I have no idea how to start this.
Its around the half-way point of 2026, and also the end of the first semester at my school. With (almost) everything about this semester over, I wanted to take the time to look back, because this really was one hell of a semester.
In a nutshell, things were going pretty okay at the beginning, until at some point everything just went wrong. Now, they say history repeats itself, and with the way my plans for next semester is looking, it 100% will if I’m not careful enough.
So I’m going to look back on why I hit my lowest this semester, so that I don’t have to go to the same trouble again next time.
The Beginning
I wasn’t totally unaware of my impending doom. Here’s a list of what I had planned to do this semester:
- 27 credits worth of classes, 24 of them being major courses
- 8 midterm/final exams
- I dropped one later btw
- A research participation
- Undergraduate research program (UGRP) (properly this time)
- Take part in a (subculture) band
- Prepare PPC (Postech Programming Contest)
- SMP (Some mentoring program)
Compare this to last semester:
- 22.5 credits worth of classes, 10 of them being major courses
- 6 midterm/final exams
- UGRP (that I barely did during the semester)
- ICPC preparation (which I also barely did)
So yeah, I was kind of aware that things weren’t going to be easy. But my naive mind thought that I would be able to manage this somehow, and I wasn’t totally wrong.
Until Midterms
I was actually doing very well until midterms. Other than the fact that I suddenly had to figure out how to play the guitar in like 4 weeks, things were okay.
I actually listened to all the classes (except for the ones I really didn’t care about), did my homework all on time by handling one homework per day if I had one, take the time to review stuff, and prepare for my research participation stuff and UGRP stuff. On top of all that, I spent around 3 to at most 5 hours practicing the guitar and keyboard for the band, and kept a strict sleeping schedule of 2~9 am.
Now, I did end up dropping a course right after midterms, but that was something very predictable as it was a graduate level math course that my roommate gaslighted me into taking. Other than that the only problem was that my problem-making skills for PPC was terrible, but that’s something that wasn’t going to be fixed any time soon. I still pumped out more ideas than my other two friends, who barely did anything.
So yeah, up until this point, things were looking very positive and just keeping this up I thought that I could manage everything until the end of the semester.
But it looked like the universe had other plans.
The Fall of BOJ (and myself)
So during midterms, BOJ (Baekjoon Online Judge, not bank of Japan) suddenly announced that they were going to end their service in like a few weeks.
Now, this was sad news for the problem solving community, but at that point I wasn’t really into PS and I could always just use other OJ sites so this wasn’t really all that deafening to me. Well, it shouldn’t have been.
Remember how I said that I was preparing PPC this year? Guess which platform PPC was held on all this time? Of course it was BOJ, and with just on month until the contest is held, BOJ just suddenly call quits and fucking dies. Such a wonderful timing.
Like, I get that AI crawling and all that might have caused an astronomical amount of server fee, and I get that BOJ is this one guy’s own personal sight and that he has the right to everything, so nothing personal, but I really [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED]
I mean, couldn’t you have at least given some kind of warning before hand?
Oh yeah, and all the seniors who had experience with preparing PPC went to military service, and anyone who was actually at school was just me and my two friends who seemed to be doing absolutely nothing.
If things were according to plan, the only thing I had left to do with PPC was
- Occasionally fix my problems when someone asks
- Check if other people problems were okay
- Send an email to BOJ to open the contest
So there wasn’t much to do. Now with BOJ gone, we had to start from scratch and find a new platform. There were a few options, but other than DOM Judge, they weren’t really that appealing to me. So then we had to use DOM Judge, which meant
- We had to make the server and judge hosts and all that
- which I still have no fucking clue how to do
- huge thanks to my senior who recently went to military service for setting DOM Judge up, I have no idea how he managed to do it but it was a real life saver.
- Figure out how the fuck this monstrosity works
- Check that special judges and interactive problems worked
- Check that the scoreboard works
- Manually make all the team accounts
- Make sure that the server can manage all participants
- and just pray to god that this thing does not cause any problems that were unseen
- oh and did I mention that there was less than a month to do all this? pretty much alone?
Saying I was worried is an understatement. At this point I was really wished for myself to end up in some hospital so that I can physically not do shit. The fact that everyone with experience was at the military did not help. I was stressed to the core that the contest would end up destroyed in pieces and it would be all my fault. I was so stressed out that even just breathing and functioning properly became difficult. I usually hated alcohol, but at this point becoming drunk was my only escape route other than literally fucking dying, and that was enough to turn me into someone who wanted to drink everyday.
I had homework due the week the contest was held and an exam 2 days later, and I didn’t even submit the homework or study the exam because of this.
Also, the DOM Judge documentation is a piece of shit and I couldn’t figure anything out from reading it for gods sake. I couldn’t find anything on the documentation about how the return code for a special judge was 41 42 43 or something, but apparently that’s the case. Also fuck you Claude for being a piece of shit and failing literally every task I gave you and only making things a million times more convoluted. Thankfully GPT was much better.
So yeah, I was in a bit of a bad state because of this.
Afterwards
Thankfully PPC itself was held on schedule without major issues. The only issue was that it caused severe mental and physical damage on my part. Still, what was done was done, and I didn’t even want to think about this a second longer. This later caused some slight issues on the open contest (big thanks to 0917ba, I would have never managed to open it myself), and I want to kill myself, but what is done is done.
But my mental health has declined pretty noticeably badly, and my physical stamina was on the verge of running out. The lifestyle I have carefully managed up until midterms was reduced to atoms with not a trace of it left. And suddenly its time for finals.
