Oberlin Blogs

Fifteen things I learned at Oberlin

September 17, 2025

Naci K. ’26

I learned that, because of the way our ears perceive sound, if you play two low notes on the piano that are very close together it might sound muddy. But this isn’t true for high-register notes. So if you’re a jazz musician trying to construct a harmonically interesting, dissonant chord, you should use wide intervals in the lower register and put the narrow intervals in the higher register.
I learned that being an early bird is the best thing you can be at Oberlin. You can take your time getting up in the morning; you can take the nine A.M. classes the rest of us don’t have the energy to wake up and take.
Relatedly, I learned how what you do in the first fifteen minutes after you wake up can set the tone of your entire day. In my second semester here, I had to get up at nine A.M. all five days of the week. The day before the semester started, I decided to start a routine: I would buy myself a box of chocolate chip muffins from the grocery store every two weeks or so, for weekday breakfasts. That was one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made.
I learned how to say “you’re smart” in Japanese. It’s あなたは頭がいい — literally “your head is good.”
I learned a reliable way to make friends. It’s very simple. Take all the opportunities you can to meet people, whether that is through organized activities, the people you live with, or through mutual friends.
Especially through mutual friends! People know people.
I learned that some programmer involved in making Quake III Arena found a fast way of calculating the inverse square root of a number. It somehow involves the hexadecimal number 0x5F3759DF.
I learned that friendship is based on trust and shared experiences. Find ways to have the latter, and find ways to build the former.
I learned how to throat sing.
I learned that warming up for physical activity — running, singing, what have you — is really important. Whenever I go for a run, I feel really fatigued for about the first ten minutes, but if I can push past that I can get into a groove very easily. This is true for intellectual or creative work as well.
I learned not to take relaxation for granted.
I learned about The Virginian, a novel written in 1902 that is seen as one of the earliest examples of the Western. Its author, Owen Wister, was good friends with Theodore Roosevelt, and a mountain in Grand Teton National Park is named for him, since The Virginian takes place in and around the Teton Range. I learned this the year before I spent a summer working in Yellowstone National Park, fifty miles to the north.
I learned to love autumn. I think Oberlin looks best in the fall. (I’ve written about this before.)
I learned how, in computer science, it’s important to structure the data you’re working with in the right way. Last summer, a program that I wrote to analyze a dataset ran so slowly, I calculated that I would be done with my eight-week internship before the program finished running. So I tried to improve it using what I learned in a data structures class in my very first semester at Oberlin. With a little tweaking, I got the runtime down to under three seconds.
Finally: I learned that you can just do things. You can just go on a walk in the arboretum. You can just buy chalk at the corner store and draw a mural on the sidewalk. You can just put on a concert without asking anyone (except the room reservation software) for permission. You can just do things.