It’s been a while since I made a new blog post and even longer since my last reflection post, so this is long overdue. Let’s jump in!

🚫 Disclaimer

I’m one (EECS) student at UC Berkeley (from 2021-2025) so take my advice with a grain of salt.

1. College is long, but also short

When I’m in the thick of the semester, midterms are happening left and right, I have a dozen homework assignments and projects due, college can feel really, really long. Like, “please get me out of here I just want to get this over with and graduate and have a full time job already” long. I’m not sure if that’s just the “academic rigor” of Berkeley or just college in general, but sometimes that’s just how I feel, and my perfectionist nature used to mean that I would spend late nights to finish assignments instead of, say, hanging out with friends.

What I have learned since then is it helps to put things into perspective. College is only 4 years. That’s the same length of high school, and it feels even quicker in many ways. Do I want to spend those 4 years moping about my workload or doing fun things with friends? Of course, you should do your work and do it well, but at some point it’s better to do what’s required of you (and not anything more) and enjoy college while you’re still there. After you graduate, you’ll probably be working for the next 40+ years of your life, so why not enjoy the freedom you have left? Plus, this will probably be the last time in your life where you are living this close to your friends, so take advantage while you still can. There is a balance to be had between grinding away to get to your next goal and living in the moment.

2. You can always do more, but should you?

Ever since my first semester at Berkeley, my calendar has been filled to the brim and my work consumed most of my time. I am, of course, grateful for all of the opportunities that have come my way, whether it’s cool classes, clubs, or research. But as time has gone on, I’ve also realized that saying no to things is just as important as saying yes. College is for exploring, and when you’re done exploring, it’s okay to just stop and do what you genuinely like or move on to the next thing.

3. Relationships matter

Another major life lesson I have learned in the semesters since freshman year is that relationships are important – all kinds of them: Romantic, platonic, teacher-student, mentor-mentee, boss-employee, classmates, close friends, acquaintances, club members, etc.

This seems rather obvious but when I was little I had the mindset where as long as I focused on developing myself and my skills, things would be fine. Opportunities and good things would just magically come my way as the people around me took notice. While developing yourself is great, it is only half of the equation (and is a rather lonely way to live).

Again, I think it’s good to make sure you have a strong work ethic, but you should not focus solely on work or your accomplishments because that alone will not make you happy, and they certainly won’t help you when you need advice or a helping hand. There have been many times these past few semesters where I really needed someone to talk to, either to ask for help, get their opinion, rant, or just share a meme. Those are the moments you will remember and cherish, not when you win an award or get a high score on an exam. (There’s also the practical benefit of networking or finding roommates, but you should try to cultivate relationships for the sake of getting to know people, not to get some advantage from it.)

4. Friendships in adulthood

Why is everything so difficult to schedule and why is no one in the same place at the same time?

5. Adulting is maintenance

Adulting just feels like a lot of maintenance to me. Keeping my unread count in my multiple inboxes low. Paying my credit card bill. Paying the rent and utilities. Taking out the trash. Making sure I eat, sleep, shower, work out. I’m even getting to the age where I start to feel nostalgia for my childhood, and I’m barely in my twenties. Yikes!

6. Get grad gifts for your close friends

It’s a nice little token of appreciation and congratulatory thing you can do for the graduating seniors in your life.

7. Take PE classes

For a while I had no idea physical education (PE) classes existed at Berkeley, but they do! I decided to take PE 1 Self-Defense: Yongmudo, PE 1 Basketball 1, and PE 1 Circuit Weight Training 1, and they were both a blast. I had never taken a martial arts class before, and this was a nice introduction that got my blood pumping. Similarly, while I had played casual basketball with friends all the way back in 4th-5th grade, I had never had formal basketball training. And taking the circuit weight training class introduced me to all types of exercises and made going to the gym seem a little less daunting.

I highly recommend taking a PE class if you’re like me and you need extrinsic motivation to work out. I personally hate doing “boring” things like just running. I’ve always thought sports were fun (with a side benefit of keeping you healthy), so if you’re into martial arts, archery, swimming, basketball, volleyball, dancing, boxing, yoga, etc., Berkeley PE has you covered. (Plus, you can take them pass/no pass and they are usually only 0.5 units! This is perfect for Phase 1 where you weirdly have a cap of enrolling in 12.5 units worth of classes.)

8. Take classes outside of your major

I’m pretty sure all majors at UC Berkeley require you to do this, but regardless, I highly recommend taking classes outside of your major. Instead of seeing this as something you have to do for the sake of graduating, see it as a way to dip your toes into a whole new world. It was mainly courses outside of EECS/CS that restored my intrinsic desire to learn and came as a breath of fresh air amid all of the looming deadlines and drudgery.

