Life

Freshman Year is Over! This is Everything I Did and Learned.

I finished my first year at UCSB, making new friends and learning so much about CS/ML.

Dylan Lu

Jun 20, 2025 • 10 min read

Fun times...

I did it—my first year of college is finally done. Here's some fun stuff that happened last quarter.

Road Trip to LA

Since many of my close friends are on the semester system, they were home by the time I was taking midterms (ugh I did really bad on stats 😦). But, that meant they had the time to come visit me! I really needed to escape the matrix of Santa Barbara, so I suggested we to LA instead of staying here.

And yes, this trip was 5 days before my first final.

We stayed the first night in Santa Barbara and I gave them a quick tour of the beach and my tiny little dorm room. Cheney's mom had credit for a really nice resort hotel, so we stayed there for the night. For breakfast, we had Chad's Cafe, which is where my parents took me back when they dropped me off at college for the first time (they have really yummy chocolate muffins for free).

But the fun (and perhaps the not-so-fun) part didn't start until we actually got to LA. We spent the first few hours in Santa Monica and just chilled by the beach, drinking our very own special blend of ice cream smoothies. The sad thing is that we had no water and it was really hot out, so just a few short hours after starting our vacation, I got sick.

Actually, I got very sick, and I didn't want to do anything but sleep. It kinda killed the vibe as I kept complaining and wanting to go back to the AirBnB, but I managed to power through. Afterwards, we got dinner at a pretty good ramen place. And despite more of my complaints to go back home, my friends decided they wanted to play basketball. It was about midnight and we somehow ended up actually in the hood—I swear there were too many tweakers roaming about for it to be safe, but we survived. I don't have any pictures, unfortunately.

Food

All of that was on Friday, so we had one more full day to spend in LA. We decided that this would be our "foodie" day, where we'd just travel around the city and try all sorts of yummy food.

An overview: bacon grilled cheese and mushroom toast for brunch, tacos for lunch, korean fried chicken for afternoon snack, then omakase sushi for dinner.

The next day, we had some good pancakes and burgers, and Hayden tried the spiciest fried chicken known to mankind.

We also visited the Griffith Observatory. For some reason, we decided to park two miles down the hill, so we had to walk 20+ mins up and down. I was sick and miserable.

We ended the night with some poker. Classic.

Fun Times at UCSB

Some miscellaneous events that were pretty fun:

Deltopia

Deltopia is UCSB's biggest party of the year, which is always on the first weekend after spring break. To be honest, it was alright. Maybe partying isn't really my thing. We walked around Isla Vista and attended several parties. We started at 9AM until 4PM

Joseph's Wedding

Joseph was one of the church mentors for the freshmen, and we went to his wedding. Surya gave a speech.

Running

I decided that I was getting too fat, and that this was not acceptable. Thus, I decided to run as much as possible. Isla Vista has a nice trail that overlooks the ocean, which Mason and I ran through a few times.

But as I'm writing this, I can tell I'm still getting fat. Hopefully I can do something about it before it's too late.

A Last-Minute Grind

This is us.

The time is 11:58pm on the night before I moved out.

We had just submitted our final paper and demo video for CS 190A: Machine Learning. Yeah, talk about last minute. Notice how we're missing someone... the useless group member decided to sleep at 10pm and leave the rest to us. Bold.

YOLO

I also promised myself I'd write something about that YOLO project for CS 190I. Oh man, I spent so much time on that project during first few weeks of the quarter (I was lowkey a bad roommate as I typed away at 3AM). But now I know PyTorch better, and looking back, it really wasn't as bad as I made it seem. So perhaps it was worth it.

Back to Palo Alto

My Mom and Grandma drove down to pick me up. I didn't really get the chance to say bye to my roommates, but I wasn't that close with them anyways. It was so nice to be done with finals and all that. And even though I did really bad on stats (77%) and my generative AI final (82%), I miraculously ended up with an A. Yay.

I spent the first few days just unpacking and cleaning up my room, figuring out what to store elsewhere or donate. Feels good to start anew.

And now that we're back, I can finally eat good food again.

