So, it’s my last fall semester, and I’m now a senior. With 3 years under my belt already, I think I’ve got this college thing pretty figured out. This semester was without a doubt my favorite semester so far. Here’s my review.

Classes

I’m gonna try to keep this part fairly short, but I had some pretty cool classes this semester. My classes this semester were Project Management, Rust, User Experience, Data Centric AI, and Virtual Reality. Most of them had associated projects, so if you want to read about the cool projects I made, check out the links.

Ultimate Frisbee

Ultimate frisbee was up and down this semester. College ultimate is always interesting because you get new teammates every year, and this year was no different. Unfortunately, I’ve never lost more games, but I take a lot of pride in the development of our new players. I’ve also dealt with an annoying hip flexor injury throughout the entire semester, but it thankfully hasn’t impacted my ability to play in tournaments. Next semester is when the competitive season begins, so that’s when the team needs to peak.

Ballet

Ballet was a lot of fun this semester. I am the treasurer this year, and it’s been a great experience taking a more hands-on approach when putting together our Nutcracker show this year. It did hit me after the show that this was my last Nutcracker. By my count, I’ve done the Nutcracker 14 times, and it still hasn’t hit me that I won’t be doing another one next year. This year, a lot of new dancers joined the club. I met a lot of fun people, and I looked forward to rehearsing with them every week.

Highlights

I decided to run a half marathon, and I made this decision 2 weeks before the half marathon. Yes, I’m a little crazy, but I wanted to challenge myself and see what I was capable of. I set myself an ambitious goal of finishing in under 2 hours. I’ve never run more than 3 miles, so I was very unsure of how things would go. So the race starts, I feel good, and the race adrenaline is hitting. Around the 3-mile mark I’m with the 2-hour pace-setters, and decide that maybe it’s a good idea for me to get a buffer between me and them. I wanna say I got to about the 85% mark feeling great and running at a pretty fast pace, but now with the last part of the race, I gotta dig. With just under a mile left, I hear Taylor Swift's song Long Live in my earbuds and I really want to finish on that song. The good news is that the song is over 5 minutes long, the bad news is that I had just run over 12 miles. For the life of me, I’m not sure if I actually made it before the song ended when sprinting to the end, but it was close. Anyway, I finished in 1 hour and 45 minutes, which far exceeded my goal. I’m so happy I ran the half.

Before the semester, I decided to follow Vanderbilt Football until they lost at home. I’ve never really followed Vanderbilt Football beyond highlights here and there, but man was I in for a great time. For those not in the know, Vanderbilt Football is traditionally bad. I went to their first game which was an upset victory against Virginia Tech, and that was an incredible experience. And for the most part, Vanderbilt kept rolling. The one game I couldn't go to was of course the best game of the season where Vanderbilt beat No. 1 Alabama. Watching that game online was still insane. All in all, it was a great year for Vanderbilt Football.

Romantic life!?! My romantic woes haven’t continued this semester, and I have a girlfriend now. She’s amazing, and that’s all you get cause that’s private.

Lowlights

It’s really easy to focus on the positives and ignore the negatives when it comes to putting stuff out online, so I’m gonna also add some lowlights.

Boy was I swamped before my final presentation for my VR project. I basically spent every waking moment working on it. I wanna say I spent around 40 hours working on it on the Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday leading up to the presentation. I was mostly working on the networking side of the game which was definitely a battle, but one I was determined to win. I also worked on polishing all the pages outside of the gameplay, because a pretty package makes everything else seem better. In the end, it all worked out, and the result was a pretty fun game that I was proud to show my friends.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do much climbing this semester. Climbing was at one point an activity I would do 2-3 times a week. But my schedule and lack of people to go climbing with made it hard. I did get out there a few times, but not much, and as a result, I didn’t really get better as a climber which is something I’d like to do.

Final Thoughts

This semester was great. There’s honestly a lot more that I would’ve liked to talk about but won’t so this post isn’t 10x as long. Now looking ahead, I’m left with my last college semester. Academically, I feel I’ve learned a lot and don’t have much left that I want to learn at Vanderbilt (though there’s still a lot that I want to teach myself). The tougher part is all the friends and clubs that I’m a part of. The “real” world isn’t like college, so I look forward to enjoying my last semester at Vanderbilt.

- Marius