Rabble of Robots

It’s official. I have completed my first (academic) year of grad school.

This year went exactly how all of the cliches will tell you it did. It was insanely difficult. It was incredibly rewarding. I learned a lot about the world, this field, academia, and myself.

This year I taught myself to code (almost) from scratch on the fly, started to be okay with “good enough” (an amazingly handy attitude in grad school), went head-to-head with an institution, and formed a new respect for all the different types of intelligence it takes to solve a problem. I also cried from exhaustion, doubted (and occasionally briefly lost) my sanity, gave up, and gave in. Yet somehow I am still standing, still hopeful, (still enrolled in the program), and still very excited for where this adventure is going to go.

I had two main goals coming in:

Have an adventure

Don’t fail out my first quarter.

I have already far surpassed both of these goals for myself. I guess it’s time to set some loftier goals and see what I can do next.