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A picture of Castle fallNeuschwanstein, Bavaria, probably from the fall. 4kwallpapers

The semester just finished (my last final was this Wednesday, roughly 4 days ago). I think this semester was probably one of my better semesters at ASU. Unsurprisingly, there were a few observations that I feel merit some discussion. I intend the first half of this post to be a rough summary of the semester, and the second half to be a discussion of some more subjective or emotional things that I noticed

Firstly, I should note that I am unsure as to how much of my positive feelings towards this semester are a function of my somewhat awful last semester. After what was likely my first real experience with burnout, I made the choice to take a smaller class load this semester. An image of my class schedule can be found below

I imagine that too much discussion of my schedule and the particulars of my classes may be dreadfully boring, but I probably ought to say a few lines about them. The majority of my schoolwork likely came from CSE 360 and CSE 365, with MAT 472 and (unfortunately) the terrible but nearly-mandatory TCL 323 also contributing measurably. I actually enjoyed CSE 365, a first for a CS class for me. This is the first CS class I have taken in which I felt that I learned some new things. The class was structured as a set of problems (CTFs) around a particular theme or idea, and about two weeks to solve them. There were no exams, just the problems. I found many of these to be quite difficult, especially close to the end of the semester, but it always felt very good to solve and obtain the flag. On the other hand, CSE 360 was an extraordinarily awful experience, with the class content being basically entirely worthless. The big project for this course is the "group" project, which I basically treated as a solo project (in that I wrote 100% of the code for my group, managed the group, and carefully looked over and corrected everyone else's portions of the project). I don't really regret this, but it did add more nonsense to my workload. Thankfully, my group was fairly good and did what I asked of them more or less when I asked for it, and so I didn't have to deal with too much of a headache here. TCL 323 "Latinão Health studies" was an extraordinarily terrible course, with the course content probably being highly meaningless (I wouldn't know) and the course assignments being a complete waste of time. I did however learn a very good lesson from this class: My radiant brilliance led me to believe it would be a wonderful idea to spin a story about being a Kosovar who had encountered many Latinos in their extensive travels around Eastern Europe, and write primarily about these "experiences" in the reflections. Effectively, I was betting on the prof not reading these reflections. This occured until the fourth reflection, which he was was stunned by, retroactively giving me zeroes on the previous three (I am not sure why he left my score on the first one). This was a pretty painful experience and I felt very bad for a while, but eventually wrote him an email apologizing for falsifying my reflections, and was permitted to redo them for a 4/5 score, which led to an A instead of an A+ in the course. I'm less than broken up about this though, given the circumstances. I think this was a good if somewhat consequential way to learn to rein in the jokes in cases where it could hurt me - I am paying a price for it, but not a super huge one.

Unsurprisingly, the time afforded to me by my lighter course load was filled with some other things, primarily preparation for ICPC. I only really began to do coding problems this semester, which put me at somewhat of a disadvantage. I spent quite a lot of time grinding and preparing for this year's ICPC Regional Contest, along with my two teammates, and though this contributed heavily to my soft-burnout, I feel that preparing this intensively helped me to become accustomed to thinking very hard about one or a small number of problems for an extended period of time, and forced me to learn how to try to force myself to come up with ideas, instead of simply leaving the problem for an hour or two and letting my mind process it in the background (which what I had been doing previously). I also spent a lot of time on my own grinding coding problems - I was very much a noob at the start of the semester, and feel that I am now almost certainly within the top 25-50 coders at ASU, potentially higher. Admittedly, this is not very impressive as ASU is generally a very weak school, but I'm glad I was able to improve quickly nonetheless. Despite being nowhere near the strength of my teammates, I hopefully was not entirely useless at the actual contest. Happily, we did qualify for NAC, so the grind is likely to resume next semester (I would include a picture, but I do not wish to post any of other people. Instead, you can find a screenshot of [__] very randomly bragging about our result on our extended family groupchat). Returning to the topic of courses - I do think my current course load is on the heavy end of optimal - I have tried to take something similar, but hopefully slightly easier for next semester.

I also think this semester was very good for my mathematical development. I feel that I have become a much, much stronger problem-solver over the last year, which I am very happy about. I attribute this in large part to becoming much closer this year with some friends who really really enjoy problem solving, and are very good at it. Just by spending time and doing problems with them, I was able to learn quite a lot about certain ideas and general meta-tactics for thinking about tougher problems. I also spent a lot more time than previous semesters solving specific problems on my own (both math and coding) and I feel that this was also obviously highly helpful. While the specific contents and techniques of math and CS problems are obviously different, they are extremely strongly related, and doing either one is very likely to make one stronger at the other as well. I think in this way, participating in ICPC was very helpful for my mathematical problem solving abillties, and not solely in the style of "work with your hands" combinatorics that appears in CP.

