Back to school
Jeremi and Luca discuss the upcoming fall quarter
Welcome back to Jeremi and Luca’s Newsletter, an update every Sunday from two friends connected by a relentless desire to learn. Here’s a closer look at what we’re reading, working on, or thinking about.
Jeremi: Cooking & Cardio
I’m going down to Santa Barbara in three days, and I want to set some intentions before I leave.
Part of my goal in going down early is to situate myself and to get into a rhythm before school starts. While this summer has been incredibly rewarding, I’ve had a few habits fall to the side that I want to refocus on.
One is cooking. In the beginning of the year, I had gotten to the point where I was eating out about 1-2 times a week, and making the rest of my meals myself. In Berkeley, this balance swung much more in favor of going out. At the time, this served my goal of getting to know my housemates, as we would often eat out together for lunch or dinner.
But from a long-term perspective, I want to swing the balance more towards cooking for myself. Both because I want to eat healthier and cooking allows me to do that, and also because I get a certain satisfaction and a feeling of resourcefulness when I am fully responsible for my meals.
Another habit I want to emphasize is morning cardio workouts. Again something that I was really happy with at the start of the year—going to bed early, waking up early, doing workouts with the triathlon team. In Berkeley, most people were on a later schedule, and I shifted in that direction to spend more time with them. The best time for collaboration on projects was often after 10pm.
As for the actual workouts themselves, I replaced swimming/biking/running with rock-climbing. If you’ve known me for some time, you know that I climbed a lot in the early years of high school, but stopped when COVID hit. It was really nice to climb again this summer.
However, when it comes to the type of fitness I want to have, I know cardio and endurance play a big part in it. If I don’t exercise, I feel either antsy or exhausted for no good reason. The community of the triathlon team was a helpful motivator to keep me consistently swimming and running. I’m exited to go down to Santa Barbara and join these group workouts again.
It may sound a little silly, but I do place a lot of value on these sorts of small habits. When I’m eating healthy, going to bed early, exercising hard, everything else flows a little more smoothly. It contributes to a feeling of contentedness.
Over the summer, I prioritized other things over these habits. I don’t regret it—balance is not a perfect middle ground held indefinitely. Priorities shift with the opportunities that we are presented with.
In any case, here is my intention for the fall: more of the small habits!
Luca: Colloquiums at Cal
Last semester, my favorite class was a public policy colloquium focused on tech, risk, and national security. Speakers were brought in weekly from the defense tech space, and the class was comprised of undergrads, graduate students, PhDs, and professors.
The speakers were incredibly interesting—people from the intelligence community, tech startups building for national defense, etc. Plus, the mix of students (older/younger, technical/nontechnical) meant engaging questions and conversations.
“Colloquium” is really a much better word for this group than “class,” and I wasn’t too familiar with that word or course style until I took it.
But going into this semester, when I was choosing classes, I looked up the word “colloquium” in our course catalog… and found two others to enroll in:
- An entrepreneurship colloquium with speakers like Mark Cuban and Garry Tan
- A political science colloquium focused on understanding this presidential term, with past speakers including Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom
For both, the professors have remarkable reach into their respective fields; in political science, we’ll be hearing from people across the political spectrum, from the current administration to news commentators to constitutional lawyers to opposition voices.
(One quirk of this happening at Berkeley is that we aren’t told in advance who’s coming to campus in an effort to avoid protestors disrupting the class.)
Exposure to interesting people and speakers has been something I’ve been looking for at Cal, so I’m excited to find it in these colloquiums. Although, I was kicking myself when all the freshmen were asked to raise their hands and a third of the room’s arms shot up—how did they find out about this?!
But nonetheless, last week was our first week back at school, and it’s been great so far: three industrial engineering courses, these three colloquiums, and a class on space and national security policy.
You guys are such winners!!!