update, Sep 13, 2025

a pseudoupdate

Here is a list of things that I need to do:

• School (obviously), which includes staying caught up on lectures, psets, and general making sure I understand stuff.
  • 18.725 Algebraic Geometry I - this is going to be my main focus this semester. No matter what, I have to understand everything thoroughly. That's the goal I'm setting for myself. I'm already struggling bc I just fucking hate classical AG it's so confusing, and I've been introduced three different definitions for the sheaf on varieties (and the prof confused himself over the definition that he gave) and I don't know which one to use. Anyways, it's all going to be okay once we move off this godforsaken chapter.
  • 18.425/6.5620 Foundations of Cryptography - omg I realized I don't want to do TCS sitting in one of the lectures. I was considering dropping it but I don't know what to take instead that's not too hard/time-consuming/not interesting. It's okay, it's 5 psets and 1 midterm total, so I can just mentally drop the class but still make it through? I really don't know why I'm taking this class sigh.
  • 18.600 Intro Probability - I realized that I needed to be a more well-rounded math major and confront one of my long-standing fears: probability and combinatorics. I've always been ass at counting. I've been told that it's a way of thinking that you get used to, so here I am getting used to it. We'll see how that goes. It's a pretty introductory class so the lectures go really really slow (since a lot of cs majors take it), but I think the psets are nontrivial.
  • 21M.150 Accelerated Music Theory - music theory for people who know how to read the staff basically. It's honestly a really fun class. We have to learn some piano so that's pretty cool. This is a half-semester class, and I'll be taking 21M.139 intro to arranging in the second half just so I can have a full semester of music for my music concentration/minor potentially.
  • 21W.755 Reading and Writing Short Stories - I'm forcing myself to take more HASS classes because I a) won't graduate if I don't and b) one can always learn more math on your own. One can only learn writing and have your writing be critiqued in college. The professor's intense but he's a nice guy and he just told everyone we'd get an A if we don't piss him off but we're still probably gonna get C's on our short stories ("This is an intro class so I won't be grading based on talent"). I'll post my short story once I've written it here.
  • Wind ensemble AND I'm doing private lessons this year. Ditto above but with music. I don't want to lose my clarinet abilities (which I have been) but I don't know. Sigh.
• I picked up a research project so I gotta work on that now. It'll be cool though, because it's sort of related to what I want to research (algebraic geometry) but not really because I'm studying an object that arises when you're doing more complicated work. "It's too much to explain exactly how we get this" my mentor told me, "but I don't want you to have no background at all, so let's start with some representation theory" and so I'm going to look at the representation ring of PGL_n
• Grading for algorithms.
• I'm gonna be teaching / leading OH for calc AB for high schoolers in the area?
• various clubs, but don't worry, I've cut down on these from last year This concludes the recurring commitments from school. There are still plenty of things I need to do outside of school:
• Finish writing my REU paper
• Apply to tech jobs, interview prep like leetcode and whatever, work on projects?? though I probably won't be doing that lmao
• Writing Which isn't a lot of things, but they're pretty important to get done. And that's my issue: I have this priority matrix, and school is usually pretty high (because there are consequences for not getting things done) and so I end up working on that. Then, all these things that are as important but don't yield immediate negative consequences don't get done. For example, I like REALLY need to work on my paper and get that done ASAP, but I fill up my time on school and other bullshit.

I know what I should do (set aside time to work on these things) but that's just hard to do in general. I've been creating a to-do list for each day, but I tend to put way too many things on it and so the lesser priority items don't get done. Maybe I should start time-blocking? I'm not completely sure.

Anyways, that's life lately. I gotta go work on my psets but this was a nice detour (and hopefully it happens more).