/End of Year Ramble

Just wrapped up my penultimate semester at my university and somehow ended up back in São Paulo, Brazil. This past semester? Stressful. Not because I had a ton of classes - just one, actually - but because it was the class. Linear algebra. Three years ago, it completely wrecked me, and I avoided retaking it like the plague. But eventually, you’ve got to bite the bullet, right? The only thing that kept me going was having a better professor this time around and the sheer terror of failing again. I’d worked out beforehand that I only needed around 40% on the final to pass (25% of the total grade), but that didn’t stop me from sweating bullets during the exam. I spent way too much time flipping to the rubric on the back and doing mental gymnastics: “Okay, I’ll get half points here, nothing there, but this one’s probably right... maybe?” It wasn’t until I’d been in Brazil for a couple of days that the scores came out. B-. Not great, not terrible. But I’ll take it.

Of course, linear algebra wasn’t the only thing on my plate. I wrapped up my final co-op block - third term with the same company. Can’t say much about the actual work (NDA stuff), but I learned a lot about myself. Like, how to work alone without completely isolating myself, how to navigate team dynamics without stepping on toes, and - this was a big one - how to ask for help. Turns out, I’m terrible at that. I’ve trained myself to be so self-reliant that I’ll sit there banging my head against a problem, scrolling through endless documentation and ChatGPT replies, convinced I can solve it on my own. 90% of the time, I do. But that last 10%? That’s when I hit a wall, and then comes the real struggle: “Is it too late to ask? Will they think I’m incompetent?” Slowly but surely, I’m getting over that weird self-consciousness. Managers are there to help, not judge. (I think.)

When I wasn’t drowning in work or class, I was grinding Counter-Strike. Pugs, scrims, matches - it was basically my life outside of everything else. This collegiate season was insane. We brought up two players from D2 to the D1 roster, and I stepped into my first season as captain. Huge responsibility. Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing at first, but I just focused on building good vibes with the team both in and out of the server. We practiced twice a week, usually four scrims total, and spent a lot of time hanging out outside of CS. I’ve made some of my closest friends through this game. And yeah, I’ve played CS for over 7,000 hours, but this semester? Next level. In October alone, I played 172 pugs. Add in DM, scrims, and matches, and I don’t even want to know the total. Zero regrets, though. The progress we made, individually and as a team, was incredible. We fell to our biggest rival in the end, but it doesn’t erase everything we fought for along the way.

Now, I’ve got something exciting waiting for me back home - parts for my upgraded PC build. I finally got my hands on a 9800X3D and paired it with an ASUS B650E-I motherboard. Picking the board was a struggle. ASRock's B650 boards are such a good deal, but I didn’t want to compromise. Still, I had to settle for just two M.2 drives, because apparently, no other AM5 ITX boards (except Gigabyte’s) give you more. It’s a little frustrating, but whatever - I’m excited to see how it stacks up. Once I’m back, I’m planning a head-to-head comparison against my current build. Expect some standard benchmarks and Counter-Strike-specific tests in a future post.