The SDSU Fall 2025 final exam period has been a capstone gauntlet on a very challenging year.
Back in January, I was a fresh transfer student having just completed all of the final requirements for my associate’s degree in the summer of 2024 and applied on a whim during the final month of the admission period for the Spring 2025 semester just to see if I would even be accepted. When I accepted the offer that was extended, I took on an accelerated curriculum to ensure that I’d be eligible for graduation at the end of Spring ’26. This would serve the dual purposes of minimizing student loan debt over more semesters, and allow me to graduate both one year after graduating from community college and on the milestone turning year of the next age decade in my life, reasons both practical and symbolic.
The months in between have been a mentally and emotionally demanding sustained pressure, the high stakes of this undertaking ever present in my mind. As an independent returning adult student with no financial support or safety nets, this has all been a very real do-or-die stakes journey. It’s only through both my own student loan debt and state assistance grants/scholarships that I’ve been able to even attempt this academic climb to begin with. So there’s no room for failure, either with individual courses or overall. Not only do I not have family to be able to fall back in an emergency, my obligations to my dog demand that I achieve continued successes to be able to care and provide for him.
Those fears and feelings of obligation to myself, my animal, and my financially supporting home state of California have been my sole motivators for the entirety of this year. With 16 units in the spring semester, 10 units over the summer session, and another 16 units this semester, this year has had only the briefest 1–2 week respites from the burdens of academia. Consequently, there’s so much I’ve sacrificed along the way. Gatherings with friends, holiday celebrations, engaging with my neighbors, weekend days dedicated to doing something special with the dog and maximizing his lifetime experiences, and so on—everything that didn’t involve my studies and tending to my pet’s basic needs.
And all those sacrifices carried a dual cost. It wasn’t just the forfeiture of the experience on my part, but also the toll on my interpersonal relationships. For as much as the words of encouragement and support flow when one pursues academic achievement, it’s not so simple and clean in practice. There’s a certain exasperation, and in some cases even resentment, for not having the bandwidth to be your usual self as it relates to everyone else. It takes the form of peer pressure to take “earned” time off and deprioritize academic obligations in favor of socialization. And the impatience of having those invitations declined. Or resentment for not being able to indulge a sudden and unplanned visit. The inbound communications dry up, and the endeavor feels that much more isolated and costly.
This balancing act of fears and expectations, worries of clinical depression/anxiety resurgence, existential demands and guilt, and academic course loads was harrowing enough in itself. But all the while, I’ve also been contending with the legal matters around my civil harassment case. My final petition hearing was on January 29th, a week into my first semester at SDSU. Since then, I’ve been managing moving it through the appellate process.
Right now, I’m in the final stages of this end-of-year crunch. All final exams have been taken, and I’ve only got a single written assignment to complete academically. By next week, all of the big burdens carried this year will be alleviated. The collegiate obligations of 2025 will be satisfied, and those other matters will finally be on their way towards their final resolution.
In other words, one more weekend to go before I breach the surface and am able to start stepping back into a life out from under all these burdens. Well, at least until the next semester starts.
Last week, I had my registration appointment for next semester’s classes. Yesterday, I got an email notification about the graduation application period opening. Today, I got the confirmation.
It’s jarring to go from the excitement of becoming a new inbound student at San Diego State University in January and find myself staring down the finality of this University student life only 11 months later. Having such a very short window in which to get to know more people and form that alma mater connection makes this current goal of lining up graduation with my upcoming milestone birthday year bittersweet.
In a more ideal timeline, I would have taken semesters 12 units at a time, a two-year University experience with more bandwidth to engage in extracurricular activities and relationship building. Instead, extistential pressures and economic reality drove me to pursue efficiency, this current timeline where I’ll be having graduation commencement cermonies back-to-back: 2025 from City College as a Fall 2024 graduate and 2026 from SDSU.
It’s been an exhausting endeavor, a near-monastic state of being with such a high opportunity cost that I exist only as a scholar and a walker to my dog. I’ve done very poorly at maintain other areas of my life in balance, from my fitness workouts to my journaling/blogging.
However, there’s still much left to do at SDSU before it’s truly done, including the coming end—and related final exams—of the current Fall semester.
With the start of the Fall semester looming, I keep reminding myself that at the end of this next term I’ll only be 9 units away from major program completion, 12 units from completing all requirements by the end of the Spring 2026 semester.
