For those of you guys who attended Olin, you might recognize the above as the library quiet reading room. I think it’s pretty safe to say that I spent most of my waking hours at college in that one room.
I’ve recently graduated college so I wanted reflect a little on how my hobbies have changed. We’ll take a look at my activities before college, during college, how they’ve changed, and what I hope to do in the future.
Before College
In high school if you asked me what the three things that I did, in the order of what I couldn’t live without, it would be:
- Reading manga
- Playing MMORPGs
- Listening to Kpop
I read tons of manga (Japanese comics) in high school, spent hours on hours on online manga readers, scroll, click, scroll, click. I read everything, from ninja things like Naruto, sports things like Hajime no Ippo, romance things like Hana Kimi, to gender bender things like Princess Jellyfish. And I would re-read things, not just short things, but things like One Piece (which at this point is over a hundred volumes long), multiple times. It helped that I have relatively short term memory. Every reread was still pretty fresh.
I enjoyed playing MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role playing games (which is honestly a mess of an acronym), Maplestory characterized most of my middle school years, while Vindictus was what I played in high school. After school getting home I would turn on the computer and meet up with my online friends. Like manga, I pumped hours into these. I was bored and there was nothing to do afterschool, no friends to meet up with, no clubs I belonged to, nowhere I could go in the vicinity without a car. Online I had lots of friends, I was part of my guild’s leadership, and I had a constant group of people I hung out with all the time. In game, I collected lots of different clothing items for my character and paid real money to buy fashion items from it’s in game store, in all honesty my in game fashion sense was eons better than the wardrobe that I owned in real life.
I also followed K-pop (Korean pop music) extensively. It’s actually kind of time intensive hobby. I kept up with lots of groups, DBSK, Super Junior, Block B, Teen Top, BAP, SHINee, 2NE1, Big Bang, and F(x), to name a few. K-pop music videos are somewhat iconic in the genre, I would watch the music videos for new songs multiple times a week, commit them to memory, attempt to learn the dance, make my brother watch the music video, attempt to learn the dance with my brother. For bands that I really liked, I would search on YouTube for variety shows that they appeared in and binge watch all of those too.
During College
College was kind of chaotic. I suddenly had all these real life friends, schoolwork became something that I actually spent time on, and I got involved in way too many campus activities. Time became something that was extremely rare, and I couldn’t really afford to keep up my high school hobbies. Manga became something I only occasionally read over long breaks, I lost touch with my online friends, and I slowly lost track of all the different K-pop groups that were immerging.
In their place I:
- Joined the school’s Go club and started to play Go
- Learned how to play the ukulele and started singing more
- Learned about the world of human centric design
- Started blogging
- Started drawing comics
- Created a K-pop dance group (despite not really keeping up with K-pop)
- Learned how to melt glass and create beads
- Got trained on most machines in the school's machine shop
- Started rock climbing
God knows how long this blog would be if I started going into all of them, so here are just some brief highlights.
I’ve always been very much about me. A lot of things come easy to me, I enjoy being the best, I recognize that I have a large ego. Pursuing design has occasionally reminded me to put that aside, to instead think about someone else for a while, to experience their lives, or at least recognize when I’m not authentically acting in their best interest. I think that doing design at Olin has made me less selfish, less self-centered (though I recognize the irony in my statement since I’m talking about how I have changed).
I’ve also discovered that I enjoy writing. Writing in high school was always a chore, something that had a rigid format, statement, example 1, example 2. But since starting my blog I’ve found that writing helps me process my thoughts, reflect on my life, make decisions, share heavier thoughts that I wouldn’t normally toss into conversations with friends or acquaintances. It’s still very much one sided though, most of my readers anonymously click in, sometimes I know who you are because you like my post, very rarely is there dialogue. I think want a little more from my blog, but until I have it I’m not sure exactly what would satisfy me.
Moving Forwards
There are a lot of things I want to do moving forwards. Supposedly life after Olin means that I’ll gain a lot of my time back. With this time I want to:
- Learn how to fingerpick on my ukulele
- Start my own business doing something that I love
- Make more art
- Learn how to watercolor
- Get better at rock climbing
- Learn how to make patterns for clothing
- Sew more
- Be able to read novels in Japanese
- Get better at playing go
- Learn how to read Chinese
- Get better at speaking both Cantonese and Mandarin
- Travel around China
- Travel around South East Asia
Some of these things are near future things; some are long term investments. I’m looking forward to accomplishing all of them.
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