Unapologetic Second Year Thoughts đź’
Did someone say sophomore slump brain dump?! HAHA.
hi :)
Usually my blog posts (or at least the intros) are a bit more sophisticated in nature, so this one is a bit of an outlier. Nevertheless, it’s Week 3 into Year Two of College — and maybe it’s the fact that my wonderful project partner S.A. and I have just spent the last seven days for hours on end trying to debug infinite loops and segfaults over and over again to the point of joking hysteria, or I myself am experiencing a memory leak because I’ve realloc-ed my brain cells to another dimension and lost the original address. But after spending some time adjusting back into the rhythm of things in the bay, catching up with friends, meeting new people, surviving 61C’s first project, and having some time to think on a late Friday night (valgrinding impossibly niche memory bugs does wonders for one’s mental state) —I’ve figured it’s a good segway into reflection again.
Just the other day, my roommate C.P. and I were talking about sophomore slump — the inaugural second year existential crisis. (It’s the freshman fifteen → sophomore slump pipeline, you know?)
Yes, we’ve all heard of mid-life and quarter-life crises. But a second-year crisis? Talk about dramatic.
Sophomore year at Cal, although still in its first weeks, feels so infinitely different from freshman year. No longer am I living in a suite of constant activity, bound to dining hall food, or shocked by all the club flyers methodologically shoved into my face at Sproul. No longer is there that element of novelty, that ingrained communal living space, nor that constant rush of meeting new faces in shared hallways—because most of my classmates are now dispersed across the city, living in our own apartments, cooking and cleaning ourselves, and going about life on our own. While many first year courses like CS 61A and Math 54 were communally open to all majors, the inaugural inception of upper divs, even amongst similar majors like Data Science and Computer Science, has meant that course paths I originally shared with my friends are now starting to diverge. For many EECS/CS majors, zooming in on lecture from home or speedrunning them later as to maximize time efficiency is increasingly the norm — it’s only the various activities I’ve intentionally subscribed to on campus that’s allowed for the running into of familiar folks.
As for second year dynamics — I find that the easiest way to describe the feeling is probably something along the lines of “frick—we’re no longer freshmen anymore.” By the end of this year, my class and I will be halfway done with college. There’s less of a “wow you have so much time to explore,” “all the clubs want you because you’re the best target audience,” and “welcome to campus! how are you liking it so far?” Instead, it’s been replaced with increasingly burgeoning questions of “any idea of what you want to pursue in the future?,” “major declarations are due by the end of the school year,” and “what are you thinking of doing for Summer 2025?” As the novelty and exploration fades, I’m finding more time to think, “oh my gawd why are we all turning 20 next year and wtf am I doing with my life?” In other words, it’s the perfect recipe for the existential crisis that defines sophomore slump.
It’s quite funny actually — at least for me, I would’ve expected such an “existential crisis” to happen a long time ago. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that while I came into college as a Computer Science major in writing, I was ultimately undecided in spirit. Although I’ve taken classes like 61B (the foundational class for software engineering recruitment) and CS 70 (a discrete math and probability class for CS majors), up until this point, I’ve approached big tech talks and SWE/startup recruitment events like I do watching Netflix — viewing them as an intriguing examination of a hype train and perpetually fluctuating job market that I had virtually no interest in, nor cared very much about.
CS 61A problems were fun like puzzles, math-adjacent CS concepts were fascinating and mentally stimulating, my intellectual worldview was being re-shaped and challenged constantly, and technical skills were practical and in high-demand. But while I’d heard about kids busy recruiting for internships as early as senior year of high school or the first few months of college, I had absolutely no interest in “falling into the stereotype.” I re-learned how to bike, took a random drama class at Berkeley Rep Theatre (ultimately re-enacting excerpts from A Doll’s House), and decided to be one of the few STEM kids to go to Washington DC — all on a few nights’ whim because AP Government was interesting, AI was hyped everywhere, I cared deeply about public service, and nothing could beat experiencing an election year in the Capitol. To me, Meta tours with CS Kickstart meant free food rather than networking and career-building. CS was loads of fun because I got to learn fascinating, theoretical, logic-based ideas and implementations that developed a solid CS academic foundation … as I dabbled in virtually everything unrelated.
