Episode 31 - Back at UCLA 🧸
It's like the third Lord of the Rings movie title up in here 💪
And we are back! After a crazy first couple of weeks back here in SoCal, the blog is back in business.
I’ve thought long and hard about how to continue chronicling my adventures here in a way that is informative and fun, but also not a huge drain on my time.
Those Parisian posts took hours and hours to write, you’d be surprised. On average, I think each blog post took me 5 hours to write.
Let me tell you, I don’t have that kind of time anymore.
I find myself being so happy that I wrote so much abroad, and looking back now, I’ve realized it boils down to 4 main reasons:
My writing, and my thinking process as well, became much stronger and more refined as I reflected and looked back on each and every day.
It was a great way to stay in touch with family and friends back home in the US.
It served as an amazing chronicle of my experiences abroad and is something I will look back on for years and decades to come. I love the idea of my kids, and even my grandkids, reading about my adventures far off in the future.
I learned more about what made each day so beautiful. As I wrote in my study abroad reflection, “I found the wonder of each day came from a combination of many, tiny, often forgotten parts and pieces that combined to make something truly special.” This is something I truly realized and learned to appreciate after many months in Paris.
I want to continue this blog for the same reasons — to continue refining my thinking, stay in touch with my European friends, and chronicle my adventures back at UCLA. I’ve found it’s also very helpful to reflect back on the experiences I have here, as we do still continue to forget the little exciting things that happen as they pass along. However, I’ve been able to share those little exciting experiences with close friends and family, maintaining that desire and ability to share about my day.
These life updates and adventure chronicles will look a tad different, as it won’t be literally me just writing about the day-to-day happenings of my life. I figured I’d rather just focus on a few different areas of my life, and go in-depth about what happening there.
And while these posts will be less frequent than they were abroad (every few weeks, rather than every few days), I hope they are as fun and interesting to read as before.
So with that being said, shall we get started?
I’m not really sure where to start, so we might as well start with housing, since that was quite the catastrophic disaster when I was first getting started in Paris.
Lol. Aubervillers was quite the adventure now, wasn’t it?
Fortunately, the Paris experience made me much more proactive about my housing situation in the future, so I secured housing through UCLA in the dorms (called The Hill, since the dorm complex where ~15,000 students is built on a massive hill) and was ready to move in as soon as I got back from France.
I got assigned two random freshman roommates in Delta Terrace, and I was living with them for the first 10 days back at UCLA. However, one of their friends lived in a larger room in Sproul Landing with a third and fourth year and wanted to switch into my room, so we made the switch and I ended up in Sproul Landing after all.
Which is right above BPlate (BruinPlate), my favorite dining hall in existence. Hooray! I go there literally every day for breakfast and lunch, what a treat.
Let me tell you, those 10 days living with the 2 freshmen (Jacob and Eli) was quite the interesting experience. Both of them were music majors, Eli is a world-class jazz saxophonist, and Jacob is taking an ethnomusicology class about Armenian woodwinds.
Which meant that I would come home from a long day of class, studying, and socializing, tired as fuck, just to have Jacob whip out his duduk (an Armenian instrument) and start seducing me with his music. Sometimes I wonder if my life is actually real.
A random side note, but my bed was also rickety and creaky as fuck, so every single time I’d roll over or even move, it sounded like the entire bunk bed was about the collapse.
Go Bruins!
My favorite memory of Jacob was on National Milk Day, January 11th, when I told him, “Jacob, did you know that if you combine whole milk with 2% milk, you get 102% milk?”. He responds with, “Are you stupid? Whole milk is 3% milk.”
He then looks off into the distance and out loud wonders: “Well if whole milk is 3% milk, then what’s the other 97%?”
What an amazing time!
Jacob was a great roommate, and I do sometimes miss the strange but insightful conversations we had in the short time we lived together. The freshman energy was insane in that man. He will accomplish great things, I’m sure.
Now, I’m living with Anthony and Liam, both of whom study economics (like me) in Sproul Landing. Liam is a funny chap who’s lived all over Asia, and Anthony is an OC man who’s quiet but loves debating and chatting with me. We three have had a crazy variety of conversations in that room, ranging from politics, law, religion, history, and war. I have really enjoyed living in that room so far.
We also take the piss out of each other all the time, as Joe would say.
Plus, it’s way more spacious than the room I was in in Delta Terrace. Score!
I also put a bunch of quotes on the ceiling so that when I wake up, they’re the first things I see. Some favorites include “Why would I want to win anything other than a beautiful game?”, “I laugh like a cornered villain who knows his escape. I will succeed because I must”, and “Another day, another slay.”
Thanks for that last one, Emma!
I also have brought back my amazing Dell monitor to do my CS homework, and have been 3D printing a bunch of things for free at the Makerspace in the engineering department. One of the things I printed was a stand for my monitor (so that when I open my laptop, the top of my laptop is below the bottom of the monitor), and it’s a cat leg stand! So so exciting!
