My life in numbers

life statistics?
Post created: 2020-05-12

Perhaps I should say my life in pictures, but I feel that implies photos...

Information derived from a double-entry bookkeeping Excel sheet that I've been maintaining for the past four years (since I got to CMU). Across approximately 2100 transactions, the stats are:

Notes

  • Glossary.
    • DSA = desk services attendant.
    • TA = teaching assistant.
    • SURF = summer undergraduate research fellowship.
  • I was working as a SCS Gateskeeper for one semester while TAing, the pay for that got lumped into TAing.
  • Cost of living has an approximate min/avg/max of 50/300/500 depending on how often I cook and on how budget conscious I'm being that month. I ate out a lot during my summer at Amazon. To put these numbers into context, one meal out in Pittsburgh is about USD 10.
  • Cost of internship is something that annoys me a little about CMU. As an international student, to obtain CPT work authorization you must be enrolled in a 3-unit course and pay summer tuition rates for those three units. Domestic students have no such fees. This was a factor in my decision to pursue SURF instead of interning at a startup.
  • The nature of my rental at 5620 Woodmont St is best summarized as unfortunate. It should have cost around high 9k instead of the current low 15k. I think my main takeaway from this is to avoid living with or planning around other people, since I would like to continue otherwise trusting people by default.
    • I have since learned that the 3/8ths of the water bill that we were going to settle later for 5620 Woodmont St comes up to a sum of 2.7k. The above figure is inaccurate. ... Yeah, this was a bad decision all around. Updated 2020-07-15.
  • Figures for academics will be updated when grades are posted. Updated 2020-05-21.

Excel is an incredible tool, but I would not recommend my current Excel bookkeeping setup. I'm moving away from it because the calculation engine is highly inefficient, to the point where I've disabled autocalculations so that I can enter data without my Surface Laptop 2 freezing up. There is interesting research being done in bringing database techniques to spreadsheets by Aditya's group at Berkeley, so maybe this will be fixed some day. In the interim, the next chapter of my life will be recorded in Ledger with emacs.