Valuable Lessons from Summer

This month’s short answer question was: “Describe the most valuable thing you learned this past summer.”

At Olin, the opportunity for interaction is handed to you on a silver platter. We’re in a world where you have to talk with your peers, which really greases the wheels of friendship. In real life, you have to make an active, forward effort to establish and maintain friendships – they won’t just happen to you. – Greg Eddleston

That PAC-Bayes is learning. – Anonymous

Just do it. Don’t wait for people to tell you it’s okay. – Anonymous

Some people are not worth your time, your energy, or your motivation – no matter how long you have known them or whatever loyalty has been established. Broken relationships require both parties to invest. But if you are the only one bowing your pride, you’re just going to be shoved further down as an ego boost for the other. It solves nothing and is not worth the tax on you. – Anonymous

If you put on a bathing suit and cover yourself in honey, no one will want to give you a hug, and everything around you will become sticky. (Maybe not the most personally valuable thing I learned this summer, but I don’t want anyone else to learn this lesson the hard way.) – Anonymous

You can always find something useful to do on your project. Most of the time, I would be waiting for an answer to a decision I’d made from my boss, but I found that even when I ‘had nothing to do’ there were a bunch of small tasks I could perform like sending emails or documentation, cleaning, etc. – Anonymous

Things can be traumatic without necessarily being immediately life threatening. Also, not all sexual assault is rape. Those two things have really changed the way I view my past and myself, and explain a lot about me that I had never understood. I spent a good portion of the summer in group therapy at a mental hospital, and heard a lot of people describe things as abuse that have also happened to me that I just considered part of life being unfair, or blamed myself for. – Anonymous

How to use git – correctly. – Anonymous

Being “busy” is just an excuse I use to put off things I don’t want to do. I realized that over the summer my self-imposed business of cooking, working out, reading, etc. was preventing me from doing little things like calling my sister. If I can’t make time for tasks as simple as that over the summer, how can I possibly thing that I will make time for it in “real life” later on? – Anonymous

Look out for next month’s short answer question: “What is one thing you regret not doing?”

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