Some courses I’ve taken that I would recommend include SOCIOL 3AC (intro to sociology), FILM R1B (craft of writing: film focus - in particular my class was focused on monster movies), LING 100 (intro to linguistics), and INTEGBI 134L (computational genomics). It also helps to have friends who are similarly interested in things outside of your major. For example, I had a group of friends who convinced me to try out linguistics and I’m so glad that they did. (For fun, here’s the NY Times interactive dialect quiz and Winston Durand’s IPA keyboard (I met Winston during my Stripe internship)).

9. Join course staff

I joined CS 88 (aka DATA C88C) course staff in the spring of my sophomore year as a tutor, became a TA, and finally became a head TA. This past fall, I switched course staffs to teach DATA 101, and for my last semester I’ve accepted an offer to return to CS 88.

Being on course staff is really fulfilling and fun - you get to teach a subject you love, see how courses work behind the scenes, help the next generation of DS/CS/EECS majors, meet a lot of cool people also interested in teaching, talk to the professor(s) of the course (which helps with research and grad school opportunities!), and maybe even write homework/project/exam questions! (Can you tell which exam questions I wrote for CS 88? Hint: I’m a fangirl.) You also get paid and receive prorated tuition remission, which is great! My only caveat is to make sure you have enough time in your schedule and to actually do the work because students (and the professors and head TAs) are counting on you.

It’s kind of funny – I’ve only been on course staff for courses I’ve never taken (unless you count being an Academic Intern for CS 61A, but that was unpaid). This was definitely more of a challenge for DATA 101, because I had taken a similar but not exactly the same CS course (CS 186) the semester before. After the first month or so, I was learning the content right along with my DATA 101 students, except I had to learn it well enough to teach it.

Another difference between teaching CS 88 and DATA 101 is that the former is a much more developed course. CS 88 takes a lot of its materials from CS 61A, which is an even more mature course. On the other hand, DATA 101 has only been around for a handful of semesters, so every iteration it has been offered, something changed. In my case, we added a midterm exam and optional final project, among other things. As the head TA for assignments, I had to make sure all the homeworks and projects we released were correct and usable. Suffice it to say, even with all my efforts and late nights proofreading and writing new autograder tests, every single project I helped put out had some small or glaringly large issues, either because of a mistake I introduced, or an error created in a past semester (since we generally reuse assignments). For DATA 101 students in Fall 2024, I apologize for all the project re-releases…

10. Research

Although I mentioned in my UC application that I wanted to do research in college, because my first few semesters were consumed by academics and club stuff, I just didn’t have the bandwidth to try and apply for research positions, let alone actually do research. However, as I began to transition away from being an active Codebase member, I decided to try it out. As a result, I applied to 3 different URAP positions in fall 2023. I ended up being interviewed and accepted into the CHEN Lab for the climate change health AI project, advised by Professor Irene Chen, who joined Berkeley faculty that past summer.

Up until that point, research had kind of just been an abstract thing and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Indeed, there was not much time to do any formal ramp-up or training – PIs are busy teaching and with their other research projects, and for the project I joined, I was working with 2 other undergrads and no grad student, which made things a little more difficult. (Usually in large research labs, undergrads will interface more with the grad students, who can provide guidance and mentorship.) This was not the fault of the professor – I could have reached out to any of the grad students in the lab working on other projects, but I think my busy schedule and imposter syndrome got the best of me. This was the semester where I definitely bit off more than I could chew, and I felt constant anxiety that everyone there would eventually find out how much of a fraud I was despite the fact that they all seemed like nice people and the professor no doubt screened many applicants and chose me for a reason.

I ended up leaving the lab after only a semester, but it was an important step for me in terms of finally stepping away from something I wasn’t really enjoying. For a while, I thought that was it for me. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for research and how self-directed it is. However, I realized that maybe that lab or that field wasn’t the best fit for me and gave CS education research a shot, since I’ve always loved teaching. This led to joining ACE Lab and working with Professor Lisa Yan. I learned more about qualitative research, wrote a paper (it got rejected), and wrote a poster (it got accepted into SIGCSE 2025). So I guess the moral of the story is, if at first you don’t succeed, try again but slightly differently.

11. On leadership

  • No one likes to micromanage other people, and no one likes to be micromanaged.
  • From what I’ve observed at least on the undergraduate level, there seem to be 2 types of leaders: The quietly competent type and the charismatic (but not as competent) type. It is rare to be both.
  • Being a leader is 20% logistics and messages, 10% meetings, and 70% people.
  • Preempt failure or delays. This is not necessarily because people are incompetent or lazy (although that can happen), but also because everyone is busy and dealing with their own battles. You can’t expect everyone to be perfect 100% of the time, and having the empathy and wisdom to plan ahead is the mark of a good leader.
  • Utilize tools like Slack’s recurring reminders, saved messages/remind me later feature, and Notion’s reminder features to save your sanity.
  • People don’t read, so stick to bullet points and concise text as much as possible.

