Q3 Reflections, Q4 Decisions

That felt like a very quick Q3–the three months definitely went by really fast. I'm a bit late to my Q4 goal-setting, but I was on a very fruitful trip, on which I was able to reflect on my goals and reconnect with a culture I hadn't experienced in 4 years.

I'll briefly touch on the progress I made on the 4 categories of goals I listed in my last post.

With regards to music, I have been taking voice lessons for the past 5 months or so, and I can definitely say that my singing has improved. I can sing Demi Lovato's
"Skyscraper" and the popular K-Pop Demon Hunter song "Golden" without too many issues after sufficient vocal warmups. Though I haven't spent as much time practicing guitar.

On the topic of career goals, I completed the Georgia Tech HCI series of courses on EdX. I also attended many alumni events co-hosted by my university in an attempt to network and pitch my projects in search of collaborators. The mobile view of my silly Spotify Playlist website is still a work in progress, but I have done a significant portion of the implementation and will refine it in the upcoming month.

With fitness, I have climbed some more, done some more ice skating, and practiced roller skating with my new roller blades. However, towards the latter month or so, I genuinely have slacked off– which I want to amend. The balance beam from The Foot Collective is fun to stand on. I also found a Giboard at the local climbing gym and can definitely say that slacklining is a completely different skillset than balancing on a stiff beam.

With language, I finished my first Swedish class– it was really fun. I liked the exposure to culture and more vocabulary than I would have gotten from Duolingo. I still maintain my other language skills with exposure via social media, news, and music.

Goals for Q4

I'm late to list my goals for Q4, and I think this one I want to keep them focused on my more immediate projects and work that needs to be done by the end of the calendar year. I will continue Swedish courses and my Duolingo activity, as well as maintain fitness, but the core goals of the next 3 (or 2.5 months at this point) are to lock in on my projects.

• Songwriting + music production courses on Coursera - finish those. I started them while on a trip back home to the East Coast, since I figured I wanted to dedicate some time to learning tricks and techniques for improving my lyric writing for songs. I'm quite okay with writing raps and poetry or spoken word, but songs that are sung are a whole new world for me.
• Finish the Mobile view of my silly Spotify site – Hopefully, I do this before the end of October, since it is so, so close to completion.
• Spend time on Agentic AI and networking internally at the tech consulting firm as I prep for finding my next booking. I gotta support my lifestyle somehow, and I still enjoy the style of this work.
• Record and post some more covers on Instagram – my voice lessons have helped strengthen my singing tone, and I want to put out more fleshed-out covers with instrumentals I find online. (i.e, record them with my actual mic instead of just the phone mic.)

I'm keeping the goals for the next 3 months super focused, as the holiday season will be kicking in soon. I'll likely make another trip back home for the end-of-year holiday season.

I'm feeling super refreshed and want to focus on completing the projects I've started.