990′s and later) as “bad” since they are nothing like the “old days” of my youth.

I am only 21 years old. I am still young in some respects, but just thinking about that viewpoint made me feel so old. I really understood what the generation gap was and what it felt like to be “old” and how today’s current generation is so different. I hope in time, they will come to realize the same thing. I personally have never thought that I would reach such a conclusion, but I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. It is our past (particularly our younger years) that are so formative and developmental in who we are today. Once that ground foundation is set, breaking apart and starting over is a really hard thing to do. I guess this is all part of becoming an adult.

April 14, 2006 

Being a Working Student at a University

Technically, I am still a student at RIT, but while I’m here in Maryland, I am a full-time hourly-paid employee for the University of Maryland. I haven’t spent as much time here as I have at RIT, so campus can still feel alien to me even at the locations I frequent like the gym and the student union. That’s because I don’t go to school here. Working at UMD hasn’t fostered the same kind of personal growth that I would normally get if I were attending school here as a full-time undergrad.

However, I have managed to still fit in and adjust easily. Despite my feelings of being disconnected from the student body here, I haven’t completely shaken off my status as a student. I currently live off-campus with two other guys who are students at the University of Maryland. I have a friend (that I met at RIT) here in graduate school, and I’ve hung out with him and a bunch of his friends. It’s nice to just be in that carefree atmosphere and have a good time. My co-workers are also young too, and fitting in with them has been easy ever since I arrived here.

I haven’t let go of my student stature, but I haven’t fully become a member of the working class yet. I guess I’m in a transitional state right now, but haven’t fully detached or attached to either side. I’m not sure what my life would have been like had I taken another job at some corporation. I don’t think I would experience the same environment or interact with the kind of people I currently do. The way I imagine it, I think my life might have been a lot less interesting.

April 7, 2006 

Life During Co-op

As part of the Computer Science program at RIT, students are required to complete four quarters (a quarter is 3 months long) of full-time work experience relevant to the field of Computer Science. I started my co-op at the beginning of December and am continuing it until the end of May. I am working at the University of Maryland for Michael Cummings in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology which is part of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Ever since I started my job at UMD, I have found life to be very different than I have normally been accustomed to during college.

One of the biggest differences is that the amount of free time you have decreases a lot. In school, class schedules vary day to day, but there is always time to do something. The time I spent in class is much less than the time I spend at work. Granted that part of my time outside of class is doing work for the class, there was always leisure time to go out for a few hours and hang out with friends. Invariably, time is the fundamental element that structure how I live in Maryland.

I spent about 8 hours at work from the morning until early evening. Part of this time is spent preparing for my day at work (i.e. trying to wake up to a conscious state so I can drive there). At the end of the day, I don’t necessarily have the same “freedom” that I would normally feel getting out of class or when the school day is over. There is usually something “important” I have to do when I come home. Whether it’s paying bills, taking care of chores, running errands, making my dinner, or finishing up some work at home, such tasks rank higher on the list of priorities. Once I take care of everything I need to, I either watch TV or muck around on the Internet. I don’t spend as much time doing so as I used to in college. Sometimes I get wiped out at work and all I want do is sleep. Other times, if I want to go out and do something, it’s usually too late or near to closing time to make the trip worthwhile (which is what weekends are for now).

Regardless of the time I spend (or waste depending on how you look at it), I’m still enjoying it fully. There were more things about working in Maryland that I was going to discuss, but I’m saving them for later. I’ve already spent enough time writing this post as is.

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