12. More Berkeley food recommendations

  • Angeline’s Louisiana Kitchen - Great tasting Cajun food, but on the more expensive side. Good for a nice sit-down experience
  • Cholita Linda - Cuban sandwiches and more. There is technically another one that has opened right in Downtown Berkeley, but I’ve only been to the Oakland location.
  • Nikko Sushi - Sushi in downtown Berkeley. I’ve had the hungry roll many times and think it’s worth the $30 price tag
  • Momo Masalas - Indian and Nepalese food on northside with a very friendly (maybe?) owner
  • La Note - French breakfast and brunch place. Come early in the morning otherwise you’ll be waiting 40+ minutes in a very long line

13. Places to work on campus

I quickly learned way back in freshman year that it’s incredibly time inefficient to go back and forth between campus and your dorm/apartment, and so because my schedule is usually so packed I can stay on campus for 12 hours at a time. In between classes and meetings, I’ve found a couple places that are useful if you’re in a similar situation and need to work:

  • Libraries, especially Moffitt since you can talk (on certain floors) and they allow food/drinks
  • ASUC Student Union / MLK
  • Soda Hall (upper division lounge on the 3rd floor, or the lobby area on the 3rd floor where there’s seating)
  • Cory Hall (2nd floor lounge or courtyard if the weather is nice)
  • Li Ka Shing lobby (seating but no tables. But it’s close to Brown’s if you need food)
  • Berkeley Way West lobby (lots of seating, including tables)
  • Literally any building on campus. It’s not uncommon for me to just plop on the ground since there’s wifi and my next meeting or class is near there

14. Take advantage of public transportation

When I was a freshman, I was still in the mindset of pre-college school where you would walk to your classes since everything was close together. However, a college campus is obviously much larger than a high school. Why walk for 20+ minutes and be sweaty when you can take advantage of free public transportation? (All UC Berkeley students get an AC Transit pass for unlimited rides. And although it feels “free” it is technically billed with your tuition so why not use it?)

Aside from AC Transit, there are also the UC Berkeley Parking and Transportation shuttles, such as the P and R lines (for Perimeter and Reverse Perimeter, respectively) which are especially useful for EECS/CS majors who have to go to Soda and Cory Hall often since the AC Transit buses don’t have many options to get from southside to northside.

15. SF is right there

Speaking of public transportation, UC Berkeley is close to 2 BART stations. Thus it’s incredibly easy to ride 30 minutes to San Francisco, where there are a lot of fun things to do, places to see, and food to eat.

16. Having a Slack addiction can be fun

I have the Slack desktop app open on my laptop 24/7 and it is quite fun to hop around the 20+ workspaces I’m in and see what everyone is talking about. It’s nice to learn about different opportunities, things going on in the EECS/CS/DS departments, and just have silly conversations with friends in club Slacks.

17. Do your donuts

A lot of club Slack workspaces have an app called Donut which randomly matches you with another person who opts every week or two. It’s kind of like coffee chats except it’s usually for casual, getting-to-know you hangouts. I highly recommend opting in to these as a way to meet new people. Just make sure that before you opt in, you are serious about it because it doesn’t feel good to be matched with someone who ghosts you! Donuts can also be stressful if you yourself are busy, so the Donut app also supports a “snooze” feature where you can pause donuts for a few weeks if you know you’ll be busy.

18. How to entertain yourself to stay sane when you have a busy schedule

There have been many times during my Berkeley career where I have just been drowning in work (most recently dead week and finals week of Fall 2024). To try and preserve my mental health, I try to do little things every day that are not work, but don’t take up a lot of time. For example:

  • Listening to podcasts or audiobooks while eating (has the added benefit of keeping you up-to-date on current events)
  • (More dangerous for productivity) Watching TV shows while eating
  • Listening to music while walking to class and doing work
  • Playing guitar

19. Roommates

If I could go back in time, it’s hard for me to say whether I would change what I had done in terms of housing. In spring of freshman year, I decided I wanted to live in an on-campus apartment, which meant saying goodbye to my freshman-year roommates, who I had really connected with. In the two years since then, I was living in an on-campus apartment with mostly random roommates, which meant that I widened my circle of friends, but also had some not-so-great roommate drama that I would almost certainly have avoided if I’d just continued living with my freshman-year roommates. To anyone trying to decide what to do, I would say the safest option is to never let go of great roommates once you find them. But if you are ever in the position of going random, things are not all bleak. You might meet some really cool people too!

