Began attending UCLA
My first few years at UCLA were characterized by socializing and my desire to dropout. I became a lot more confident, but later on began to doubt myself.
College was a blast, but learning to manage my intimate relationships left me feeling lost and drained. I quickly learned that I understood other guys and girls very little, and that my misunderstandings were causing other people to feel hurt and frustrated: especially if the relationship was closer.
I began reading books on personality typing (Myer Briggs, Keirsey Temperament, Big Five, DiSC, Enneagram, Jungian Archetypes, etc.) to compensate, although none of these seemed to help me understand people better. A few years later I made up my own "personality typing profile" strategy that looked like this:
Classify People By:
Guiding Light (GL): the single most important thing to them
Examples: pursuit of happiness, any dream, being a good person, etc.
Modus Operandi (MO): how do they behave and make decisions?
Examples: feeling oriented, thinking oriented, extraverted, introverted, etc.
Pain Point (PP): area of concern / something they are trying to come to terms with
Examples: being alone, fear of conflict, sexuality, etc. could basically be anything
Achilles Heel (AH): biggest strength, therefore biggest weakness
Examples: kind-heartedness, spontaneity, fearlessness, etc.
Linchpin (LP): the thing that holds together this person's persona, take it away and they aren't themselves anymore
Examples: whatever this person identifies with, for myself: philosophy.
Regardless, I didn't keep up with my own system for long either. It's difficult classifying and boxing people into cookie-cutter shapes; it's inaccurate and prone to errors so...
when I think of reflecting on college, I feel the same way. I find it hard to point out exactly what it was, what happened, what I should have learned or not learned, and fold it neatly into a box that makes sense. There's a lot of different ways to tell my college story, none of which I'm completed satisfied with at the moment. So, I'll just continue on to when I dropped out of UCLA.
Chronology:
- 2013, September
- started first quarter at UCLA.
- 2014, Fall --> 2016, ~March
- created a club called Bruin App Builders
- 2015, Spring Quarter
- dropped out of UCLA as a second year in Spring Quarter after taking only 2 classes and fiat luxes for Fall and Winter quarter. My letter to housing (was living in Dykstra Hall, Floor 2):
Character Development:
- There's a lot of details I haven't added to this phase of my life, but the long story short is that I felt like I had failed in all my serious relationships: whether that be family, close friends, or romantic partners.
- Despite a strong career trajectory, my emotional life was on the rocks.