Busy Start for Second Semester

lol the title is giving alliteration

Second semester started much more abrupt as i expected. on the first day of second semester i had already been assigned 100 tests and 500 assignments due for the following week. one thing i love about my teachers is that most of them have a monthly calendar or schedule for the students so we can plan our weeks accordingly.

me, angela H, and helen on the field (we beat space rocks)

Because of First Tech Challenge's Inter-league Tournaments for my robotics team (Gamma Rocks 25735), everyone was super busy preparing for the competitions. the hardware team was busy building our team's new robot, and i myself (software) had to work on configurations for our 5 motors and servos on tele-op as well as autonomous. By the final week before ILT, i was SUPER SUPER stressed as the other software team mate/ captain of our team was busy with her other extracurriculars, so I had to step in for her and finish all software parts of the robot. Our team's mentor coach Simon helped a lot though! He led me through the hurdles and problems with configuration, as its usually the most tedious and detail-oriented fraction of the software set up. I used encoder to create a simple autonomous for our robot to score a high basket, which was a pretty big accomplishment for me!

At the end of ILT, my team managed to make it into the top 10 teams out of 25, which is a really surprising outcome considering this is our first year in FTC! We got into quarter finals, and I won the semi-finalist pin for Deans List! I was really shocked cus i lowkey forgot to go to the interview for it (which is mandatory), and i still managed to get in (?) 😭

in apcsp class studying for spanish test 🙏 😔

In terms of academics and school work, I feel January was the most stressful and difficult month for me this year. i was getting Cs for my english honors class, and my grades were not starting it off well. i continued to study on, and i tried my best. i think one of the biggest problems to ending up with bad grades on my tests despite studying so hard is the lack of sleep. the last two weeks of January was pretty brutal on my sleep schedule. I slept around 1-2am on an average basis, and during class i'd get sleepy (especially during 1st period), causing me to lose focus.

despite all the challenges, i finally made it out of January alive, and i'm looking forward to a smoother month for February