I had no idea what I wanted to do — just that I seemed to love getting good at tangential disciplines— falling quite quickly into the exact same rhythm I did in high school: Taking the hardest STEM classes because I could, while spending all my other time doing activities wholly unrelated. In high school, I pursued the STEM-adjacent olympiads and got the good academic grades to prove I was capable of doing so to admissions officers … then I spent the rest of my time writing and editing for the school paper, running on the cross team, playing in symphony orchestra, serving on my city’s Youth Commission, taking weekly classical vocal classes, and exploring fields diabolically unrelated to anything I knew I’d apply to college for.
I often joke that if I didn’t go to UC Berkeley, where CS is so wonderfully taught, I’d probably have jumped the gun on majors long ago. Luckily, freshman year was all about exploring: new clubs, new environments, new people, total information overload, and the like. It was great! Exciting! I got to explore. I felt completely okay about not knowing anything about the future because I was a first year. I joined the Berkeley Political Review. I joined the triathlon team. I discovered and helped organize a super cool tech policy fellowship. And in that process, I’d started to think that tech policy was the way I could reconcile my love for the intellectually-stimulating CS coursework with my tendency to gravitate towards everything unrelated. This wonderfully niche field of tech policy gave me a strong direction and made me feel like I was such a wonderfully open-minded, interdisciplinary, unstereotypical CS kid — heading off into a field that really suffers a dearth in technical backgrounds.
Yet after coming back from Washington DC and interning at my first choice think tank for the summer, I sat down at my desk, scratched my head, and decided, quite adamantly:
Shoot. I don’t think this is what I want to do for a career.
Which, in short, meant perpetual confusion. Unbeknownst to me, the “interdisciplinary middle ground” I’d set for myself had been my unrealized, internal identity for years on end. Having my favorite teachers and classes in high school be math and English (shoutout to Mr. Yim, Mr. Tyler, and Ms. Keys) probably didn’t help with narrowing down a focus area.
Yet I’ve begun to realize that forever slogging in a middle ground and splitting my focus hasn’t necessarily been a source of open-mindedness, but rather, a source of comfort and, in its own way, stubborn inflexibility. As I’ve had another full month to digest my freshman year and summer takeaways, I’ve noticed that perhaps I’ve been a bit close-minded when it came to (1) taking CS a bit more seriously beyond academic classes and (2) realizing that CS has so many routes —and there was nothing wrong with exploring the hype train I so vehemently filtered out. I’ve loved virtually every CS class I’ve taken, despite the intellectual torture at points. While spending this entire last week until ~1:00 am trying to locate unfreed memory was an absolute menace, the concepts were fascinating, and I’d gladly do it again for the growth in mental character.
Of course — I acknowledge that I’m lucky in many ways: I feel incredibly grateful to be a declared CS major in the frenzy that is UC Berkeley’s High-Demand situation right now, but even with my major declared, I’m still completely in the dark as to what the heck I want to do with my life. While I’ve done a fair bit of happy exploring in freshman year and found communities I absolutely cherish with all my heart (shoutout to Paragon), I don’t think I’ve ever given SWE, startups, or other “stereotypical bay area pipelines” a fair chance, and have started to make an intentional effort to learn more about them. College is—I suppose—a perpetual state of re-evaluation, adaptation, exploration, and maintaining an open mind. Something as simple as recruiting and LeetCode was never even on my radar, never an incentive I’d ever thought would be me, until now. This semester is also the first time I’m doing ALL techs and code-related courses — given my stubborn “I will always balance my techs with a humanities course for sanity and refuse to do anything otherwise” condition, this choice was—in hindsight— quite a step out of my comfort zone.
And I still have no idea if this is what I ultimately want to do. All I’ve really subscribed to is the belief that I just have to continue pursuing the opportunities I find interesting, practice a growth mindset, learn how to learn, meet new people, and trust that everything will work out the way they’re supposed to be, whatever that might mean. The more I try to hyper analyze what I hope or want to do with my future, the more confused I get. So for now, I’m just playing it by ear, doing interesting things, meeting cool people, and living in the present one day at a time. As long as I stick to my principles and core values, I’m sure everything will fall into place.
So we’ll see.
It’s currently almost 3:00 am, my bedtime was four in a half hours ago, and I operate absolutely terribly on less than eight hours of sleep—but nothing beats a spontaneous, late night brain dump. So for my lovelies out there—if you’re currently perpetually confused about the state of things, you’re not alone.
sophomore slump ftw ❤
— xoxo cw
Thank you to A.W. and C.P. for the inspo. As for S.A., my garbage memory and sanity would segfault into oblivion without you. I still need to buy that flute rod.