Fate

🐈‍⬛ Life

Hi friend! How’s the week going for you? This week I had to make decisions that I never thought I would have to make. What I learned (relearned?) is to not fight with my subconscious intuition.

Although it’s a completely different context (and far less painful), when I was choosing which university to go to, it essentially boiled down to two options. The first one is my safety school and the only school I applied to in Canada: University of Toronto (UofT). The second school was Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The former was for life sciences, and the latter was for computer engineering. For those of you who are not familiar with these schools, CMU is the better school, especially for computer engineering. I thought about it a lot and finally put the deposit down for CMU. But I kid you not, a couple of nights before the decision deadline, I had this dream that I should go to UofT. So I woke up and rejected CMU and all other universities and accepted the offer from UofT.

apparently not me

Only looking back and rationalizing afterward did I realize that my decision was mostly because the tuition cost for CMU is ridiculous compared to UofT. Also, I figured that if I could survive UofT pre-med, I should be able to survive anything lol.

To this day, I don’t know if I made the correct decision objectively because UofT made me suffer GREATLY and I’m not sure if it was worth it. But what I’m trying to say is that the way I’ve made decisions has always been to absorb as much information as possible and then listen to whatever pops up from my subconscious.

quite fashionable tho

Now bringing it back to the present, I agonized over these choices that had a nearly equal number of pros and cons. Any choice would also be extremely painful. So in the end, I just went fuck it, took a nap, and then made the choice that popped up from my subconscious. I don’t know if I made the correct choice, but I feel at peace with it. I hope that fate is kind.

(๑*ᗜ*) Anime

I caught up on a couple of episodes of Parallel World Pharmacy. Despite the fact that it’s an isekai with an OP protagonist, it’s actually quite good!

outfits are super cute!

📖 Books

As the days go on, I’ve found respite in writing things down. I never actually go back and read what I write, but somehow just putting words down makes my thoughts and emotions less nebulous, which in turn makes it easier to address them from a logical perspective. Other than writing, crying in public seems to work quite well too. 🥲

actually tho

This week, I also reread Man’s Search for Meaning. It’s a book that I come back to whenever I feel like I’m losing control over my life. Sorry if you’ve heard me say this quote multiple times, but it’s helped me so much. I read this to myself at least 3x a day.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

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🌻 Learning & Productivity

I’m very grateful to past Tina for building a strong foundation of systems and habits. It’s times like these that I fall back to them. They’ve saved me from freefalling to who knows where. 🕳️

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👨‍💻 What I’m Learning

I’m learning to be kind to myself. 💙

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💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)

🛍️ Currently active Shopify question!

A delivery is flagged as extremely late if its actual delivery time is more than 20 minutes after its predicted delivery time. In each month, what percentage of placed orders were extremely late? Output the month in a YYYY-MM format and the corresponding proportion of the extremely late orders as the percentage of all orders placed in this month.

delivery_orders

Head on over here to answer the question!

*Btw if you’re prepping for data science interviews or just want to keep yourself sharp, Stratascratch is a great platform with 10k+ real interview questions on SQL and python coding, probability, product sense etc. You can use my code ‘tinahuang’ at checkout for 20% off ❤️

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PS: Reply to this email about what you’d like to see in future editions of Boop’s Keyboard! I’m super new to writing a newsletter and I know there’s a lot for me to learn. ALL constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)

-Tina