I also have been printing a lot of Rocktopuses (Rocktopi?), which is literally an octopus with Dwayne Johnson’s head on top. Sick.
The fact that you can print any object is magic to me. I was talking to the MechE students running the makerspace and they said they bought one printer, that then printed all the other printers.
Wtf. That is so cool!
I might start selling them on Bruinwalk, we’ll see.
Of course, I’m at UCLA to get a degree, so I think it’s important to mention my academic life, too.
First and foremost, my classes:
Econ 103, Econometrics
Econ 106I, Organization of Firms
Cs M146, Machine Learning
Being completely honest with you, I don’t attend lecture for either of my econ classes and only go to the lectures for CS. The econ professors have the classic UCLA curse of being not the best lecturers but having really good lecture slides, which doesn’t particularly encourage class attendance.
Which isn’t mandatory, by the way!
I do attend the discussion section for my 106I class, though, since we do Harvard Business School case studies that are really really interesting and moderated by industry professionals the professor has connections with. One of the cases was moderated by the woman in charge of all YouTube TV ads in North America, and another by the manager director of the largest bond trading company in the US (who I’m getting lunch with this week!).
Crazy, innit?
UCLA is pretty cracked sometimes.
Ok, all the time.
Classes are going well, with good grades and smooth sailing in all of them. We already started enrolling in classes for next quarter, which is a little crazy to think about.
My machine learning class is definitely the hardest class I’m taking this quarter, and I attend every class and lecture and take detailed notes. The quality and mental power needed for CS classes are on a completely different level than the economics courses.
Like it’s not even close.
The exams are conceptual, higher-order thinking material, and the problem sets are Python coding machine-learning exercises.
For which I bought ChatGPT-4 to help me with.
My reasoning was:
I don’t want to be a machine learning engineer or a SWE, since I enjoy talking to people and don’t want to sit and look at a computer screen all day (I’m working a consulting internship this summer, so we’ll see how that goes lol).
I could use ChatGPT-4 and finish the homework in 15 hours, fully understanding the higher-level decisions behind the code implementation but not necessarily being 100% confident with the nitty-gritty details. The $20/month is irrelevant to me, as I make that in an hour giving a tour (and I give plenty of those a week).
I could learn the Python coding myself, which would take 45 hours per problem set, take a huge toll on my mental health, and confine me to my room for days at a time as I experience hair loss due to severe frustration and stress (and me pulling out my hair).
Option 2, please!
So that has been going well.
Honestly, academically, I’m chillin'. My mind? A pure academic weapon, constantly sharpened by the rigor of UCLA.
On a different note, I got my Sciences Po grades back this week, with straight A-’s and 1 A! I barely studied in Paris, so I was very happy with those results. Hooray!
And my history professor, the one I bantered with all the time and was his American punching bag? This was his class comment for me:
Frequent and valuable contributions to class discussions - should be careful, however; more traditional teachers in France might have frowned on the bantering! Good written work, demonstrating solid analytical skills.
It seems that I made quite the impression.
Being back at UCLA has also meant that I am back to having my wonderful bike, and with it, the opportunity to bike around LA on my beloved roads (namely, Benedict Canyon and Mulholland Drive, wow, what amazing roads!). I also finally joined the triathlon team at UCLA, since my friend Ariv had been encouraging me to join all of last year and I wanted to have a more family, team vibe around biking that I missed on the cycling team.
On the cycling team, I felt it was more of just a collection of people who liked biking and sometimes went together.
Very much not a team spirit.
In the first two weeks of being on the triathlon team, I already felt closer to my teammates than I did after 2 years of being on the cycling team.
Crazy!
The triathlon team has been very very fun so far, and I already competed in a race! We went down to San Diego two weekends ago for the annual Tritonman race, which actually turned out to be a duathlon of a run, bike, run due to hazardous water conditions.
Nice!
I finished fourth on the entire UCLA team and paced really well through the entire race, being completely exhausted and spent right at the end.
And I have to say, it was super super satisfying to pass everyone on the bike ride.
We stayed at the house of one of my teammates, and it was a great time chatting with her parents, bantering with my teammates, sleeping on the couch covered with warm blankets, and catching and then petting their very, very fluffy cat.
I love cats!
Biking and running around UCLA has been a blast.
I also play IM soccer with Lucas, my roommate last year, and our team is absolutely cracked. I think we’re going to win all of Mens A this year. Like the chemistry is insane, we are all so good, and the defense is extraordinarily strong (with me at the back, I’m tremendously modest). I also play IM basketball, though we’re not very good and I’m just there to hoop and have fun.
Last but not least, I’m playing IM dodgeball with the tour guides on our team called the t0urnadoes, and my back is sore after each game from carrying most of the team. We just won our first game of playoffs yesterday, and our next round of playoffs should be next week!
