There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People slowed the spread of yellow fever; they sprayed the Isthmus of Panama puddle by puddle. Effort alone I loved. Some days I would have been happy to push a pole around a threshing floor like an ox, for the pleasure of moving the heavy stone and watching my knees rise in turn.

– Annie Dillard's An American Childhood

woke up 6:30 am. nitro cold brew kept me pumped up, but also gave me major anxiety. exam was easier than expected. only 15 mcq questions. surprised that i got all correct after checking them 4 times. i usually get something wrong.

i can finally relax again. felt excited to go back to doing practicum work. i'm having so much fun learning and just running embedding models on hugging face. i still don't have a clear project to work on, everything is really like the wild-west. B mentioned research in medical field is doing things no one else has done before using private data that no one has access to, so a PhD in bioengineering actually makes sense. glad i get to be doing this research work.

worlds shortest hackathon at founders inc by nvidia and vercel. went late and started the hack with 50 minutes left. idea was to integrate nvidia software packages to generate data science solutions. some of the top 5 projects were justified, but i genuinely questioned how they got into top 5, especially how fetching transcript file from youtube and displaying it nicely can win a signed gpu.

got back home and accidentally spent 3 hours doing homework and even some practicum work even though i have a throbbing head pain. i seem to be able to sustain pain very well and not give in when my body is telling me to rest. that's my toxic trait. felt drained and burnt out.