Hello, I'm Kev. 👋🏻

Brief reflection on 2024

What a year! I blinked and went from a mid-career professional to a full-time student. Burn-out was in full swing, mid-terms came and went, calculus professor passed away, finals zipped by in between thanksgiving and Christmas, and I’m planning a wedding in between all this. WOOF. Now that the holidays are over and I’ve stabilized, I realize a blog post is looong overdue. What a wonderful opportunity to reflect a bit on 2024, sketch some goals for 2025, and kickstart my new writing habit.

Reflecting on 2024

It was a long one. I started out January ‘24 completely burnt out after 8 years of overextending myself at work. I used up all my PTO around April and took a 3 week “sabbatical.” I spent these weeks asking myself a lot of questions. I wanted to understand why I felt so burnt out and what changes I needed to make. This process helped me learn a lot about myself. What I do for work, being of service to those in need, and being close to the community(es) my work affects are all deeply important to me. I ended my stint asking myself one question: if you could choose to do anything with your life, what would you pick? My answer? Become a Physician.

Fast forward through several discussions with my Fiancé and battles with self-doubt; I’m now on a pre-med undergrad track! Returning to school as a non-traditional student is a trip. The habits and workflows I developed in my professional career aren’t necessarily beneficial in my academic career. There’s a lot I could talk about, but I want this post to end up a reasonable length. Let’s jump right in and outline the courses I took during my Fall ‘24 term and the grades received:

I’m… at peace with the grades I received. As in both sciences feels great, and I’m glad to have identified weak spots in my writing skills, but I’m still disappointed I ended up withdrawing from Calculus.

English 102 was a surprisingly brutal course. Writing is hard. I’m still haunted by the ghost of blank-page-past every time I open Obsidian or Pages. I’ve finally realized that writing is like playing an instrument: no amount of auxiliary work (reading about the piano, stretching your hands, optimizing the space where you play the piano etc) can replace simply playing the piano badly for some time. I need to write badly, more. Blog posts, short stories, and poems are all forms of writing I want to explore! Improving my writing skills is a MUSTDO for this year.

My Calculus professor passed away right after mid-terms (which was difficult to process in itself). He had been ill since the start of the term and, understandably, missed several lectures by this point in time. This, in addition to challenges experienced during the hand-off to a new professor, created too much of a challenge for me. I scored a 120/100 on the first exam! But after scoring a whopping 45/100 on the mid-term and continued struggles during lecture, I decided to withdraw for the sake of my GPA. Additionally, I plan to take Calculus II and want to develop a strong foundation in differential / integral Calculus before doing so.

What I’m tackling in 2025

Academically

I registered for three classes in the Spring ‘25 term:

As of 06/06 I’m also scheduled to take:

Summer ‘25:

Fall ‘25:

Personally

I have a few goals I’d like to accomplish this year:

For this website

I want to write more about my experience as a non-traditional student and about making a career transition at the age of 29. I’m just not sure what that really looks like yet. If you have suggestions, feedback, or questions about this journey, please don’t hesitate to reach out!