This Semester's Break

11 May, 2025

Another semester done! Exams went alright, though I don't know if I did well for my Learning & Cognition subject. I'm currently in my semester break, and I have around 3 weeks left of it. I hope that I'm able to work on some of the things that I've been putting off throughout the semester.

Apart from trying to achieve my weekly work goals, I want to:

• Set up a time to speak with my supervisor to go over my current research direction within the few weeks. If possible, I'm really hoping to have my proposal 60-70% done by the end of the break.
  • There's some things I need to wrap my head around - especially the framework I want to focus on for the variables that I've chosen so far.
  • This one would probably take up most of my time? I need to get through a bunch of research articles and extract the most important points from there that I want to present during the call.
• Complete my HSK 1 Course from Chinese Zero to Hero. I got the bundle a year or more ago for a discount, and I completed the first half of this course last year. I want to brush up on my Mandarin, and although I know most of the vocabulary so far, I think the course helped remind me a lot of the ones I've completely left out since my kindergarten days.
• Read more! I haven't been reading as much, and I would love to finish these books, if possible:
  • Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
  • Jujutsu Kaisen Volume 1
  • Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
  • My Friends by Fredrik Backman
• Work on my blog! I hope to write a few posts (apart from my week notes and listening journals) and work towards my 100DaystoOffload challenge. I have some ideas already, but I just have to sit down one day and get that done.
• Respond to my Bear Blog emails! I've had a few emails sitting in my inbox for weeks now, and I've been putting it off waiting for a day to just get back to the people who wrote me. I appreciate the conversations with the people there, and I want to get back to them as soon as I can.
• These are not a priority, but more so if I feel like it:
  • Go through the Bible Project's Introduction to the Hebrew Bible course. I'm in the second module and am taking it slow, but so far it's been pretty interesting. I'm not a religious person, but I have many around me who are (and The Locked Tomb is super Bible coded lol, which motivates me), and I always found that it is such an intriguing piece of historical literature. This is also supplemented by The New Oxford Annotated Bible for a more academic perspective of everything. This is just for the fun of it, type of thing, so not too much pressure here.
  • Update my Bookshelf Archive! I've been building a Bookshelf section for my blog, hoping for a means to have one place to list down everything I've ever read, including reviews I've written, ratings, and quotes. It's super simple and some of it are ready in Obsidian, but I'm hoping to get more of it done before I mass publish on Bear.

I'm hoping I get to accomplish 1/2 of these, but I won't beat myself up too much if it doesn't happen. I honestly did feel mildly burned out when I got back after finals. It was weeks after weeks of just grinding assignments and revision, paired with someone at work getting fired out of nowhere, it was all pretty exhausting. Regardless, I'm happy that I get to just stay home and work on some of the things that make me happy periodically :)

[42/100] for #100DaysToOffload

#100DaysToOffload #personal