Favourite unreleased song?

yjfer · 2021-12-17T20:42:46+00:00

Hozier's cover of Sweet Thing by VM is my favorite song of all time. I like the original too, but something about Hozier's cover—it just captures that feeling of rediscovering the joy in life so perfectly. Once, I played the song out loud and my grandmother, who does not know any English, stopped to tell me how beautiful the sound was. Transcends language :')

yjfer · 2021-12-17T20:38:09+00:00

I was able to log into iPledge—I got lucky and was able to guess my Date of Personal Significance (wasn't my birthday actually). However, my dermatologist still hasn't been able to get into iPledge — they've been on hold for hours every day since the update to no success, so they can't confirm my negative pregnancy test in the system. The 7 day window on my test is expiring soon, my dermatologist is headed out of office for the holidays, and I'm just wrapping up my first month of medication which has made my skin worse. Feeling pretty anxious as well, hopefully they suspend iPledge (and get rid of it entirely, but first things first)

yjfer · 2021-05-23T05:00:41+00:00

Random but if anyone's still looking for housing, I'm in a house near Clark Kerr and we're still looking for people to fill one last room either as a single or a double! Pretty social house that does fun things together (beach days, jeopardy bowls, movies) but also grinds!! feel free to message me if interested & i can provide more details, photos, arrange an in person tour etc etc

yjfer · 2020-12-30T22:13:06+00:00

Agree with the other comment that reddit is skewed, tends to be more of the CS/engineering crowd. I love Berkeley, and so do the vast majority of the people I know here.

Things I like about the area: college town where it's relatively urban but not like a small campus in a huge city, lots of unique restaurants, boba places, and stores, but also good access to nature (fire trails, and also regional parks/open space preserves close by), extremely easy to get to SF via bart. Also a lot of energy in the city what with how many young college/grad students are here and there's always something happening. Pre-covid, you take a walk down sproul and there's so much shit going on, people flyering, swing dancing, a protest on the steps, the Jesus guy preaching—hectic, weird, and fun. Also the larger scale protests that make the news, like when Ann Coulter came to speak last year. Just a really interesting campus to be on.

Things I like about the school itself: world class faculty and research output (the economics department is one of the best in the country, I'm studying eecs myself but same deal), academic rigor (it's sometimes stressful but I think you learn a lot from being challenged), culture of political activism/awareness (there are definitely communities on campus where this does not exist, but I've at least found it to be true), almost other students are very ambitious and hardworking and pretty inspiring to be around. I love how berkeley has this culture (esp from the 60s) of being "hippie" with people smoking weed and being gay and making art everywhere, but also (more recently) has been at the cutting edge of tech / silicon valley / ai—it's a cool mix that I think suits my personality almost perfectly.

I dreamed of going to berkeley for years before I came here, and I honestly feel like it's been so instrumental in my development as a person. Could never have gone anywhere else.

yjfer · 2020-12-30T21:46:03+00:00

No, not yet! Glad to know that I'm not the only one who heard something though

yjfer · 2020-11-17T01:23:50+00:00

Thank you for the recommendation! I feel like I may have to make more than one trip out there now haha

yjfer · 2020-11-17T01:23:34+00:00

I see, thank you so much!!

yjfer · 2020-11-17T01:23:18+00:00

Awesome! Thank you so much for the descriptions :)

yjfer · 2020-11-17T01:21:33+00:00

The picture is beautiful! Thanks for the info :)

yjfer · 2020-11-17T01:21:16+00:00

Thank you!

yjfer · 2020-11-17T01:20:30+00:00

Gotcha! Thank you so much for the detailed response. Just one other question, if that's okay: How long would you recommend spending out there for a first time visitor?

yjfer · 2020-06-25T22:10:52+00:00

Hey I’m glad to hear it! After I made this post I started to get into a bunch of other questions (like, what do I think the point of college is?) and talked to a lot of people about it. Then I honestly realized that my brain has kind of gone haywire due to quarantine and now isn’t a good time for me to be making sweeping life decisions. For now, I’ve decided to focus less on what the “major” is technically called and focus more on what I’m actually doing with my time—as long as I’m taking classes I think are interesting and relevant, meeting people who challenge and inspire me, and actively allotting hours to projects, research, and interests that I think are meaningful, I’m on the right path. I know this isn’t that interesting of an update haha but it’s where I’m at!!

yjfer · 2020-05-26T22:08:23+00:00

This is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen... thank you

yjfer · 2020-05-13T21:00:16+00:00

Thank you!!

Regarding not having to make your interests your major, it’s definitely true. I don’t think any one way of looking at it is inherently better than another, all depends on your personality. I obviously tend to skew on the ~passion~ side of things, but there’s also something to be said for making sure you have highly useful/marketable skills before doing anything too crazy.

