April Updates
Getting back on track & making progress
April was a very interesting month, with great experiences (first time in the US), and getting productive again, overcoming what seemed like a burnout from the diverse, sometimes intense, work I had to do over the course of the year. Yes, gap year, I know, but I had to do something to fill my time, and it seemed like I did more than I should at times, especially the first half with the college applications and many different activities.
The biggest thing that happened this month was MIT Campus Preview Weekend: 3.14 (or so they call it) days of fun experiences within the MIT campus and community, getting to know more people than possibly my entire life, and participating in exciting events to get to know MIT as a whole. It was my first time in the US (but not the first long trip from Greece, not even the second longest, but the third), and I was largely out of my comfort zone, having to speak only in English for 3 days was quite unusual for me (but I got used to it, and will have to even more in the next 4 years (I even started thinking in English at times, which scared me a lot). Most of CPW was a great experience, I learned a ton about MIT and its people, had fun, but also had to walk a lot, within campus, but mostly when my phone died and I had to search a huge area of Boston to find the fraternity I lived in (across the river from campus): 30 kilometers in a single day was not so fun, my legs were dead for the next day and a half.
After I returned from CPW (and slept, a lot), I had to catch up a bit with things that I had lost (although I tried to complete some of them before leaving to not have that issue as much). I had to complete the readings and exercises for an AI safety course I’m doing (that has been running for quite a while now), and get to the second, and hardest, part of the course: building a project. Meanwhile I had been stuck in my robotics project for quite some time, trying to figure out a very complex framework (more on that in the previous post), so I had two big projects to complete now. Oh, and I also had the TKS Moonshot to get started on and make progress there.
At the same time, I had been having quite a difficult time getting motivated and productive, so before starting that sprint of projects I took a little time to relax, and finally put away all the things that had been bothering me until that time. Thankfully, I quickly got back on track, found the desire to build stuff again (that I had lost for some time), and started working. I have started making progress on my robotics project, found an idea (and planned it for the most part) for the AI safety course, and an idea for the TKS Moonshot too, with a detailed plan for how that would work too.
So, May will probably be the month where I complete many things that had been unresolved for some time, and produce some great results. See you next month!