This summer in Nashville was interesting and I will try to be as honest as I can about my experiences, good and bad.

The Start

Man, this was tough. Working a full-time job isn’t something I’m used to. I interned in Game Development at Iron Galaxy (they’ve helped work on little-known games like Fortnite and Overwatch). I only had a 1-week break between the end of my semester and the start of my internship, so we jumped right in. Our training had us learning assembly, and boy this was hard for me. I’ve only had to stay up late for school once at Vanderbilt, but keeping up with this internship meant staying up late consistently.

It was also around this time that I tried out for Nashville Shine, one of the best mixed ultimate frisbee teams. I got cut, and though I disagree with the decision to not get a practice squad place, I didn’t come into the tryouts well-rested and in top form, so I definitely could’ve put a better foot forward. But regardless, this would have been a big time commitment that I’m not sure I was ready for.

One beacon of fun was pickleball. My partner and I started off the league undefeated for the first month. Both of us having only played a couple times before, we signed up for the intermediate league. Pickleball is great and I highly recommend it. It was actually the 3d printed pickleball paddle that got me interested in pickleball in the first place.

And the Plot Thickens (I guess)

At this point in the internship, I was done with assembly (thankfully). Though I learned a lot about programming where there are basically 0 abstractions, it was good to get my mind away from 1s and 0s. We started learning about Unreal Engine which was pretty chill.

I started a personal project to 3d model and print a shoe rack. This project really evolved from me needing more space for my shoes. I have tennis, climbing, running, pickleball (yes they exist), sandals, and crocs. Maybe I have too many shoes, but like I’m not gonna throw them away, so a shoe rack is the perfect solution. The astute readers may realize that you can easily buy shoe racks, but like wouldn’t it be cooler to make it myself? And so I designed a few versions and finally made one that would work.

By this point, our pickleball road to glory has hit a few bumps. We’ve lost a few close games against good teams, but we’ve always won at least 1 game in the 3 game series that we play every week.

And now it ends

My roommates moved out which left me with a place with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. It was amazing! I started hosting people and not worrying about annoying my roommates. I turned the extra bedroom that my roommates left into an office and music studio…it was very nice. I came to realize that I should live by myself or be extremely sure when picking roommates and not ignore red flags.

Work-wise, I felt like I was crushing things. We got placed on a project and I was knocking out bugs, implementing UI, and so on. It felt good to finally get to do what a full-time job would actually look like.

At this point, I really started working on organizing stuff for the ultimate frisbee club at Vanderbilt. I’m the president this year and I’m gonna do my best to grow the team culturally and competitively. I made a website for the team which you can check out here.

And of course, can’t forget about the pickleball playoffs. We ended the season as the 2 seed and played the 3rd seed in the semi-finals. This was a team that we’d lost to in the past, and in this case, we got the job done and beat them in comeback fashion. It was probably my most dominant performance. Unfortunately, we lost in the finals, but it was a good run.

Then, it all ended with college move-in and the start of senior year.

- Marius