UCI Survival Guide: 2024 Winter (7/9/2024)

 I really put off writing this until way later, so some of these thoughts may not be 100% indicative of how I was feeling during this quarter lol.

This quarter wasn't neccesarily my most busy quarter, but I for sure took a lot of mental damage this quarter. It was quite eventful, and after this quarter I'm starting to have very mixed thoughts on the Irvine Dance Community, but also just college in general.

On paper, this quarter had potential to be one of the best quarters of college, and some of the best months of my life in general. I hosted Claim to Fame which was a success, and I was even able to go to the East Coast to the NCBA finals jam as the west coast representatives. I was also able to go to UCSC for one of their jams with BBA. That trip was super fun, although I didn't make it out of prelims at the jam so I had to deal with some personal demons during that jam specifically.

I also started working for Axiom Materials this quarter, which meant that I had a car finally. This meant that I was actually able to do things like visit Darren for his birthday, or go get a haircut with Wei. It also meant that I became a certified BBA driver, which I did a lot of. On paper, this was everything that I ever wanted.

But, the amount of stress and needless bullshit that I had to go through this quarter really did a lot to me mentally, so overall this quarter ended up on one of my worse quarters at UCI. Claim to Fame was stressful to manage, and I spent that entire event being stressed out because of the Breakkonnect glitch than actually having fun. Right after that, I went through a really weird week (in retrospect), where I basically thought that someone I knew had forced his gf into having unprotected sex with her or something. That got resolved in around a week, but then right after that someone tried to cancel me to the entire IDC with some screenshots of stuff I allegedly said in Discord and in IG dms, and then I released an emotional response, and then I eventually had to have an in person meeting with the IDC. This strained not only my mental, but also my relationships with people on BBA (who were people that I really trusted and was really close to), and also my/BBA's relations to the IDC. It was honestly a whole mess, and I still think that the anonymous user is a bitchmade waste of sperm and energy, but it is what it is.

I also had my first actual panic attack this quarter, around finals week! I basically had to deal with the Jun situation again, where this bboy grad student basically was banned from the club (really long story short). This whole thing had started back when I was entering my third year, but it got brought up again, and I had my own issues with how the whole thing was being dealt with, and eventually I just couldn't take it before and I left a BBA board meeting to just cry on the floor for an hour. That was sort of a wake up call for myself that I had really been putting myself through too much during the quarter.


Classes Taken:

CBE 140B (Chemical Engineering Laboratory II) - Quinton Smith (A)

Smith is so chill. Even though this is still lab and lab sucks, I actually did enjoy this lab class. What I mean by that is that I liked how I didn't really have to show up to discussion, and I also liked how I could just talk to my fellow chemical engineers in the downtime during each lab. I learned so much lore about each person. Also, Smith basically just gave everyone an A so that was super nice.


CBE 150A (Chemical Engineering Design I) - Omar Hamid (B-)

Honestly, I was ready to get a C in this class. This was not a good class. I felt as though it was structured weirdly, but the lecturer is probably the worst part. Hamid stumbles over his own words and sounds like he's about to cry all the time. He exudes the opposite of confidence, and so it's hard to take him seriously. I kinda stopped going to class, and to be honest I did barely any work in any of the group projects as well. I could tell my team wasn't super happy with me, but I had a super busy quarter so I didn't really care. Lame ass class.

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