Welcome to my first post! I’m not one to write publicly about personal experiences, but after looking at my friend’s blog (hi gavin), I’ve started to see the value in documenting my journey through my 20s. I’ve come to realise that life is short and my time here limited, so I’ve decided to give it a shot aswell. So here’s how my 6th term at SUTD went.

Work

Probably my best term to date. I felt like I was in a groove most of the term, and I managed to stay relatively on top of things inspite of the heavy mods that I took. Off the top of my head, here are some of things I learnt/read about:

• Programming in C and C++
• How SQL queries work under the hood (its actually insanely complicated)
• Audio engineering and how sound works
• How to lead projects
• Computer graphic algorithms

For my SUTD peeps here are the mods I took:

1. 50.017 Graphics and Visualisation
2. 50.043 Database Systems
3. 50.051 Programming Language Concepts

Quite a heavy combination imo, but I think i did decently given the effort I put in. This term I worked on a bunch of really cool projects, especially for 50.051, so much so that I’ve written an article about what we did.

Looking back, I think I bitched and whined a lot of about the amount of work I had to do, but now that’s it’s all water under the bridge I feel like I’ve really gained a deeper understanding into computer science and programming as a whole. There’s alot that’s still magic to me (@LLMs and machine learning lol), but I really feel with each mod I take, I peer deeper under the hood, and I realise that everything is a result of decades and decades of thoughtful planning, research and engineering by really smart people. And part of me is excited to see what contributions I will make to this rich ecosystem of knowledge (i hope).

I’m also more comfortable leading projects now, given that I put in a lot of thought behind the planning of my 50.051 project (and also reflecting on my previous internship at Switcheo, but that’s for another post)

Music

The past few months, most of the members of my other bands were on holiday, but I managed to scrape together a couple of good friends to form Nada Wants Cake. Most of the bands I’ve joined over the years, I’ve joined as an additional member, so it was super fun putting the band together with my friends; especially being able to be open with my thoughts and experiment new things with them.

We also signed up for the annual SUTD performance, Springheads, which was really fun too. Outside of the actual performance (honestly the crowd this year was mid), the whole process of recording, shooting promo vids and photos, and practice sessions was so fun.

Not forgetting the performance itself, it was honestly super fun playing on stage with a full set-up and crowd. Here’s was our setlist:

1. Sex - 1975
2. Some - Steve Lacy
3. Forget You - Ceelo Green
4. Beggin - Maneskin
5. R u mine - Arctic Monkeys

Also here’s the only picture of the stage that has all of us in frame lol I was on keys for this song.

Friends

I think I’m quite a privileged person, and sometimes I have a tendency to take things for granted. But an aspect of my life I’m always constantly thankful for is how often I’m surrounded by people that I love, especially in school.

I cannot even to begin to imagine how horrible school would be without the presence of my friends, and I’m deeply aware of how lucky am to have made so many friendships in school. If only the exchange boys were in school (the cardboard cutouts LOL) then this term would have been literally perfect.

Special mention to my 3 friends, whom I spent most of the term with lol, I literally saw these people almost every day for 3 months. I’m actually glad I didn’t go on exchange and I managed to a full term with them before they graduated, definitely wouldn’t have been a great term without them.

Fitness

Felt really locked in through most of the term, the daily gym sessions with Neville and Sanat really kept me in a rhythm. I’ve always struggled with doing too much or doing too little when it comes to the gym, but I really felt like I’ve found a sustainable intensity that I can probably keep up for at least the next decade.

I’m actually currently sick at the time of writing this, but I’m itching to get back into the grind and make more progress.

Summary

I think it’s been a pretty fruitful term. There are definitely things I could have done better, could have been more consistent for some mods, and managed my time better for some projects, and I’m definitely looking to improve the next two terms.

Overall, I’m pretty grateful that I have the opportunity to learn what works for me and fine tune my life in a relatively low stakes environment like university. I’m especially glad I still have 2 more terms to figure things out and really work on myself before I go out to the real work as a proper adult lol.