20. Check out student films

Shoutout to my former roommate Yasmine for introducing me to the world of student filmmaking on campus. For example, the Cinematic Arts and Production (CAP) Club at Berkeley premieres short student films every semester, some of which are quite cool and impressive! (Sadly they don’t do a very good job of uploading all the films to YouTube, but you can watch some of them here).

21. Get people’s contact information when you meet them

This might seem like a no-brainer to most people, but I don’t really use social media that much to keep in touch with people, so I often need to remind myself to get people’s phone numbers or social media handles so that we can communicate later on, whether that’s because we’re in the same class or I want to meet up with them later. It also helps to have people’s full, written-out names in my contacts because I’m terrible with names.

22. Check your posture

Don’t develop the habitual shrimp spine like me.

23. Off-campus meal plans are pretty great

Although I get teased about this, I think it is honestly worth the money to get a meal plan even after you move out of the dorms. If you are like me and you are perpetually busy the entire day, have abysmal cooking skills, and don’t mind the mediocrity of dining hall food, having an off-campus meal plan is so worth it. And honestly, the dining hall food is better and healthier than anything I could cook myself, and saves me the stress and time it takes to shop for groceries, cook, and clean.

24. On-campus apartments are pretty great

For all of the non-freshmen at Berkeley worried about housing, I highly recommend applying for on-campus apartments, such as Wada Hall, which is a building in Unit 2 (that is not dorm-style living). Wada is the most affordable option, and yet is still miles above the quality of any of the dorms I’ve seen. The apartments I lived in during my sophomore and junior years were large, clean, and comprehensive, with 2 bedrooms (1 double and 1 triple), a bathroom, and joined living room/kitchen.

There are many misconceptions when it comes to non-dorm housing at Berkeley:

  • Misconception: You have to be a Regent’s Scholar to have a chance of getting an apartment. Reality: It’s a random lottery. Just apply! All you have to lose is some time filling out the online form and the application fee, which is less than $50.
  • Misconception: You have to get a meal plan to live in an on-campus apartment. Reality: You don’t need to buy a meal plan. You can get an off-campus meal plan if you want, but you are not required to.
  • Misconception: On-campus apartments are terrible, are like dorms (small and communal bathrooms), and are expensive. Reality: As I mentioned above, I lived in Wada Hall and that was the cheapest on-campus option. It was much better quality of living than all other dorms I’ve seen and the average monthly price is basically the same as the rent I currently pay for a much smaller, off-campus apartment (assuming you are like me and don’t live in Berkeley over the summer). There are also many benefits unique to on-campus living:
    • It is generally safer: You are only living with other students, buildings require key card access, and everyone has their own room key
    • The laundry services are maintained well and you pay with a mobile app (not necessarily the case in all off-campus apartments). For Wada Hall, you also don’t need to go outside/go to a separate building to do laundry
    • There are elevators
    • It is managed by the university, so if you have noise/neighbor/roommate issues you can always talk to your RA
    • Utilities (water, gas, electricity, wifi, trash) are included in your rent and you don’t have to deal with scammy landlords or pricing
    • Apartments are fully-furnished
    • In your housing application, you can apply with other people you know to room together (but this is not guaranteed)

25. Track what you do

I find it interesting and useful to track what I do, mostly so I can remember what I’ve done, see statistics about my habits, and recommend media to people. For example:

26. Certain concepts are difficult to fully grasp until you’ve experienced them yourself

And then when you read a story or watch a movie or listen to a song you’ve heard a million times before, it takes on a new meaning.

27. Coffee isn’t that bad in moderation

I’m not sure if this is a genetic thing or because I made a concerted effort to not drink coffee up until junior year of college, but I am mostly able to drink coffee only for its utility of keeping me awake (for example, if I didn’t sleep much the night before and need to wake up early) without getting addicted. Of course, this can be a slippery slope if you build up a high caffeine tolerance and become addicted to coffee or energy drinks (which I would avoid).

28. Alcohol is pretty meh

I feel like I grew up in a relatively sheltered neighborhood, so I didn’t really have the stereotypical “high school experience” of going to house parties and having been high and/or drunk before being 21 years old. Since I’ve turned 21, I’ve started to very slowly and very cautiously explore alcoholic drinks and how they affect me, and to be honest I’ve mainly been disappointed because of the terrible taste and middling effect of making me slightly warmer and sleepier. Either way, I still think that it’s totally fine to not drink at social events or to drink responsibly, whatever floats your boat.

29. You never know, someone might read your blog

I’ve mostly been writing these blog posts for fun and for myself, but I’ve talked to some people who have actually read my blog posts, including Berkeley students and 2 interviewers, which is cool!