Counting down

I couldn’t help but head back downtown for another half an hour to take a few more pictures of neat-looking spots. The weather hasn’t improved at all since last week or the week before, so this really is springtime. At least that gives all of the photos a similar feel.

I have less than a month until my final exams now, and then only a few weeks between then and the beginning of any future summer internship — with the trip to Taipei in there somewhere.

I’ve made good progress toward most of my long-term goals this week, but a lot of them came together just yesterday — it was an oddly productive Friday.

During one of my morning Chinese classes, I had a friend who’s also doing an EE-Chinese double major (although he’s in a different EE program) inform me that his advisor let him know that a study-abroad could count as an internship, too.

That seemed like a good thing to know, so at the end of our classes an hour and a half later, I ran to my advisor’s office and asked him about this too (with a preparatory email to let him know what I was getting into). The answer was that nobody had done it before (which I interpret here as a no, to be fully honest), but seeing as of my two semester internship blocks the first one is this coming fall, this had me additionally motivated to keep looking for a job opening.

An additional conversation about a job application and my resume turned into scheduling an hour meeting next Tuesday with the career services office, and only an hour later came an email bearing my first invitation to an interview at the company I was most hoping to get my first internship with!

I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to fill the hour career services meeting at first, but now I think I have plenty to discuss.

If I can get this internship, it’ll both make my resume look better for any potential future internships, give me a pathway to trying to get noticed on the job in the hopes that they renew my internship and give me next summer, too, and gets me much less stressed about having my required internship blocks done before spring of 2027, when I plan on studying abroad. Three fewer reasons not to sleep at night.

For the time being, then, my job is to project my enthusiasm, my ability to learn, and my experience. In about a week and a half, I’m going to drive a few hours/cities away in order to have an in-person interview and to give a presentation about some of my relevant projects. I’m already counting down the days.

Before then, though, I have two exams this coming week. Yesterday, I had a friend with a decently large homework assignment to do about digital logic — most of the same things covered in the digital systems class I took last year — so I told him I’d sit next to him and try to be helpful.

I usually appreciate study-grouping, as someone who now lives in an “off-campus” apartment and can’t really get any peace in my bedroom.

While he was doing that, I was trying to do some circuits homework and couldn’t figure out how to get the parameters of a bandpass filter out of the transfer function. We’re going to be tested on that in less than a week, so I have some office hours to attend — it doesn’t help that at the beginning of the unit, the professor said that “this content is the hardest to understand out of this whole class” (why do they say that? I think it’d be much more helpful if professors were there to reassure students that this isn’t too bad and that they’re here for our learning, which I understand to be the reality).

Now that the end of the semester is on its way, I put together the obligatory list of projected class grades using the data I’ve got at the moment. I currently seem to have a B in both of my engineering classes this semester — obviously the important ones — so I plan on trying to recover a little bit after getting somewhat lost in the past unit in circuits. The second exam this week, for the other engineering class, is for my IC Technology class and is about diffusion, which I think I understand a little better. I have some homeworks to reference and this professor is usually nice enough to hold review sessions one or two days before any given exam.

I’m definitely doing okay in other classes, though. Both of my Chinese classes this semester are As, even if I’m starting to hit the part of my education where I know enough to know the sheer volume of what I don’t know — and the part of the semester where thinking becomes a little more difficult. I was reviewing one of the presentations that I made with the professor yesterday, and we didn’t get past the title slide before she looked at what I had called the presentation and commented, “…that’s so English!”.

Writing is challenging, but speaking is even more difficult, too. I seem to have an easier time just listening to people who know what they’re doing. If there’s one thing that being a language learner has taught me, it’s that everything just comes out better when you think before you speak and listen a lot.

It’s that and it’s remembering not to compare yourself to other people — the eternal struggle. My long-term internship search has brought me to LinkedIn many times, and on one or another doom-scroll I’ve seen a number of people giving the advice to remember that every day, the only thing you need to do is be better than you were yesterday. Nobody’s comparing you to anyone else — self-improvement is your own process, and it can go as slowly or as quickly as you want. I’ve just been keeping that in mind lately, and it’s been making my life a little easier.

So this week, I just need to remember to think before I speak, listen a lot, go to office hours, and to have confidence. If I can keep those up for another two months, I think I’ll be okay. After that, I have no clue. Hopefully I’ll be working my dream internship.

…

Since I went back downtown, I took a few more pictures of an area — the east end — that I missed the first time. I think this is supposed to be the attractive tourist part of town, but it seems to have a reputation for a reason. It’d be nice to come back when the weather is better.

I think a lot of these buildings are standard to major cities. I don’t know exactly where Rochester lies on the “major city” spectrum, but I’ve always lived fairly far from any urban center, so these all look pretty cool to me.

I noticed this street on Google Street View when trying to make a tally of the places that I missed when I visited last week, so I had to go in-person. You can see exactly which campus this is on — probably the best college in the area — and for all of the work they do here they definitely deserve the aesthetically-interesting space to do it in. I’m sure there’s more to see, and I’ll be back.

I’m not sure if this building is objectively notable at all, but this was a neat photo with the street signs and the tree overhead. For a building that’s got an engraving of that kind of company name on the front, it still looks very clean and well-cared for. I don’t think this company is still in the building (and I’m not sure they even still exist), but this is some key urban mood-setting.

I’ll be back with two fewer exams to do and less than a week until career judgment day. Waiting will be hard.

Thanks again!