And oh boy, this semesters final exam was an absolute mess. I had to take 8 exams, but I barely studied any of them other than number theory. Two exams I didn’t even look at the class materials, just took a peek at my friends blog for like 10 minutes. For some I didn’t know the exact range of the exam so parts I didn’t even look at showed up, and so on.
Last semester I used to stay up all night studying on exam weeks, but I just didn’t have neither the energy or the will power to do so. The fact that everyone else’s exams ended a day or two earlier than me did not help, and I practically gave up on studying properly by the end of Wednesday.
Thankfully at Friday my dopamine got recharged to its absolute limit and I was able to actually do a pretty good job on my number theory exam.
So to summarize, I was doing a pretty good job at handling stuff up until midterms, but then one (quite huge) problem arose, and everything fell down.
The Problem
I think there were two major reasons to my downfall this semester:
- BOJ shutdown
- Underestimating courses
Now, the end of BOJ was totally uncalled for and no one around me seemed to have been aware of it, so that much was entirely out of my control. While in hindsight there might have been ways to handle it better without getting mentally drained, at the time it was a huge shock + I am terrible at doing things impromptu, and therefore I think whatever happened was kind of unavoidable. Regardless, the way I handled the situation was definitely not ideal.
As for underestimating courses, I believed that properly paying attention in class would have been enough to follow along a course. This has a few problems, the first being that I didn’t listen to anything after midterms except number theory, and second, I was barely able to follow along class in number theory which I actually listened to, and finally, I forget half the stuff I learnt even if I paid attention.
My underestimation of number theory was exceptionally big, as I initially thought that I’d be somewhat familiar with the materials that were going to be taught. This was true until midterms, but after that the difficulty just skyrocketed to oblivion and I found myself learning about algebraic number theory despite knowing nothing about algebra.
As for programming languages, the difficulty wasn’t as hard as number theory, but the homework required an insane amount of work that I never anticipated. The time given for the 7th homework was an entire month, and if LLM’s weren’t a thing I would have never finished at least 3 of the 8 given homework. So my plan to tackle one homework a day was never going to work out in the first place.
Hence, I think those two are the two main reasons I had such a hard time, and everything else were minor consequences of those two. Stuff like band practice honestly didn’t become a huge problem as time passed, as I got used to it and less time was required to practice as the semester went on.
Is It Solvable?
Ideally? Yes. Realistically? Not sure.
Stuff like BOJ shutting down is totally uncalled for, but there isn’t anything that I plan to do next semester that can cause something as catastrophic as this. Also I do feel like I can better handle the situation since I already experienced it once. But this isn’t something I have to worry about next semester.
As for courses, my current plan (that is NOT final) has 24 credits again. If I take into account difficulty and stuff, realistically its 18 credits of hard stuff and 6 credits of stuff that’s either relatively easy or not a huge problem. That is twice more than this semester, which I believed to have 9 credits of hard stuff.
To avoid my mistake this semester the only way to survive would be to study the materials before hand, actually pay attention in class, and make sure to do homework on time without rushing. The latter two are stuff to worry about later, but the first one is something that I do plan on doing. Specifically I always planned on studying topology and modern algebra during summer break, so hopefully those two won’t be too much of a bother. One subject is basically what I’m doing at my research participation stuff, so hopefully that also won’t be too much of a bother. This is all being extremely optimistic, but at the same time not impossible.
A bigger problem is band related stuff and ICPC. I’m not sure how often my team will practice for ICPC, but if it’s once a week then that’s basically sacrificing a day every week, so one less day I can use every week. As for band stuff, I performed in 3 stages this semester, so it wasn’t all that bad, but I’m anticipating that number to at least double next semester, as it turns out playing the guitar is actually very fun. This can also be taken care of if I just practice the hell out during summer break (which I plan to do). However, this also means that quite some time is going to be taken each week as an hour of practice each week for each stage performance is going to be required.
So all of the above is theoretically possible, but time management is going to become crucial. I also plan on continuing research (UGRP and research participation, might not be the same lab though), so I have to take into account that as well. If there’s anything I learnt this semester is that 24 hours per day is not super long, but sufficiently long enough to do a lot of stuff, if managed well. So the fact that doing all of this is possible is not far fetched.
The biggest problem is that the future is unpredictable, and I have no idea what might happen next semester. The reason I don’t make plans for anything that is more than a week away in the first place is because of this. There’s no guarantee that stuff like BOJ shutdown won’t happen again, and if it does, then it is more than enough to destroy literally everything that has been planned. Still, I can’t really imagine anything worse than this years PPC happening. The experience with this years PPC was so terrible that I honestly never want to set foot into something like this ever again, even though I am kind of forced to do so next year.
So an escape plan should exist, the most obvious one being dropping courses. However that is only possible until midterms, and after that it would just become giving up on grades, which is still a plan. And honestly, that is the only possible escape hole I can currently think of, as stuff like band, ICPC, or research isn’t just a me problem. I can only give up on stuff that’s entirely related to me and no one else, and the only such thing are my grades and credits.
To summarize, under perfect conditions it is definitely possible, but reality usually likes to kick me in the ass, so no letting my guard down. I already messed up once this semester, so hopefully I can handle things better next time.
Honestly if I just take like 5~6 courses that would be the best solution, but for some reason I just can’t do that.
Conclusion
History repeats itself.
I’m fucked.
Cheers.