In previous semesters, I also participated fairly heavily in quizbowl. This semester, I did not. I felt basically zero desire to, and acted accordingly. I am very much not convinced that quizbowl as a game is very useful in any significant way. I feel as though my time is generally much better spent doing math and CS, and given that free time as a whole was in fairly short supply for me this semester, I don't regret my choice. For the sake of brevity, I will avoid expanding too much on these thoughts here, but my basic stance is that problem-solving is far, far more useful than memorizing a somewhat random set of discrete facts.

It's probably now reached a good point to turn to discussing some of the "more emotional things". I should preface this section by saying that I suspect I have a very poor understanding of my emotions. I do think I tend to be fairly honest with myself, but I only somewhat rarely think about my thoughts or feelings, and usually not very hard, so I suspect there is a high probability that many of the statements I will be making will be either incorrect or highly suspect. For that reason, I'll try to state things in minimal generality.

I will be frequently referring to two different semesters here: for clarity, "this semester" is Fall 2024, the most recently concluded semester. "Last Semester" is Spring 2024, the semester before this one.

I think I experienced a sort of "soft burnout" on a few occasions this semester. I had my first real experience with burnout last semester, which was extremely bad in my opinion. I became totally overwhelmed with my classes and spent virtually every waking minute either doing homework or feeling bad for not doing homework, which I found to be highly unsustainable. I had a variant of that feeling this semester, especially close to the ICPC contest date. Every moment not actively preparing for the contest felt like a moment wasted, and so I felt wholly unable to think about literally anything else. Thankfully, due to my experiences last semester, I was able to identify this before it became a more serious issue, and took a few days off from basically everything in an effort to reset and be in a mentally sound state for the contest, which I found to be effective. There were also a few more points closer to the end of the semester where I felt the same thing. I do not think this strategy is ideal, as disconnecting in this manner is pretty tough to do during the semester. One idea to explore on this front is trying to prevent reaching the stage where this is necessary, and I think a path to doing this is just to play more games with friends more regularly.

I also had a kind of friend-axis-reshifting this semester, which I think I enjoyed. I'll use pseudo-anonymized SDRs to represent friend groups for clarity. My much lower involvement in quizbowl led, logically, to me spending less time with the main friend group I had from that club (r: \( \exists m \in \mathbb{Z} \text{ such that } (B, \dots, z) \subset \{A, \dots, z\}^m \) ). However, somewhat unexpectedly, I ended up becoming a lot closer with some other friends, also from the same club (r: \( \exists m \in \mathbb{Z} \text{ such that } (S^2, \dots, y) (E, \dots, r) \subset \{A, \dots, z. \texttt{SPACE}\}^m\)) which was definitely enjoyable, and helped keep me sane. I also of course am still very good friends with my core high-school friendgroup (r: omitted) which I am very glad for.

I think I also lost the joy of doing problems for a little bit this semester. My somewhat singular focus on improving placed me in a state where not only would I feel bad if I failed to solve a problem, I would feel just as bad if I succeeded on account of taking longer than I ought to. Obviously, this is not a very healthy mindset, and though it did probably inspire some amount of improvement, a more neutral outlook that retained the joy of problem-solving for its own sake could likely have resulted in a larger amount of improvement in a more sustainable and enjoyable fashion. I think in the future, it may be wise to try to keep in mind that at a fundamental level, math is supposed to be fun. If I continue to honestly attempt and hopefully solve problems that interest me, I do think I will continue to improve, and will hopefully be able to have a better time while doing so.

Since my goals this semester were so concrete, I found that I was not very able to shake the (I think, destructive) belief that any time not spent furthering those goals was time wasted. In the past 2-3 weeks of the semester, probably as a sort of rebellion against/escape from this idea, I have racked up roughly 50 hours in Skyrim (which, by the way, is excellent). Before the Putnam, I found that this was somewhat effective, but the back of my mind was still occupied by thoughts about how I should be doing problems and preparing for the contest. Still, I think forcing myself to do something that was engaging but relatively brainless was a good "de-stressing" method. It's probably worth thinking a little harder about such ideas in the future (but whether I will remains to be seen).