not-matthias
Reflecting on the second year of Uni.
Posted on :: Tags: life

It's been a year since I wrote the blog post about my first year of university. It was truly life-changing, and I didn't think it could get any crazier... but it did.

Meta: I was thinking for a long time about whether or not I should even release this publically, or if I should just keep it in my private Obsidian vault. I value privacy and am often overthinking whether or not to share information. I see social media as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can be great for building an audience and connecting but it can also be the source of comparison and unhappiness.

I've realized that the benefits outweigh the downsides. Even if just one person decides to go to university because of this post, I see it as an absolute win. University changed my life, so why can't it change yours?

What happened?

0xA Science Association

A few friends and I founded an association called 0xA and organized multiple events throughout the year. It started small with around 30 people coming to our kickoff event, but then we ended up organizing an event with more than 100 attendees. As one of the organizers and photographers of the events, I feel proud when I go to our website and look through the pictures of our past events.

Moving out

I would have never believed, how much this changed my life. I always had the assumption that living near the university is a waste of money because you can stay at home and live rent-free. Sure, you might have to commute every day, but you can still use the time productively. I spent the 3 hours of travel time per day often reading, writing in my journal, or working on university assignments. Yet I still think I wasted a lot of time.

Living directly next to the university brings a lot of benefits I hadn't thought about:

  • You can go to pretty much every meetup or party and leave whenever you want. Before I either had to sleep at a friend's place or catch the last train at 10PM.
  • Being physically close to friends allowed spontaneous meetups or talks until 3AM in the morning after the party.
  • My university dorm had a really active community. There were cafe chats, bar nights, regular tables, and events throughout the year. I met a lot of interesting people there.
  • You'll be in a completely new environment where you can decide how you want to live your life. This gave me a sense of control over my life, which was truly inspiring. I also tried out a lot of new things, which I probably wouldn't have done if I was still living at home.

Gym

I also started going to the gym more often. It all started when I was doing a few push-ups every day in July 2022, which turned into a habit pretty quickly. I noticed that I was getting stronger, which was motivating. At that time, I didn't really focus on my diet but I had fun and built some muscle which made me more confident.

Dancing

I never really learned how to dance, until I decided to sign up for Hip Hop / Urban Dance classes with two friends. And it didn't only change my confidence and life at parties, but also outside of that. These dance classes taught me how to vibe to the music, while not caring about what others think.

One time at a party, I saw a girl dancing and was fascinated by her moves. A friend of mine told me that it's called shuffle dancing. I was excited to learn it as well and did so one step at a time. It was really hard and bad in the beginning, but I stuck with it. I even convinced a friend to start learning it as well. It was so much fun just doing our thing at the parties, not caring about what others think about our mediocre dance moves.

I also love the shuffle community. I can't tell you how many times someone randomly came up to me at a party and then started to join me shuffle dancing. I got compliments about my dance moves and got to meet new people. It's a great icebreaker, but most importantly, it's a lot of fun and great cardio! :D

Meetups

Linz is the home to many meetups, ranging from DevOps to JavaScript. I went to almost all of them, and it was totally worth it. You learn about new technologies or projects (e.g. plaintextaccounting or how to create self-hosted and self-styled vector maps) and have the opportunity to meet like-minded people.

And there's always free food and drinks :P

Taking more pictures videos

I want to document my life so that I can look back and see what I have been up to. I've been taking a lot of pictures, but then a friend of mine convinced me to take videos instead. Why? Videos contain a lot more information and are more entertaining to watch. You can also hear background noise (music in a club, birds in nature, or maybe just cars) which is not a thing in pictures. Pictures only capture parts of a moment, while videos let you experience everything about that moment again.

University

Most of the lectures I took weren't that interesting, but I had 3 highlights:

  • Networks Anonymity: Learned about Tor, I2P, Nym and Freenet.
  • Advanced Operating Systems: Learned about operating systems and hardware interaction, drivers, modern scheduling and memory management algorithms in Linux.
  • Functional Programming: Learned about functional programming with OCaml, reasoning, efficiency, type checking, and type inference.

To sleep or not to sleep?

I conducted an experiment by accident: Is it better to focus on sleep at the cost of university, or vice versa?

I read Why We Sleep and realized how important sleep is, but I think I overestimated it a little bit. In the winter semester, I focused on getting 8 hours of sleep. So if I had a lecture at 8:30 and I went to bed at 2:00, then I wouldn't go to the lecture because I would wake up at 10:00. Because of this, I missed a lot of lectures and had a really bad sleep schedule.

I tried to do the opposite in the summer semester: Go to all lectures, no matter how much sleep I got. Even if I only get 5 hours of sleep, I still go to the lecture. Because of this, staying up actually had a consequence which made me go to bed earlier. And it's still better to go to the lecture tired than to not even show up.

Other highlights

Final Words

While I am writing this, I already started my third year of university with an exchange semester in Groningen. The last month has already been an incredible experience, I can only wonder where I'll be in a year.

If you found this type of blog post interesting, let me know. I'm currently thinking about writing more about personal experiences and life lessons.

As always, thanks for reading!