By spending the past year split between Boston and MV, I think I can confidently say that each place has everything that the other lacks. They balance each other out perfectly, each having their own entirely different meaning. Boston is always new; no matter how many times I go for a run on the streets of Boston, I always find myself taking a new route. On Martha’s Vineyard, my route draws a heart each time, beginning and ending at my home. The same familiar route every time I put on my sneakers. I love the newness and I love the familiarity. I love having new experiences In Boston, and I love coming home to the faces and places that I’ve never not known. Academically, I’ve never faced such a challenging yet rewarding year of school. I remember feeling total imposter syndrome during my first year computer science lab. It was the kindness of one of my classmates that made me feel like I was capable. He asked me if I was okay and gave me his number with permission to ask him any question, even stupid ones. That act of kindness helped me more than he could know. In my second core programming class I dedicated myself to understanding rather than just doing, to asking the stupid questions, and reminding myself that I wasn’t alone. I declared computer science as my major that semester. Since then, I have coded games, an image processor program, and a functional binary search tree. As I enter my fourth semester in Boston, I realize what I want in a career. I want to be able to create and learn new things every day but still feel grounded in the code I’ve learned since I started in my first semester.