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Brandon’s Idealized Brain

Although my mind doesn’t always look like this, I think this beautifully artistic graphic represents my priorities pretty accurately. Of course, school and studying will almost always take top priority for me. UCI offers some really amazing opportunities and ways to get out and have fun, but the reality is that more than likely you are paying quite a lot of money with the primary purpose of obtaining a great education. Often times it’s easy to lose sight of that, and I’ve personally let my studies slip a little more than I would’ve liked this quarter. I think that as a student, it’s natural that your studies should take top priority. All that being said however, your health and well being are just as important in the grand scheme of things.

I’ve always believed that your studies and well being go hand in hand. It’s hard to be successful in one if you’re unsuccessful in the other. For instance, if you’ve been getting 3 hours of sleep for the past week you’re definitely not going to be able to perform well in your classes despite the studying you’ve done. On top of that, you’re probably going to feel terrible and not going to have the motivation to keep studying hard. At the same time, if you slip and let your grades suffer there’s a good chance that you’ll become stressed and that’ll take a toll on your health and well being as well. It’s important to balance both your studies and your health so that you can enjoy your time at UCI.

Social life and leisure time is the third section of my brain, and may as well also be a part of the well being section. Aside from friends at UCI, I find it’s personally important for me to keep in touch with family and friends back home. I get homesick quite easily, so part of taking care of myself includes finding time to call my parents and siblings. Me and my friends all love video games, so to keep in touch we play multiplayer games together. The icon to the right of the leisure section is for a pc video game client called Steam, which lets all of us connect and socialize while we’re playing.

The last section is extra curricular activities, which include clubs and hall activities like the FYEP philanthropy project. When I was in high school, I naively thought that extra curriculars were just a way to help increase my chances of getting into college, but now that I’m here, it’s more apparent than ever that they are still important. Counselors and mentors always stress that networking and making connections with a variety of people is one of the most important things you can do in college. Grades are important of course, but meeting new people is also important to help find opportunities which may even lead to internships and career paths.

Although this brain illustration is overly simplified, I hope it gives a good idea of what is important to me and how I try to organize my priorities here at UCI.

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Inside the Freshman Mind

Everyone in university has important details to keep in mind, be it the date of the next midterm, your next enrollment window, or the details of the study session that you just went through. For me however, I like to tell people I’m a pretty simple person. So I used the following picture to describe the things I personally keep in mind while at school.
As you can see, its pretty simple. Four boxes for the four major pillars that keep me going. There is a hierarchy to this image in that like in all things, studies should take priority because that is the reason you’re here at UCI after all. Studying itself is important to me because its like the key that will open up doors for you in the future. I like to think of studying as a way to make that key unique so that the doors that become available to you are ones that will fit your key. Thus, studying takes the highest priority in my mind.

Next on the hierarchy is socializing. This is also another important aspect of college like and is especially important for me because its friends that you learn which professor to take, what is most likely going to be on the final, and if the class is enjoyable or not. I used the logo of an app called Discord because that’s what my friends and I usually use to communicate albeit playing games together or just having a conversation. There was a recent series of events that really made me appreciate having friends in university that I will get to later in the post.

Down the hierarchy is food. Despite hearing some dorm mates complain about the food here, I feel like it was strictly better than what I was eating in high school so I’m not complaining. That being said I put food in my brain because there’s no better feeling than just sitting down, eating, and just talking with friends or studying. I often see people in the Anteatery studying because it has a moderate amount of noise that for some people helps them concentrate. On top of that eating food also keeps you alive so that’s also a nice bonus.

Lastly there’s arguably the most influential aspect of university life, sleep. The photo is also extremely accurate of what goes through my head whenever I head back to the dorm. The question is no longer “what time should I sleep” it has evolved to become “how long can I get away with sleeping” because at UCI, there is always things to do. Sleep is important because simply if your tired, your not learning and that would be detrimental to the most important part of this hierarchy.

Now, for that story that made me appreciate friends. This actually happened yesterday while working on a project for my BIOSCI 9B class that I took with a few of my friends. Being an online class, we didn’t need to go anywhere for our lectures but that’s besides the point. This project is essentially just to create your own food experiment and write a report on it and turn it in. Simple right? That’s because it is. My friends and I decided to extract red cabbage juice and utilize its sensitivity to pH to show the effects of making pancakes with different ingredients. We didn’t foresee the effect of boiling the cabbage which ended up causing the first and second floor of the dorm to smell strongly of cabbage. That was also the night that we learned that cabbage is not popular with the other people in our dorm. We had a lineup of ingredients to mix in like bananas, pineapples, almonds, and the strangest one, baking soda. The whole experiment was going well up until the final portion of the experiment. That was when someone in the group thought it would be a good idea to eat the pancakes that we made. Looking back, 3 of the 4 pancakes that we made were actually pretty good except the baking soda one. I can still taste it just typing about it. It was the unholy combination of way too much baking soda and pancake mix. Now you may be wondering why use baking soda? It was because there was no fruit or vegetable that we could think of that was basic enough to change the color of the mix. Almonds came close but the amount that we needed to even change the color slightly made it so that the pancake ended up being a brick rather than a pancake. Now back to this horrid creation, when you chewed that pancake, you could feel the granules of baking soda between your teeth. It was also beyond bitter and just overall an unpleasant experience. Sadly, one of the members of the group took the worst of it as he ended up having to run outside and throw up around a total of 8 times. So, for future reference, never use baking soda in pancakes or if you do, don’t eat it.

 

Zot On!


-Josh