Somehow I ended up at art school, majoring in fine art.

I chose fine art because Korean design colleges required a ridiculous ugly art style - floating random objects with exaggerated perspective and light — for a portfolio. Meh, I’d rather draw watercolor still life.

After I entered college I realized something was wrong. The entire timetable was occupied with courses like.. Drawing 1, Drawing 2… Drawing 4, Fine art 1, Fine art 2… Fine art 6 and so on. WTH! I wanted to learn things, not spend my whole college life (and tuition fee) building artwork and trying to pitch my poor work.

So I transferred to design. Learned editorial, graphics, videos. Which was nice. I learned the techniques and viewpoint of a Designer. However I always had some desire for math and physics. I loved anything interactive, so I started coding. But.. it was not as technical as I aimed. Building UI for CRUD apps was boring. I found joy when I had to dig deep, wrestle with a problem, and actually think. Building map tiles from scratch, optimizing bundle size, automating typesetting.

However my math had always stayed at Liberal Arts level!

For the last 10 years I tried reading The Theoretical Minimum and it was so painful. After completing the Classical Physics part and moving on to Quantum Physics.. I decided I should review high school math again. And — apparently I did not forget the math, I just never properly learned it.

I never learned comprehensive trigonometry, calculus beyond a mere polynomial. That was why reading the physics book was so painful!

Learning all of this from the ground up is taking quite a while. But I am enjoying it. I hope I can finish before this summer and move on to physics again.

I am paying the price for not practicing math as a teenager, but rather drawing random things for 12 hours a day.