Before you go to sleep every night, what do you think about? Do you reflect on the events that happened during the day? Do you think about how you’re going to talk to that girl/boy whom you have a crush on? What about that embarrassing thing you said when the wrong person was in the room? …Do you think about number theory?

I’ve thought about all of the above and much more at one point or another. Some of those things make me sleep better at night, others keep me up till dawn. I sometimes ask myself, “is this the direction I want to be heading in life?” The answer is never quite clear. What are my long term goals, do my short term goals complement the long term ones, and are my decisions and actions helping me reach them? To which I answer, “what goals? I don’t have long/short term goals!” I don’t have very specific goals, but I wish did, and I wish I could answer those questions. I’m not certain about what I want out of life. Is anybody certain, really? What I do know is this: I want to achieve balance. A balance between work and play. I want to experience excitement, but I also value my quiet time. I have ambitions, but if I had to, I wouldn’t don’t want to sacrifice everything else in my life to pursue them. Having balance is a very generic want, but I don’t think it’s very common to see it fulfilled. Without more specific goals, I feel that anything that fulfills my wants comes only as a stroke of luck.

I love my degree, I enjoy the theory that makes todays technologies possible, and putting it in practice and actually seeing a piece of technology being created, even if it’s something small or a recreation of something that already exists. I enjoy programming because I like creating things, and I enjoy solving problems. I’m lazy but I like efficiency, that’s a common characteristic I see among my peers. We hate doing manual work, especially repetitive work. Who doesn’t? Programmers can do something about that. We can write programs to do the work for us, sometimes writing those programs can take longer than the work itself, but it’s all worth it, because we turned something boring into something challenging and exciting. Nevertheless, sometimes I wonder, do I want to have software development as a career? Sure I enjoy computer science in academia, but there are a lot of things that come with real work that is very boring to me. Having to learn a programming language that I don’t like, having to read other people’s badly written code–badly written because they were under a deadline and couldn’t design it properly, which unfortunately is the state of most code I’m expecting to see in the real world. There is a tendency for us to rewrite code from scratch because code written by someone is always less legible and elegant to the someone else reading it, but that’s one of the things that I need to learn not to do.

I’ve gotten myself into things that prevents me from focusing on and enjoying my degree to the fullest, sometimes they prevent me from enjoying my degree at all. In exchange, I’m a part of something different like producing a theatre show and being on stage in front of hundreds of people to watch them laugh and cheer for something that we’ve created. Is it all worth it? I think so. There will rarely be any more opportunities to do this kind of thing after going into the workforce. Many people have told me that it’s too much stress and time commitment and that it’s totally irrational to do it with a full load of uni work. They might be right, and I also think that it’s irrational. Those observing from a distance can see a clearer picture, but they tend to miss finer details that make doing this worth it.

I need to stop thinking. I need a peace of mind.