I grew up in a time when the “boy’s don’t cry” attitude was still a prevailing and unchallenged social attitude, and with everything that happened to me in my adolescence, my response was to grow callous and rid myself of the high emotional sensitivity I had in early childhood. It certainly didn’t help that those were also times in which presenting as straight-passing was a prudent survival mechanism. In turn, this has created a high bar for art in any medium to clear, and why I highly value media that is able to elicit an emotional reaction from me. The stronger the better.
For everything going wrong in the world—the U.S. specifically—2025 has been a rich year for me in this regard. In music, television, and gaming, I’ve experienced very strong works that didn’t just entertain, they’ve moved me to tears and inspired a sense of resolve that feels critical in enduring the future ahead.
🎞️ Sinners
Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster horror film certainly lived up to the hype. Without getting too deep in the subtext reeds and attempting to unpack a lot of the underlying meaning that the Black contingent on social media platforms have already discussed at length earlier this year, all I feel necessary to say is that the musical sequence midway through the film was worth the price of admission alone.
That amalgam of Black culture across time that is deeply synonymous with American culture was poignant enough, but the inclusion of Asian dancers associated to represent the two Chinese secondary characters resonated with my Chinese ethnicity, in total a stunning representation of the power of music and the oneness of humanity. It was an excellent warm-up to the visual feast that was…
🏟️ The Cowboy Carter Tour
Beyoncé tours are more than just music concerts, they’re major cultural and economic events at this point. Ever since her 2016 Lemonade album, she’s been on an insane ascent as an artist, no mean feat given that she’s always been an undeniable front runner in the entertainment industry. The level of detail, intentionality, and overall quality of all of her recent works is unparalleled, and has pushed me from “she’s good, I like some of her songs” squarely into fan territory. 2023’s RENAISSANCE tour will forever be the experiential apex of live music, but this year’s Cowboy Carter tour was still impressively magnificent—especially for a country themed album that I was not musically as enthusiastic about as I was its predecessor.
At face value, it was a live performance. In context, it was a celebration of Black history and excellence in the presence of the peak artistry. More than that, it was a soothing of the American soul, a time and a place where the Star-Spangled Banner could once be symbolic of “old glory” and not modern racism.
🎵｢海珠」(“Kaiju”)
In terms of actual 2025 music releases, the standout piece was Japanese band Sakanaction and their latest single, ｢海珠」(Kaiju, meaning “strange beast”, usually given as “monster”). The song was the first new release in years, it came on the tails of a publicized struggle with depression by frontman Ichiro Yamaguchi in both news and a couple of documentaries. Both musically and lyrically, the song is astoundingly dense in poetic beauty. From the perspective of someone intimately familiar with depression and living in these modern post-truth chaotic times, the message really hit hard when the music video (with an official captioned translation) came out a few weeks after the music release.
「今何光年も遠く 遠く 遠く叫んで また怪獣になるんだ」 “Now, I’ll roar so loudly that I can be heard from many light-years away, and turn into a kaiju again.”
Despite being around for a good while and being very popular in their native Japan, the song ended up being the first time the band’s music was used as an anime theme song. Although I don’t usually watch anime, repeatedly reading comments praising the show and the song’s thematic relevance eventually led me to…
📺 Orb: On the Movements of the Earth
This anime adaptation of a manga by the same name technically debuted at the end of 2024, but I didn’t come upon it until earlier this year; luckily by then, it was available to stream in its entirety. I started out highly dubious that a fictional period piece anime about heliocentric cosmological model would be able to retain my attention. Yet in a world where flat-earth conspiracists exist in this day and age, there was something fitting about a contemporary artwork revisiting the dogmatic oppression of knowledge and a universal truth that did historically happen.
With the plot’s driving conflict rooted in our reality, the ultimate resolution is also implied; the story arcs and the characters in between make the journey worth it. In them lies the notion that the experience and fruits of enlightenment lie a beauty worth dying for. It was a layered take on mortality, meaning in life, and nature of reality. Yet, for as great as Orb was, it pales in comparison to the masterpiece that is…
🎮 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
I could, and probably eventually will, write extensively on this unexpected marvel. To try to capture it adequately in a summary paragraph or two is a lost cause. The first game by a French indie game studio, and in one fell swoop eclipsed every entry in my lifelong relationship with the Final Fantasy series. It is musically unimpeachable, visually stunning, and fantastically well written. I haven’t been compelled by a game to learn the head writer’s name since Amy Hennig gave us both the Legacy of Kain and Uncharted series, but I’m already a big fan of Jennifer Svedberg-Yen.
“For Those Who Come After” and “Tomorrow Comes” are brilliant in their simplicity as catchphrases.
Fear and Anxiety are what drive us to compare ourselves to others because we start deriving our sense of who we are and what our value is based on how we stand next to other people
