William N. Johnson

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

— Søren Kierkegaard

Like Janus, the Roman god with two faces, I find myself looking both backward and forward. 2023 was a year of endings and beginnings, a pivot point where excitement tangled with stress, farewells blurred with new starts, and reflection slowly gave way to resilience.

Senior Year

Being a senior was all three at once: exciting, stressful, and bittersweet. On the bright side, I finally completed my Bachelor’s and got to dive deep into a senior design project I still brag about: Neuromorphic Autonomous Racing. What made it truly special wasn’t just the tech, but the team—friends I’d known since community college back in 2020. That kind of synergy? It’s rare, and it created fun academic moments.

But, man, it wasn’t smooth sailing. My stubborn drive to keep a perfect 4.0 GPA meant I overloaded myself with pressure, even tackling graduate-level courses like Software Security and Network Security. The stress was relentless. Still, crossing that finish line and graduating felt like my proudest achievement, even if my brain felt like scrambled eggs.

And the ceremony? Yeah, I skipped it. I’d earned my Volunteer of Distinction pin, which probably would’ve looked pretty cool on a graduation gown, but pomp and circumstance has just never been my thing. Plus, let’s be real, a university graduation just hits different than high school, right? Much less fuss.

Demo of our Neuromorphic Autonomous Car

Friendships & Farewells

The more difficult goodbyes weren’t marked by speeches or after-graduation parties. They were silent farewells to colleagues and friends, especially the ones I’d spent countless hours with for my Software Engineering course and our Senior Design Capstone. These were friendships built on shared passions, debugging sessions on Discord, and the mutual understanding of impending deadlines. When the time came to part ways, we didn’t need flowery speeches—just an unspoken good luck on your next adventure. It felt more profound, in a way.

The Master’s Degree

Pursuing a Master’s wasn’t exactly on my meticulously planned roadmap. The post-pandemic job market was brutal, and grad school offered a kind of stability I just couldn’t ignore. With a solid nudge from family members and professors, and a strong academic record, I took the leap—and thankfully landed a Graduate Teaching Assistantship to help chip away at tuition.

But honestly, the transition wasn’t fueled by excitement. It was anxiety. I was itching for hands-on work, for building things, not more math and theory. By the time I finished my Bachelor’s, I was already pretty burnt out, and the Master’s felt less like ambition and more like… well, obligation. A necessary evil, maybe.

Stress & Balance

Stress pretty much shadowed me through 2023—keeping grades sky-high, navigating the GTA role application, and prepping for grad school. To cope, weirdly enough, I drifted back onto social media. It was a fragmented online landscape then, wasn’t it? I dabbled in Substack, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon… trying to find a niche that felt right.

Substack, unexpectedly, became my personal outlet during that summer. Even if nobody was reading, I loved what I started calling “vibe blogging”—basically, prompting ChatGPT for topic ideas and then spinning my own thoughts and outlines into these fun, low-pressure (and sometimes whimsical) posts. I’d pour out thoughts on programming, linguistics, or just whatever random idea popped into my head. Writing helped untangle the knots in my brain and gave me a rhythm outside the constant push for academic perfection.

By fall, though, the weight finally caught up. I felt sluggish, mentally overloaded, just completely stretched thin. The turning point? Finally letting go of that crippling perfectionism. It wasn’t a dramatic epiphany, more like a slow, quiet surrender. And honestly, 2024 greeted me with a significantly lighter, more positive outlook because of it.

Blogging & Social Media

Blogging was never about building a brand or becoming an “influencer.” It was genuinely just a way to escape.

The social media landscape then still felt so… fractured, though. Tech circles were clinging to X (formerly Twitter), science conversations were migrating to Bluesky, writers were nesting on Substack. Different corners, different voices. It definitely wasn’t cohesive, but in a weird way, it felt more real than ever before.

Fun fact: I was #62008 on Threads. Managed to snag the APK before launch, even though registration was locked.

Reflection

Looking back now, two years later, I definitely see 2023 as a character-building year. A year that tested me, stretched me to my limits, and ultimately reminded me that strength comes from facing those hurdles head-on and sometimes taking a small step back, even when you’d rather just curl up in a ball.

The biggest lessons I’m carrying forward:

• Plan ahead, but don’t panic. Wait, isn’t that an advice from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Even if grad school isn’t in your immediate sights, dabbling in a graduate course or two before you need to can make a huge difference in how prepared you feel.
• Roll with the flow. Seriously, don’t obsess over the what ifs. Opportunities rarely come neatly packaged or exactly when you expect them—sometimes you just have to grab them and figure out the rest on the fly. It’s often where the best stuff happens.