commit 63d2169d3a96eaa13d7f5e2de7c38cfdb99e9056
parent 8cab16503f189abc4e627660fc0fc729e116aab8
Author: FIGBERT <figbert@figbert.com>
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2024 13:09:27 -0700
Add Stanford Quarterly Reflection Y1Q2
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diff --git a/content/posts/stanford-quarterly-reflection-02.md b/content/posts/stanford-quarterly-reflection-02.md
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+title = "Stanford Quarterly Reflection (Y1Q2)"
+date = 2024-04-20
++++
+
+In this quarter, Stanford became my default. As such, my memory of my
+time at Stanford has begun to take the blurry and general form I
+associate with "real life."
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+### Academics
+
+My workload increased this past quarter, as I left the one-unit courses
+behind in favor of some required humanities courses and entertaining
+medium-unit classes. I received my first A+, and also my first A-, in my
+Stanford career. On balance, this lowered my GPA by 0.01, as the unit
+counts were skewed in favor of the A-. I took five courses:
+
+1. ARABLANG 2A: Accelerated First-Year Arabic, Part II
+2. CHEM 29N: Chemistry in the Kitchen
+3. COLLEGE 102: Citizenship in the 21st Century
+4. CS 40: Cloud Infrastructure and Scalable Application Deployment
+5. PWR 1KAA: Writing & Rhetoric 1: Forward Momentum: Writing About
+ Movement(s)
+
+Arabic continued to be a positive staple of my week. It also expanded
+its impact, when I took a late-night excursion into San Francisco with a
+friend visiting from UChicago and we tried out a pizza place recommended
+on the authority of Khaled. It was lovely! The proprietor remembered
+Khaled from his days at USF. We also went on later that night to
+discover a crepe place near where we went to high school, which was
+surprising as we had not encountered it before and because restaurants
+open past midnight are rare gems in San Francisco. I got back to
+Stanford very late.
+
+CHEM 29N was a total treat, if not particularly rigorous in either its
+chemistry or its cooking. It is stuck in the classic funding limbo,
+wherein the program is given little money due to its low output but
+cannot increase its effectiveness until it receives more money. Still, I
+got a lovely addition to my fledgling apron collection.
+
+COLLEGE was aggressively mediocre. There is great value in the liberal
+arts and indeed they are fundamental to Stanford as an institution. You
+will, however, not find this value in COLLEGE 102. The class is a
+compromise: primarily between those who want to require a liberal arts
+core and those opposed as well as between those who want to overhaul the
+Western canon and those who do not.[^1] The end result is boring.
+
+CS 40 was a course super relevant to my day-to-day coding work and a
+lovely introduction to the exciting world of 3-unit courses, but as it
+was its first quarter running there were still some kinks to work out.
+"Figure out programmatic declaration of self-hosted services" has been
+on my todo list for quite a long time, so I was excited to both learn
+how to do this and get school credit for it; however, instead, I just
+spent a few weekends spray-and-praying AWS CDK gibberish at the screen.
+I understand that they're going to switch to Terraform or Ansible next
+year, and I wish them luck with that (and myself luck with self-study of
+the same). Ideally, I would have come away from the class with the
+skills required to write cloud-agnostic declarative infrastructure, but
+I have not. Unless you're looking to hire me, in which case I absolutely
+have.
+
+#### And Now to Address PWR
+
+I am unable to imagine a more painful academic experience than PWR 1KAA.
+To gather the world's best and brightest—driven, talented youth—at great
+expense in money, time, and effort, and then force them to divert
+significant effort into this aimless toil feels criminal. It is astounding
+that this has been allowed to occur. To absorb the material of this course
+would be a detriment to your writing ability.
+
+And though I suspect there would have been no PWR 1 courses that I would
+have loved, it did not have to be a complete failure—for that, the
+instructor is responsible. As explanation, and a means of
+self-restraint, I will simply deliver the following anecdote: A very
+good friend of mine, in a different PWR course, had scheduled a session
+with a tutor to work on his final essay. His tutor canceled, and he was
+assigned my PWR instructor in their stead. He left the meeting
+astounded, with no actionable advice and significantly more confused. He
+had some choice words, and told me genuinely that he felt sorry for me.
+
+I pray, sincerely, that I never again encounter anything like this course
+during my time here.
+
+### Personal
+
+I fear that I have waited too long, and have become too engrossed in the
+day-to-day of this new quarter, to do this section as I would have
+liked. But I will appreciate people nevertheless, and devour my camera
+role repeatedly as I seek to return to the proper mental state.
+
+I want to appreciate Nika and her illegal bunny. I want to appreciate
+Daniel and Ryan for a raucous night of festivities; I admire Daniel
+greatly for his ability to commit and his fearlessness in social
+situations, and I am grateful to Ryan for his non-stop encouragement.
+Huge love to Jack and Sam, who tried the Vision Pro with me and
+got many a late-night Zareen's. Kelly, for an even later Zareen's,
+failed attempts at glasses shopping, and lovely brownies besides—you are
+a light. Vivek for climbing on the Shangri-La scaffolding. Nate for
+hitting 195 before me.
+
+The JSA Retreat stands out as a highlight of my experience this winter.
+The chances of finding such a space as we created in that house are less
+than one-in-a-million, and I am in awe that it exists here at Stanford.
+I would not be the same without it, and I don't think it an exaggeration
+to say that it is *the* defining part of my Stanford experience. Diego's
+cooking was not half bad, and I love *I Love London*.[^2]
+
+I was warned that winter would be dreary and horrible. I'm just not sure
+what people are on about; this was my favorite quarter yet.[^3]
+
+---
+
+[^1]: Let the record show that, on these fronts, my positions currently
+stand as follows: I am opposed a required core at Stanford, and broadly
+aligned with the idea of updating the Western core. To the former, I
+think the increasing number of required courses is bad; the WAYS system,
+in which you are required to study specific fields but have a great deal
+of choice in how you do so, is significantly more aligned with the
+spirit and culture of Stanford. If you want a core, and the specific
+impacts that having such structure brings, look elsewhere—aforementioned
+UChicago friend is thoroughly enjoying his time on the school's intense
+and rigid path. We should not attempt to backport this to Stanford. To
+the latter issue, I am hopeful that we have advanced as a species since
+much of the classics were written. I do not hold these texts sacred. I
+do, however, hold excellence sacred—and don't think updating this corpus
+will be as easy as cutting a few pieces and throwing in a few modern
+works from traditionally marginalized voices. This process needs to be
+done well and by actual experts, which I do not believe has happened yet
+in a curriculum I have encountered. It has certainly not happened in the
+COLLEGE department, where courses are taught by brand-new "teaching
+fellows" who agree upon a core curriculum but all refuse to teach it and
+instead occasionally do and say things ranging from the abhorrent (see:
+Ameer Loggins) to the casually wrong (my teacher suggested, and doubled
+down on, a claim that China and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are more
+accountable to the citizenry of their nations than the United States
+government).
+
+[^2]: Which, while we are on the subject: I'm saving my spring break
+trip for my Q3 post.
+
+[^3]: Small sample size, but still.
