welcome, all, to the first actual blog I'm writing.

i've been thinking about what i wanted my first post to be about, before i figured out that a) it should be something i'll keep working on long-term, and b) it doesn't really matter.

so here's what i've come up with.

every week, i'm going to write a short post detailing what i failed at in that week, and talk through what happened and why i failed, and see if i can take some viewpoints away from the failures.

i can't fail if i don't try something new, so if i end up not having enough failures to fill up a blog post, that's a pretty strong signal that something, somewhere isn't going right. maybe i'm not trying new things, or hard enough things, or i'm sinking into complacency. the blog, then, is something that's going to keep me honest as i build and learn about what i want to do.

cool, let's get it.

here's what i failed at this week.

a) college

this week, i got back most, if not all, of my college decisions from the u.s.. unsurprisingly, it didn't go well.

i got rejected from all the schools i saw myself at for the next 4 years.

mit, stanford, yale, caltech, columbia, harvard, umich ann arbor, princeton...

the list just went on, and on, and on

i applied to 32 schools, and ended up with 19 rejections, 6 waitlists, and 7 acceptances.

the main reason i haven't written anything yet, even though this blog was up pretty long ago, is because i'm still reeling from the results of the process.

but in parallel, i'm reflecting on what the whole grind (4 years of near perfect grades, and years of impactful work on what i love) has bought me, and i'm going to write another blog, a little later, to comment on this.

but it still hurts though, regardless of any/all after-the-fact justifications. maybe i just had a flawed mental image of seeing myself attending a top college, which has now broken pretty much completely.

(writing about this does help, tho. try it.)

b) getting enough momentum start working on something cool

so, college apps were tough.

i ain't proud to admit it, but i spent a lot of time last week just completely out of sorts in terms of work.

i mean, i'm still putting 10-12 hour shifts studying for finals, but i can't really bring myself to start something new.

but i'm back up, and i'm going to commit to learning enough about a topic this week to write a proper blog post about it the next week.

*********

that's pretty much it for this week.

wow, this was bland as hell. maybe something else to focus on is making these blogs sound less depressing.

see you next week, hopefully with some more failures we can all laugh at, or learn something from :D