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The Széchenyi Chain Bridge ("Széchenyi lánchíd"). A local legend supposedly holds that the liosn do not have tongues, but they apparently do, just not visible from the outside.Willfredor, Wikimedia Commons

As I write this, I'm sitting in the Ferenc Liszt international Airport of Budapest, Hungary, having just concluded a session of feeling very emotional. The BSM program came to end around 3-4 days ago (depending on how you do your counting) and over the last few days, the friends I've made here have been slowly leaving the country to head back to their respective homes and universities. Now it's my turn to do the same.

Firstly, let me say that the program was completely an awesome experience. Budapest is an incredible city, with an unbounded quantity of things to see and do, and we were living right in its beating heart. It's heavily populated and alive at all hours of day and night, but never felt unsafe or overcrowded. The program was netiher too big nor too small, at around 50 people, and I was lucky enough to find a great group of friends who were willing to put up iwht my nonsense, and (occasionally) even be mildly entertained by it.

It sort of really sucks. Virtually everyone in the program was awesome, but but more or less just as I felt that I had made a great group of friends and really bonded with the great folks I met here, the program ended, and I probably won't be seeing very much of them again. We're all going to be quite far from one another, and while I think it is likely that many of us will meet each other at least once more, the probability we stay friends our that our relationships develop or become closer is, I estimate, rather low.

The situation here feels like basically the same thing as the end of Outer Wilds - it's kind of a "be happy that it happened, rather than sad that it's over" type beat. In analogy with the game, the universe has ended, but it was always going to eventually, and the time for it has come when the time for it was to come. Of course, it is sad that this had to happen, but it did, and rather than feeling sad and bad that the inevitable has inevitably come to pass, we would be wiser to be happy that the good things occured at all. Unfortunately, this is much harder in practie than theory

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Ok, I am now on the plane and feeling far less sappy than I was previously, so let me now talk about the academics, which unlike the above nonsense, may actually be of interest to more than 1 person. I personally took CO@ with Sali, C&P with Tamas Keleti, DML with Zsamboki, and RES with Tibor Jordan. I typically referred to Keleti as "Tom Eastern", or the lunatic's innovation of "skeleti". Tibor Jordan I usually referred to as dr.Michael Jordan or later (since this is inconveniently long to type) just MJ. I found that all the classes were somewhat pseudo, with the possible exception of C&P.

The first half or so of CO2 was extraordinarily uninteresting, basically it was a hypergraph zoo, and then some easy Ramsey theory and probabilistic GT. However, at some point, the class took a hard right turn and became suddenly extremely cool, focusing on hard theorems proved by non combinatorial methods (Linear Algebra topology, etc), which I found super cool. C&P is kind of a weird course, being effectively a problem-solving focused naive set theory course, building up to a proof of Banach Tarski. I had the misfortune of having taken set the semester before, which sort of made a great number of the lectures useless. In addition, having a reasonably strong mathematical background, I already knew virtually all of the lecture content for the class. Since I was generally able to solve all the problems (with a few exceptions!) and I'm not someone who really enjoys presenting, I didn't find much value in going to class, and basically all but stopped going about halfway through the semester. However, the psets were reasonably interesting nonetheless. DML was a largely unremarkable intro to ML course - I believe we tread a lot more ground than most full semester intro ML courses at most unis (or at least my uni) do, but it wasn't a tough course in any way in my opinion. RES with Jordan was quite interesting - while I don't regret taking it, I really found that I did not care much abotu the problems that he wanted us to think about, and this made it hard to find motivation to work hard on them. We did get some not-so-remarkable results in the end, but I personally do not feel I did anything nontrvial (and I got an A, instead of an A+). I could definitely have worked much harder than I did, and we would probably have had quite a bit more to show had I done that, but I don't really regret not doing so, as again,the problems were just not really the types of problems that really interest me (lots of ad-hoc tool-free structural arguments which amount more to case bashing than anyything else). STill, I liked my group, and we had a good time complaining about MJ's constant seeming disappointment (at least for the first half of the semester).

Let us now return to nonsense. I think this is probably the best and most enjoyable semester I have ever had; I think it is probably the case that BSM consitutes the two best months of my life thus far. I think my experience here will inform some decisions as to how I conduct my last year back at my uni. I intend to spned far more time in other people's apartments, on campus, in cafes, etc, and far less in my own. One of the key reasons I had such a better time here than I have had at ASU is that here, I lived very close to my friends, such that going over to their apartment or meeting them somewhere could be easily done on a whim (takes around 5 minutes instead of 20). I certanly won't be able to move closer to my home uni, but I think for the next year, I must buy a bike in order to greatly reduce the transit time, so that I'm more free to do things on a whim.