I'm writing this post 10 days after getting back. For the most part, it's actually kind of bad how much brain rot and TV I've been watching, but I guess it's good to decompress. I've also had fun playing basketball, poker, and seeing old high school friends randomly at the gym. One of them even got into Stanford 😭.

Golf

My mom wanted to get tacos from EPA, so I went with her. Randomly, Tyler Wong was there buying limes for his key lime pies. I'd just saw him the previous day for poker. We decided we should go golfing sometime this week.

Yes, my hair is chopped. And so is my golf skills. I think I averaged a triple bogey, and I didn't get a single par the whole 18 holes. I'm washed.

Stanford Shopping and Taiwanese Food

I've been hyping up O2 Valley to my friends back at UCSB as it's one of my go-to dinner spots. Mason and Jonathan came down to come visit me and we started the afternoon by going shopping at Stanford mall.

We looked all over the place: Lululemon, Banana Republic, Macy's, Urban Outfitters, J. Crew. But none of them had anything I wanted. I needed help picking something to wear for work.

But before all hope was lost, Mason decided that we should take a quick look at Vuori. I was skeptical, since I already knew Fuey was going to get his sister's discount (30%) for me, so I didn't think I'd buy anything. But as we were browsing the collection of $100+ sweatpants and t-shirts, I randomly saw Sophie from Gunn. It was so random. She was working there for the summer and said she could get me a 60% discount! Thus, I decided to go crazy and get $260 worth of Vuori for only $100. Looking back, I think I should've bought more.

Satisfied, I then took them to eat good food and get good boba.

Conclusion: An Overview of Everything I Learned

College is fun and all, but it's also about learning right? In high school, I thought I was the cracked CS kid, but I'm now realizing that maybe web dev isn't all there is to it. After getting a glimpse of real CS, here's me:

But now the only way to go is up. This is an overview of what I learned this year in every class.

Fall:

CCS 1L: How to hack together something with PyTorch/OpenCV. Built multiple small projects related to ping pong, the biggest one being able to turn videos into a 3D scene.
CCS 1A: Refresher and deeper dive on the subtleties of C++. Threads were new.
MATH 4A: Linear algebra. Tests were all online so I didn't learn that much.

Winter:

CCS 1B: High level overview of CPU. Built a MIPS assembly interpreter.
CCS 1L: Built a VR game to speak Chinese while surviving zombies.
MATH 4B: Differential equations. Useless for now.
CS 130A: Was scared going in, but professor made the class too easy. I learned a few new algorithms like Kruskal's, Prim's, etc, but it might've been better to take it with a more rigorous professor.
CCS 10: Murat's class. We thought "Attention Is All You Need" was the hardest thing ever. Turns out, it's really easy.
CCS 2: Discrete math, proving stuff. I don't think we were as rigorous as the non-CCS versions though.

Spring:

CS 190A: Classic ML like PCA, SVM, K-means. Better understanding of CNNs, FC layers, backprop. Also reinforcement learning, Bellman equations. We built a suite of DQN agents to beat Geometry Dash.
CS 190I: Training ML models from scratch with PyTorch. YOLOv2 was hard, so I did YOLOv1 last minute (also tried Mamba). LoRA finetuning LLMs. Built realtime speech agents. Realized that research is so different from building projects.
Math 6A: Vector calculus. Only useful thing was gradients (which I kinda knew) and double integrals.
PSTAT 120A: Harder than I thought. Realized there's much more to the subject than AP Stats. Lot's of hard integrals and distributions; need to be clever with strong math skills.
CCS 5: Diffusion, physics-inspired ML like Boltzmann machines, just lot's of hard math to explain certain intricacies of AI/ML research.
CCS 130G: Was cool talking to Jay Freeman almost every week. Learned very high level details of IoT and agentic setups (like MCP). Listened to interesting ex-CCS guess speakers. Showed off my CS 190I project. Got 6.0 units for just showing up.

Projects:

SLAM-TT
VR Chinese Game
Geometry Dash RL
Realtime Speech Agent
Genetic Variant Visualizer for Dementia (got paid to make this, was kind of a pain though)

We did it. Took me 2.5 hours to write this post. Super excited to start my TetraMem internship on Monday.