Reflections on first year of university

Learning to go beyond the default

For most parts of life, there is a pretty clear default path. In university, this looks something like: spend first year going to a few more social events than you typically would, follow along in your classes, possibly join a club/society, try to get an internship somewhere around your second-year summer (first-year if you’re bored/ambitious), do some exploring (often in the form of joining a sport or activity you haven't tried before), then gradually scale up the amount of work you put in during your last two years and focus on your CV to get a job in the end. A similar default path will exist for high school, work life, and all other walks of life.

Most people arriving at university start doing the default path: attend most of the social events during the introduction week, gradually increase the focus on your studies and then lock into a routine. This is not necessarily a bad place to start, and after all, where else would you? My main realization from first year isn’t so much that this is a bad place to be. After all, for some people the default might suit them fairly well, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, it is quite unlikely that the default will be a perfect (or even close to perfect) match, and I realized that it is very easy to trick yourself into believing that the default path is the right path (for you). Since everyone is pushing you to go in this direction (ask a random adult what you should do for your undergraduate degree, and they will likely give you some version of what I listed above), it is really easy to stop considering (completely) different ways you could be approaching university life. Even worse, it is easy to start thinking that not enjoying the default path means that you should change.

I think I fell into this trap pretty hard in my first year. Sure, going clubbing and some of the standard social events in the first semester makes a lot of sense. But at that point, I should have realized that it wasn’t for me, accepted that fact, and moved on to trying to find the communities that I enjoy (co-working spaces, discussion clubs, AI/ML). Instead, I never considered that there were significantly different ways I could do my first year in university, and tried to adapt myself (“Oh, I’m sure you’ll enjoy those parties after you go a few times and make friends”). This led to a lot of time spent trying to enjoy social scenes that just aren’t my cup of tea, instead of exploring things I may be more fond of.

At the start of my second year, I made a conscious choice to more proactively seek out the kind of spaces I thought I would enjoy, and I was really happy with finding a few (not a tonne, but a few) communities of people where I felt more at home (big shoutout to [orchard] and OAISI). I started being more selective with what I chose to spend my time on, trying to cut out a lot of things that I now know that I don’t enjoy (discussions about academics, certain classes, the typical social events), and instead fill it with things I like (talking about AI safety, attending student co-working spaces, classes I enjoy).

My own change to second year is by no means a revelatory amount of change-up, and there are still things I am excited about changing up from the default setting (I recently tried sleeping in the CS department together with some friends, instead of my usual dorm room - although I’m not sure that will become my new default). I also think this is a pretty common insight people reach toward the later years of their degree, many people are more intentional about what they do as they get used to university. But many people are not, and a large part of me still isn’t (even though I should be). And even with that, I know that I could have made the changes I made to my university approach much sooner than I did, if I had just been more up-front with myself much earlier about what I was missing in my life. I clung onto the default because it was the only thing I could envision my life being, realizing that I had more choice over what to do with my time at university is what allowed me to let that go.