Reflections on Summer (overview)

Shivam Gandhi
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read
I had the pleasure of visiting Hawaii this summer. Definitely will be back to learn scuba diving in the future.

This post isn’t exactly a post but more of a summary about what I did this summer. The writing will not be good, and you may find it dull. However, I figure that if I’m going to write about my progress in different skills, I should publish updates on them. It’ll be in bullet format.

At the beginning of the summer I set up some goals for myself. Some of these, I met. Some of these, I even exceeded. However, there were some that I failed to meet. Of the ones I failed to meet, I’ll provide a brief explanation of why I failed to meet them and what I could do to prevent failure of similar goals in the future.

There were also some goals that became evident during the summer. As Jordan Peterson says:

Remember that what you do no yet know is more important than what you already know

These goals were probably more important than the ones I initially outlined. I’ll make note of them and why I added them on.

Athletics

  • 265 lbs bench, 480 lbs deadlift, 420 lbs squat (goal met)
  • 163 lbs bodyweight (goal exceeded, planned to be 170 lbs but it’s nice to be lighter)
  • Cut my mile time down from 12:00 to 10:00 (added on because I realized I was getting too tired while squatting and needed to improve my conditioning. I cut the 2 minutes off over the course of 4 weeks of training)
  • Improved mobility greatly (mobility in squatting was hindering my training, so I subscribe to mobility WOD and started doing them)
  • Fixed my back (late in July, my back started getting bizarre pain. I learned that this was because my core and lats are weak, so I worked on them)

Academics

  • Completed my study of the first 3 chapters of Sakurai QM (goal met)
  • Read 1 book per week (goal exceeded, audiobooks made this really easy and I learned to love reading. Read around 25 books this summer, which I plan to make a post about)
  • Completed a Machine Learning course (goal met)
  • Completed an iOS course (goal failed, decided to learn React Native instead, but now I’m confused since I don’t trust React or Facebook due to the patent nonsense)
  • Read through 4 chapters of Landau Lifshitz and did the problems (goal added since I realized my classical mechanics background was a bit weak for advanced QM)
  • Watched a few good thought provoking movies (I decided to do this once I’d gotten to a point where I didn’t want to study any physics. Might include my list in the book post)
  • Started writing (goal added early on in summer when the sugar post got popular on reddit)

Career

  • Completed my internship (goal met)
  • Researched future internships (goal met)
  • Made good contacts with people who I would like to work with (goal somewhat met, could’ve done a better job)

Guitar

  • Wrote 3 full length songs (goal exceeded, wrote more like 5)
  • Improved my picking speed, sweep picking ability, and scale knowledge considerably (goal not fully met, didn’t get to be as fast as I wanted)
  • Learned a lot of new music (goal met, no real metric here)
  • Learned some jazz chords (goal added, these chords ended up adding to the kind of math rock music I was writing)

Habits

  • Cut sugar out (goal met)
  • Consistent meditation (goal somewhat met, would’ve liked more consistency in this)
  • Morning journaling (goal met)
  • Reducing internet addiction (goal somewhat met, would’ve liked to improve this)

Character

  • Did things that made me afraid (goal met by doing snorkeling, cold approaches, open ocean swimming, and other similar things)
  • Removed a large portion of my social anxiety (goal met through cold approaches and trying to make friends in a new city)
  • Built up confidence (goal met by accomplishing most other goals)
  • Improved social skills (goal met by reading books and putting myself in social situations more)
  • Improved my clarity of thought (goal added when I realized that writing required this)

Misc

  • Planned out sophomore year goals (goal added)
  • Made some good friends (goal added, didn’t think I’d really do this successfully in a new city, but I managed it)

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how my summer went. I learned a whole lot and grew in ways I didn’t expect to. However, I can’t wait to get to my fall semester of sophomore year at Brown. I’ve got a pretty detailed set of goals that I’d like to accomplish this fall (which I won’t reveal right now) for which I plan to write another post about come winter time.

Thanks for reading!

)

Shivam Gandhi

Written by

I write about things I learn as I put myself in interesting situations. Otherwise I’m a student at Brown U. doing comp-bio and physics research

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