Prompts

• Thinking back to when you applied to RC does anything stand out as being different from what you expected?
  • List everything you did during your batch — this could be projects you built, things you learned, new things you tried, relationships you formed, anything!
    • How did it feel to list this out?
    • Think back to when you applied to RC. What would past you at that moment think about this list?
  • Identify some of the high points and low points of your batch.
    • What did you feel?
    • Try to identify the why behind the emotion. What about the event made you feel these feelings?
  • What are you taking with you into the future?

Things I Did

• Made some new frandz 🙂

• Metalearning

  • re-cultivating a growth mindset, grit, positive attitude toward failure
  • renewed sense of purpose, seeing the power of infectious enthusiasm
  • better understanding the depths and boundaries of interests

• Finished the first c. 40% of , virtually all of Algorithms Illuminated (Part 1): The Basics, and all of new material (i.e., excluding discrete probability) in

  • Practice / reinforce a lot of basic DSA concepts with Leetcode

    • 60+ of NeetCode 150, 42+ of Blind 75

      

• Begin to learn Haskell: made it to halfway through UPenn CIS 194 and Learn You a Haskell

  • Discovered the joy of functional programming (beyond what little I’d been exposed to)
  • Started Exercism Haskell track

• Switched from vim to Neovim, updated dotfiles / dev environment

Highs & Lows

Highs

• Developing a decently rigorous understanding of intro DSA material (moving up the degrees of knowledge / Bloom’s taxonomy)
  • Nailing a tough problem
• Feeling my mind expand with the exposure to purely functional concepts through the vehicle that is Haskell
  • Figuring out a particular implementation based on type system (”what it has to be”)

Lows

• Getting sucked into peer validation traps
• Feeling fear/anxiety of job search that awaits me and not making nearly as much progress as I wanted to
• Losing sense of balance outside of RC, especially around physical health (didn’t help that I hurt myself a few weeks out from the end)