Week 12: Panels, PRs, and Ping Pong: A Week Full of Moments That Mattered
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
By: Hong Bing Tang April 20, 2025
04/07/2025 to 04/13/2025
Introduction:
Hello peeps. I hope you all are doing great! This week for me was one filled with a lot of involvement with meetings and panels! In addition, we had our home meet this week as well and I got to see my parents, my sister, and her boyfriend as I ran the 5k! It was a pretty eventful week so let me get into it!
Talks:
This week I had a variety of panels and a meeting to discuss various parts of my experiences and identity. To start off the week, I was invited to attend Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Student Panel Event as a speaker. In this event, me along with four other students with various different way of identifying as Asian had a discussion panel where we were asked questions based around how being Asian has shaped our identity and what ways it has influenced our life along with our cultural identities. Even though there were 5 of us panelist, each one of us had very different experiences with our own cultures even though we had each identified as being Asian and it was really cool to learn more how other people’s perspectives differed from mine. Overall, it was a really good event, and I was glad to talk about my experiences along with learning more about others. Plus, it gave me the opportunity to speak in front of an audience of around 30-40 students, which is always exciting.
To follow up, on Tuesday night we had our Bi-weekly SAAC meeting. Since it was one of the last SAAC meetings of the year, so in this meeting, I took the time to reflect on my subcommittee and see what I could do better in the future along with what events we would like to see in programming next year. Additionally, we talked about how to increase student athlete engagement and decided we wanted to do some sort of cup system to maintain competitiveness within different sports teams. I hope to be able to jumpstart this over the summer and see if this would help with engagement.
To cap off the involvement of the week, I was also invited to speak to an honor class about my student athlete experience. Joining me was a women’s basketball player, Meachie, and football player, Decker. We were able to talk about our student athlete experience and talk about topics such as NIL, the transfer portal, which I have very limited knowledge about since transfers do not happen much in cross country, and the resources that we get like athletic advisors, top of the line training, and nutrition. This was a really valuable experience since the students, after studying all about athletics, most of the semester got to see how much of the things they learned about applied to our school. Overall, I really enjoyed it!
School:
This week was not too bad of a week of school with the normal amount of workload I was doing well and was on top of the assignments I had to do. However, this week I did have an exam in my coding class. I was a little bit worried since the exam was on harder concepts than the last exam, and we had not done many coding examples. Although the professor had done a better job at explaining how each of the algorithms worked so I was not too worried about the algorithms that he explained in class. Like our last exam, it was split into 3 parts with 1 parting being MCQ and done in class, one was a hand-drawn algorithm, and the last was a coding question. I studied a bit but not too much. When I took the multiple-choice part in class I was feeling pretty good until I was halfway through and had problems about hashing. This concept was covered quickly in class and did not done any examples, and there were 5 questions on the exam. So, I mostly had to guess on these ones which were unfortunate. However, even with this I did well on that portion. The next portions were not too bad since we had done examples in class, and I knew how to do them. Overall, it did a lot better than I thought I would do on the exam.
Ping Pong:
On Friday I decided to have an epic competition with Jessie. We decided to head to the SAC and play some ping pong against each other. A while back she had talked some smack and said that she could beat me in a table tennis match, so we finally got to play each other. We started off by warming up and she was a lot better than I remember, which was kind of funny. We then started to play a game, and she was really consistent, and it was really hard to score some points since she would return the ball a lot of the times I forget how competitive we get, especially her, when the games are close. I am not going to say what happened, however let’s just say I choked and ended up losing ☹
Chippewa Challenge:
The last big event of the week was our home meet! I was running the 5k! I was feeling pretty excited, however nervous as well since I was not feeling very confident. When the race went out, I was at the end of the pack and hanging on. The plan was to try to break 15:30, however, when the race went out, I either had the choice to run by myself at the beginning of the race or try to stay onto the pack but run a pace way that was to break 15:00. I decided to try and see what would happen if I tried to stay with the pack and well, I hung on for around a mile before dying a slow and painful death. It was a tough race, and I just felt out of touch of it when I fell off the pack. I feel I have dealt with racing for most of my college career, and it was frustrating. Even with this frustration, I stayed positive and in this rough race, I still ran faster than I had last year along with I did a strategy that I rarely do and went out aggressive which in the end will be helpful for cross country. After my race, I didn’t have much more time before I had to run another one. I was also running the 1500 and was pacing Brody to be able to see how fast he could run. It was a fun little task since I enjoy helping others out. The plan was to try to run 80 seconds per lap to get around 5 flat. I went out a little fast but even with this Brody held on well and was able to run 4:57 for the 1500 which is a pretty good time!
After both events, I decided to get food, relax on the infield and watch some races. I really enjoy track meets just for this to be able to watch others compete and be supportive. I was able to watch Joey and Miciah run the steeple, and it was super fun because Joey ended up running fast enough to be top 10 in CMU history for the steeple. Miciah was also close, but after falling on the last hurdle, he missed the mark. Additionally, I was also able to watch Andrew run the 400m hurdles and he ran great, won the race, and got a new PR. Overall it was a successful day on the track for many people!
After the race, Jessie, my parents, my sister and Evan, and I headed to Texas Roadhouse to get some food. Always a classic location to share some awesome food and conversations. Plus, it was my sister’s first-time meeting Jessie which was awesome! I was just really nice to be able to have dinner with some of the most important people in my life and I was really happy to share the moment with everyone! It was a good vibe, and the food was also good 😊
Conclusion:
Whether I was sharing my identity, competing on the track, or just spending time with people I care about, this week reminded me how full life can feel when you’re involved and intentional. It had its highs and lows, but each experience helped me learn a little more about who I am and where I want to grow.
Goals Update!
Journaling: I only journaled once this week
Reading: I have not gotten another book yet.
Phone usage: An average of 1 hour and 24 minutes. Not horrible, just a little higher due to the meat.
Get in Touch
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