Studying, Books, Tea, and other little delights!

20.5.19 // really loving how the sun isn’t setting at 4pm anymore!

95/100 days of productivity — 22.05.19

may 21, 2019 - graduation

i did it! i finally graduated from uc berkeley this past sunday!! thank you to all my family, friends, teachers, and professors for supporting me these past 4 years, and thank you to all of you guys for supporting me for the past 2 years as well! it was a tough but very rewarding experience, and i know that this is only the beginning of a long and hard journey ahead of me. i’ve learned and grown a lot, not only as a musician, but also as a person. i’m proud to be part of the department of music, class of 2019, and i’m excited to move forward to the next chapter of my life!

GO BEARS!! 💙💛🐻💛💙

studygram: gloomium

Little study sesh at the lib📝

16 /1OO days of productivity

i think that “excelling” looks different for everyone! because we all want different things out of grad school, and all struggle with different parts of it. but i’ve been thinking about my own grad school experience, now that it’s winding its way to its end, so i can say that for me at least, two things have made a really big difference:

do your own work. partially i mean this: worry about your own damn self, not about what other people are doing. getting anxious over other peoples’ successes and achievements does nothing for your own. but i also, mostly, mean it like this: the first paper i ever wrote in grad school came back absolutely drenched in red ink. i don’t think i’d ever had a paper ripped apart like that, and i’d been in school for 16 years by that point. the professor’s feedback was brutal and 100% correct. convinced i was an idiot, instead of trying to forward my own argument, i read a dozen books and found ways of patchworking other–smarter–scholars’ arguments together into a whole. i saw myself as putting existing works into conversation with each other to say something new; the professor, rightly, saw it as building a neat little shield in front of myself so that i didn’t have to actually engage in that conversation. it took me another quarter to figure out how to stop doing that, and it’s something that i’ve gotten a lot better about since. trust yourself, your instincts, and your work. foreground them. you’ll be in conversation with others, yes, but your job is to say something for yourself, not act as a mouthpiece for others.

and it’s MAGNIFICENT