an ode to homebrew

personality makes a comeback 🍻

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj — always up to something in social good x tech. scroll to the end for a daily roundup on unique opportunities. :)

an ode to homebrew 🍻

my intention going into freshman year was to really enjoy the typical college experience. don’t get me wrong, i made a lot of fun memories, great friends, and got a real taste of college.

it was successfully fun, in a college kind of way. i’m not entirely convinced it was my kind of true fun, though. i felt largely uninspired first semester — professionally, personally, socially, mentally … all of the above?

i know myself as someone who yaps incessantly, is lively, and always looking for the next project to tinker away on. during my first semester of college, i somehow became the exact opposite. i felt little to no desire to chatter away. i felt apathetic about everything. i felt like i wasn’t turning the needle in any aspect of my life.

it felt like my personality dissipated. but, wasn’t i enjoying college for what it had to offer?

i’ve realized college’s offerings aren’t really my idea of excitement.

the stark contrast in my zest for life was made evident when i stepped foot into homebrew, a hacker house in nyc, in february of this year. i had intended to just quickly set my stuff down and immediately leave to explore the city solo. instead, i met madhu and sat on the couch yapping for 3 hours about anything and everything. this might sound so trivial, but i genuinely hadn’t yapped like that since i was at home with my best friends or during my time at the residency in berkeley. that was a year ago.

corny as hell, but i felt like me again. neurons were firing, and i felt inspired. i suddenly wanted to keep meeting new people, keep talking, keep bouncing ideas back and forth, and keep making progress towards those ideas again. i wondered, why did it stop?

it stopped because i forced my fun to fit into the template college offers, and it simply doesn’t fit. since that february trip to nyc, i have returned twice more and make an effort to talk to new people every single day.

when i’m in a new city, i typically spend all of my time out and about exploring. now in nyc, i find myself wanting to go back to homebrew and just hang out with the people there. there’s a promise of great conversation and silly side quests, all with an undertone of shared ambition. like, yes let’s play super smash bros and jackbox until 3am and then talk about neuromorphic computing the next morning and then bike around the city for hours. this is my fun.

my energy has been revitalized with the zest for life i know all too well internally — it felt like that external expression got lost along the way of my freshman year of college. i’m so happy it’s back.

we are so back. :)

today’s drops 🔍️

• apply for a $1000 grant with 1517 fund to work on your project

• software engineering internship @ salesforce

• join xrc as a paid venture fellow

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i also write a bi-monthly update focused on my work and project updates if you’d like to check that out here.

want to put an opportunity on my blog? shoot me a line at harsehajx@gmail.com.

teehee,
harsehaj ✌️

PS. if you have a question/topic you think would be interesting for me to reflect on, don’t hesitate to comment or reply to my emails with any ideas you ever have. :)