lessons learned this summer by Nisha D. '21

my summer is coming to an end. i think shuli mentioned this in a previous blog post: the days go by slowly but the weeks speed by. here are some things that i’ve taken away from this summer. these things aren’t from one particular category of my thoughts – they are very random and i’ll be impressed if you can catch a single thread of coherence running through them.

• sometimes it’s fine to take a weekend off and not be “productive”. feeling guilty about not being productive isn’t healthy and is probably an instinct instilled by our capitalistic society
• don’t run without stretching. i got shin splits within a week
• relatedly, chug water after you run because the LA air is dry and you’ll wake up the next morning with a sore throat if you don’t
• waking up at 7:15 is too early, but 8 is too late. 7:45 usually does the trick
• setting one alarm never works
• Lyft is way cheaper than Uber late at night
• boba with 25% sugar tastes just as good as regular boba
• i want to be a designer, not a coder.
• there are very few women in the game industry and this is still a huge barrier to entry into the industry in the year of our lord 2019
• eating the same thing for lunch and dinner every day does, in fact, get boring
• dumb, impromptu decisions are sometimes really fun but sometimes aren’t actually very fun at all
• cloud’s up air in super smash ultimate is really good, and his recovery sucks ass
• getting good at 2D platformers requires practice
• the sims is more addictive than i remember it being
• eating snacks does positively correlate to gaining weight
• weight isn’t actually that easy to lose
• getting into routines is hard
• falling out of routines is also hard
• my body really has aged and no longer can function on less than seven hours of sleep
• working 9-6 is exhausting
• imposter syndrome is a thing in the real world, not just at MIT
• having a standing desk is nice, but i can either stand or get work done
• playing educational videos in the background is a good way to stop yourself from using your phone at work
• having no social life has its ups and down
• clothes take 24 hours to air dry to my satisfaction
• out of all the cities i’ve lived in so far, i think boston is still my favorite
• i want to live somewhere that’s not boston. i want to get out of boston.
• living in LA without a car sucks
• LA is too flat for my taste. i feel exposed
• california is a beautiful state
• i have a strong fear of having to decide what i want to do after college
• i want to work in the game industry, but not as a programmer
• drivers in LA don’t know how to use their blinkers
• i want to take a roadtrip around the united states
• the learning curve on blender is too damn high
• sometimes its easier to write code than to learn a software
• sometimes writing code is fun
• code is a tool but not the be all end all