LA 2025

I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining UCLA Bioinformatics as a PhD student this Fall! This was a long time coming, and I couldn’t be happier.

I’m definitely anxious and a little nervous about the future, but I think that’s pretty normal.

With funding conditions as they are and with labs cutting back on recruiting students, I definitely have a lot to think about as grad school draws nearer. Nonetheless, I think these are concerns to consume not be consumed by.

Visiting UCLA

As part of the admitted class, I visited UCLA for a few days in March. I got a chance to tour campus, and meet professors, current students, and prospective students.

The vibes were great! I love SoCal, having gone to UC San Diego. LA is definitely a different feel, and it’s quite apparent when driving around the city. Everything is spread apart.

UCLA itself is nestled in a pretty nice area. The area surrounding campus feels pretty college-townesque which isn’t the worst thing in the world. I’m hoping to have a car so I don’t imagine getting around LA will be too bothersome (other than traffic of course…).

I’m also lucky in that one of my close friends who I worked with at Octant is also at UCLA in the same program. He’s a 1st year so in addition to having a great friend in the area, I also have someone who’s been very helpful in understanding the trajectory of grad school. He’s great.

I also have a few friends in LA from university that are still in the area. Overall, I’m excited to come to UCLA. I feel like the atmosphere is very welcoming, and having a few people I can rely on as I get accustomed to living in a new city will be doubly helpful.

Other fun stuff!

The visit days for UCLA were only 2ish days. I also ended up staying that weekend with my friend Ishaan. Ishaan is a photographer and a former housemate and a close friend (current) of mine.

We ended up going to a few matcha places as well as to the Getty.

I took my Fujifilm with me again. I think by March I had gotten pretty accustomed to a lot of the settings. You’ll notice a bunch of sepia tone photos. I realized the camera can take 3 photos at once each with a different filter applied.

I was really enjoying using the Vivid, Sepia, and Black and White filters. The sepia filter made photos look very dynamic.

The lighting here and the colors of the washed background made for a great little frame.

LA doesn’t have the greatest public transportation, but somehow the Getty has a really cool train that serves the museum.

One man’s trash…

A cool little cafe!

I’m obsessed with the native sepia filter that the FujiFilm x100VI provides.

Who’s this?

Closing thoughts

I’m really excited to make the move to LA in the next few months. I’m planning to move to LA around September, and classes for my program will start at the end of the month.

I’ve moved around a lot as a kid and even in my adult life. Going to school away from home, moving homes often as a child, and now working in a completely different city have all made moving a pretty regular and common thing in my life.

I won’t say I like the logistics of moving by any means, but I do really enjoy moving to a new place. Meeting new people, filling out a new mental map in my head of a new area, finding cool little routes and spots on my bike (or car!), and just existing in a new space really really calls to me.

I know some people in my life haven’t moved much, and in some ways I envy them; staying in one place too long makes me itch. It’s not that I don’t like stability but rather that I anticipate and crave movement.

If I hadn’t gone to grad school this year, for example, I likely would’ve moved to SF proper from the east bay. Would it have made my commute worse? Yes. Would it have been exactly what I wanted being in the center of it all? Absolutely.

Moving to LA will scratch this itch. And I’m all for it.