The other side of the whiteboard
This year was tough by all means. Academically, one of hardest semesters, and personally, a hand injury in the fall severely limited my ability to do a lot of things (luckily my co-op was remote). But my two experiences with CubeCats and the Learning Commons were two wonderful highlights.
Looking back, I can recall how frightened I was the first day of each, walking up and talking to freshmen about satellites microcontrollers and physics. Now it is a piece of cake. These topics were familiar territory from all the time I had put into them, and I learned a lot about mentoring because I wasn't afraid to admit my mistakes and shortcomings, which made both experiences wonderful and helped me build great friendships along the way.
However, while I enjoyed this aspect of the year, I felt like I missed out on growing my technical skills, particularly through personal projects. Both experiences drew on knowledge I already had rather than pushing me toward new ground. My last personal project was in the fall, when I had more free time, and genuinely miss that air of working on a difficult new problem.
That said, I feel confident in my ability to communicate and mentor small groups, and while that is a wonderful skill to have, I don't see myself in a long-term teaching position. So I am hoping to pivot toward the technical side, first through my upcoming part-time job in the fall, likely a continuation of my current research, and second, by steering my extracurriculars toward active engineering work that is new to me. The next CubeCats satellite is something I am already a part of, but I also have a backlog of personal ideas, and maybe the Formula SAE team at UC.
Only time will tell.