Somehow, I find myself to be an athletic weapon as well.
Coming back to UCLA after being abroad, I decided I wanted to be much more intentional with cultivating strong relationships and friendships back here in the US. Abroad I learned that happiness and good times come not necessarily from doing great things in great places, but by doing them with great people. That was the focus, especially after such an amazing time in Paris with the Paree gang (and in particular, Joe and Emma on that AMAZING Interrailing trip!).
So that’s what I’ve done. The first few weeks back were me having 1-2 hour long conversations with old friends, catching up and debriefing about the past 7 months (I kinda fell off the face of the Earth with UCLA friends and only really kept up with my family regularly while I was abroad).
I’ve gone on hikes, had so many deep conversations with folks, and gone on many a fun adventure back. Ariv, Audrey, Sanketh, Will, Aryaman, Micah, Cän, Akshat, Federico, Giannis, Liam, Anthony, Max, the Tri Team folks, Timofey, Sierra, and so many more have shaped my experience being back in such a positive way. Y’all have made the transition back to being a UCLA student and navigating the serious and rather unexpected reverse culture shock, that much easier.
I thank you all for that.
I also can’t forget to mention campus tours, which is the single most defining experience of my UCLA undergrad career. I spend dozens of hours with tour guides each week, in the office, on tours, in meetings, hanging out on campus, and so much more. We had our tour guide retreat this weekend, which was so wholesome, fun, and exciting, and I have loved meeting and mentoring the new hires in tours as an old hire this year.
And yes, campus tours is very much a campus cult. I didn’t realize how much we party until I joined the program, but we drink enough each quarter cumulatively to give alcohol poisoning to a small army.
Don’t worry Mama, I drink responsibly every time!
I’ve also really enjoyed adopting a more mentorship role in The Bruin Group, my student consulting club here at UCLA. I gave a talk earlier in the quarter about my professional and personal journey at UCLA to all the new recruits from this quarter (I love recruitment so so much!), and now they’ve all been reaching out to me for dinners and lunches so that I can be their mentor. It is all so exciting!
With one newbie in particular, Jason, I’ve been taking him under my wing and giving him conversation and public speaking tips, which has been helping him meet more people and become more comfortable and interacting with strangers.
I’m so proud of him.
Regarding friendships and relationships, the last thing to mention is that I got a girlfriend this quarter.
Me! Cuffed!! HOW CRAZY!!!
It has been so wonderful, wow.
Let’s backtrack real quick.
I came into this quarter with the mentality and readiness to start dating someone again. I had been single since December of my sophomore year, had an entire year to focus on myself and grow, traveled and worked in Chicago, Paris, and all over Europe, and found myself in the position of having my shit together at UCLA.
Namely, I had my professional life well-wrapped up, surrounded myself with rewarding and supportive friendships, am in very good shape, and am doing well academically — basically, as my friend Cän and I discussed, “all I’m missing from my life is a Mrs.”
So, I set out at the beginning of this quarter to be more proactive about going on dates and meeting potential partners. I went on dates with a number of different people, which was something I had never really done before (spare the jokes, please). I learned and figured out more about what I was looking for in both a relationship and a partner.
And then I met Brooke.
If I’m being honest, meeting her was almost as life-changing as meeting Joe in Paris was.
Which if y’all know Joe and my experiences with him, is quite possibly the best compliment I could ever give someone.
Brooke was the staff lead on a backpacking trip that I went to Santa Barbara with, and I remember thinking that she was cute and adventurous on that trip.
But she was the staff lead, so I wasn’t gonna make a move since that would be super awkward; plus, there were plenty of awesome people that I met and hung out with on that trip.
I myself applied to backpacking staff, so I was texting her through the week after the trip to ask for tips and advice about my upcoming staff interview for the backpacking club.
We got dinner the following Friday night, pregamed for our respective parties after the dinner together, really really hit it off, then spent probably a collective 15 hours over the course of the weekend as we donated blood together, hung out, studied, and chilled a bunch.
I might also add that she is the most adventurous and outdoorsy person I have ever met in my entire life, even more so than me.
That probably says more than any other sentence I can imagine (excluding the Joe one).
Monday morning, I woke up, ate breakfast, bought flowers at Trader Joe’s (what a great flower selection they have, by the way), walked to her apartment, asked her to be my girlfriend, and she said yes!
And the rest is history. We’ve hung out a ton since then, and I’m so so excited to see what the future holds with her. :)
So there we have it!
My time back at UCLA so far has been wonderful, and honestly, like Joe identified, I truly feel like I’m thriving here. Everything is going well so far (knock on wood), I’m constantly learning new and exciting things, and I’m looking forward so much to what the future holds.
Thanks to everyone who’s made it so so special so far. I can’t wait to continue making more amazing memories with you all.
Signing out for now,
Dennis :)
FANTASTIC