Spiel of the Day

Hey everyone! (I doubt anyone is reading as nobody knows this website exists, but that's okay)

Today, June 5th, 2026, is Day 1 of my Spiel of the Day, something I've been trying to do for a while but never actually did. Instead of going to the pool while I'm here in California, I thought today could be my first day to actually bring this into fruition. My goal for this "series" is just to document my days and to exercise my personal writing, something I don't get to do a lot. I've organized these into small, manageable 500-word chunks that I can just look back on and read whenever I want to figure out what I did on a certain day or how I'm progressing on the projects I'm working on. I plan to be candid in these spiels and speak freely, with little direction beyond sharing what's on my mind at a certain point in time. FYI: This is not intended to be polished, and I will rarely go back and edit. This is a place for raw, unfiltered, metacognitive reflection.

I'll begin by talking a little bit about my trip to California. This is pretty much the main "break" I have during the summer, along with a week or two after, and it's interesting how I'm spending it. I feel I can't enjoy it completely and that I'm being "unproductive." I think, in a way, most Andover students feel that way during times of rest such as these, and try to organize their days with something to do, whether it's a summer program, a research opportunity, or something else. To be honest, I tried to do that over the summer, but I got into only one of the summer programs I applied to, and I don't really know what I'm going to do afterward. That may be a blessing in disguise…it could also be me coping.

Grades came out yesterday, and I realized my outlook on grades has shifted a lot. I admit that I am kind of obsessive over my GPA and eternally will think it's not good enough; however, there was a time when the day before grades release day, I would be stressing nonstop the day before, not being able to go to sleep in anticipation of what I was going to get. However, this time was different for me: I opened BlueLink, read the comments, checked my grades, and then went about my day. I didn't think about them the entire day after that. Something about this term made me not really care about what I got: I knew I learned to the best of my ability in classes I was really interested in, and now that it was over, it was time to continue moving forward. I sensed this shift kind of throughout my circles as well. Previously, right after grades were released, my friends would call about them and discuss them in detail. However, as far as I know (maybe time zones stopped me from being there), no such call occurred. People checked their grades, read their comments, and then went about their lives.

I want to end with a quote from my CHM300C comment from K. Rob., where he said, "As you move up in levels, a greater percentage of the problems are ones you haven't seen before, and having practice with trying different methods will continue to benefit you." This applies not only in science but in life itself; unforeseeable problems will inevitably arise, and it's with practice each day that we can benefit from the joys of life.

Hopefully, I can stick with this throughout the summer.