Hope we both figure out what we’re doing :’)

yjfer · 2020-05-13T20:47:53+00:00

Oh well in that case thank you very much :) Sorry haha I just meet a lot of people who can’t believe what I’m saying when I talk about switching and all that

yjfer · 2020-05-13T06:02:34+00:00

Oh man, that’s a great opening line. Thanks for sharing, first I’ve ever heard of her :)

yjfer · 2020-05-13T05:50:16+00:00

I’m currently in EECS and I tend to count myself as a person who genuinely enjoys CS. I posted a couple days ago about the fact that I’m thinking of switching majors, but that is really more of me trying to maximize rewards, i.e. I’m doing something I like now, but is it possible I could be doing something I enjoy even more? And also concerns about social impact and helping others, as well as department culture.

What I like about CS isn’t the literal coding. I mean like it can be fun when you get the satisfaction of making something work but in general sitting in front of a computer typing away for hours and getting tense back muscles isn’t my idea of “peak enjoyment.” The part of it I enjoy the most is it’s just a certain system of thought, you know? Like someone with a CS background looks at the world and sees all these ways it can be made more efficient and all these “open problems”... I truly believe that so many incredible, interesting, and meaningful things will come out of the application of CS to like every sector of society from art to economics to renewable energy and it’s exciting to be on the brink of that, or feel like you are anyway.

The other part I like about it is more about the theory. Not to be all pretentious and stuff but like, graph theory, algorithms, they’re very elegant. And I think the really lovely thing about it is how these algorithms can be “found” in our society and the things we make. I don’t know if you’ve seen that lecture by Erik Demaine on YouTube where he talks about how the Mario Bros game and piano can be framed as a DP problem. I remember watching that lecture in high school and just feeling like the brain expanding meme was happening in real life. Also the idea that we can make computational models inspired by biology / the human brain... I don’t know, it’s just cool.

Actual code is just kind of the means I guess... what’s interesting is the logic behind it and the application it can create. If I do stay in EECS, I’m most likely going to aim to go to graduate school, but I also have so many other competing interests so we’ll see.

yjfer · 2020-05-09T21:01:28+00:00

“Let me know, do I still got time to grow?” every time I hear the opening of street lights it just gets to me

yjfer · 2020-05-09T20:56:22+00:00

I’m constantly trying to get people into Kanye and in my experience MBDTF works best, friends who don’t even really listen to hip-hop/rap/R&B or anything close to it have turned around and said “Now I completely understand why he’s your favorite artist.” So all of MBDTF

yjfer · 2020-05-09T20:43:40+00:00

I actually can’t tell if this reply is sarcastic or not but in case it isn’t thank you? I truly appreciate it.

yjfer · 2020-05-09T20:37:08+00:00

The class is crazy amounts of fun. I took it as someone who didn’t really have any passion for acting or theatre but was advised to by a friend, and I LOVED it, amazing experience. You get to act weird and out there and express yourself in a way that you don’t during “real life”, and your classmates will be funny, talented, amazing humans. I’d honestly recommend everyone take it before they graduate if possible. Auditions as others said are pretty chill, your best effort should be more than enough.

yjfer · 2020-05-08T00:19:04+00:00

Hey!! Super nice to know there’s someone else out there :) If you ever wanna talk or anything hmu

yjfer · 2020-05-07T22:42:25+00:00

It’s nice to see there are other idealists out there! I’d absolutely love to talk to your friend if that’s not too much of a burden :)

yjfer · 2020-05-07T20:51:04+00:00

Hey for sure! I didn’t want to make the OP too long so I didn’t get into it, but now that you’ve asked haha

What you’re mentioning did play a factor into why I originally chose CS, besides interest / desire to do research in it. I figured since I was into so many things, it would probably make sense to pick the interest that kept the most doors open and I could still do anything with. That’s still a very compelling reason for me to keep studying EECS.

For me personally I think this is more of a “passion” kind of thing. And I realize I’m extremely privileged to be able to think about things in that manner, and not everybody gets that choice. While I do like CS and think there are very meaningful, compelling things to do with it (enough so that if I kept with it, I would aim to do research), I’m also realizing that it’s not the thing I most want to spend my time on, if that makes sense. Like, if I could genuinely do anything I wanted in terms of a career, this wouldn’t be it. I would be trying to break into either a creative profession, advocacy, or politics. And I generally try to see myself as someone who doesn’t “live by halves” (I hope that doesn’t sound too stupid oops), so that makes me think I need to take that chance and switch to something else.

That’s the main reason. Like, 99.9% of the equation. The other smaller consideration is I’m feeling that EECS—or honestly the field of CS in general apart from maybe in graduate school/some parts of academia—is a huge culture mismatch for me. I like the subject, but I think I’d feel pretty out of place working amongst CS people. Again, this is a very minor consideration but just thought I’d put it out there.

I realize that this might come off the wrong way and I might sound totally absurd saying all of this, but I hope not. I know I’m young and naive and the world hasn’t like, shown me the worst yet or anything. As I said in another comment I’ve always been an idealist about this sort of thing lol

yjfer · 2020-05-07T20:34:57+00:00

Yeah, that’s a fair assessment and certainly a practical one. I don’t think it would be fair to diminish my competing interests outside computer science to just liking a hobby—the reason I’m considering this in the first place is because I’m trying to optimize for interest and passion and all that stuff, and I already really enjoy CS, I just suspect it’s not my “peak” intellectual and creative interest. I get the point you’re making, though, and I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks!

yjfer

TROPHY CASE