A Life Story in 15 Minutes
Privileged kid gives outlook on life.
I have spent most of my life fulfilling the goals and desires of the people around me. Nothing that I have ever done has truly been for myself. I spend my time appeasing others, never thinking of how I can appease myself.
Right now, I am working an office job for a Fortune 500 company writing SQL queries and making slide decks. Two months ago, I was saying my last goodbyes to the University of California, Santa Barbara and next month I'll say hello to Duke University. After my freshman year, I transferred to a 'better' school and have a decent internship. Why then, does it feel like nothing?
Because none of it was anything I wanted.
When I was 9 or 10 or something around there, I wanted a new computer to play Minecraft. I begged and begged my parents until they agreed. With the help of a friend's older brother, I gladly went on PCPartPicker and racked up a shopping cart of a little over $1,000. Add in tax, a mouse, keyboard, and monitor, and the total was certainly over $1,500. That was an insane amount of money to me. When everything was at my house just in time for my birthday (strange how that worked), I had no clue how any of it got there. I think I spent an entire day building that computer, probably because I kept replaying the tutorial video on YouTube.
A few years later, I was introduced to Arduinos and microcontrollers. I was pretty hooked and, again, asked my parents for whole kits of sensors, a soldering station, a 3D printer, and anything else I could think of. In the end, I found the cheapest stuff I could find on eBay and made whatever I had work. It was through learning about the basics of microcontrollers that I was exposed to a community of people who also enjoyed building things. I heard about people making apps and websites to connect to them, so I went ahead and learned how to do that too.
I think I might have peaked there. My first year of high school was quickly derailed by the pandemic and I had no source of motivation to keep me doing anything. I might've run an AP calc or comp sci cheating ring where I'd finish a test in 15 minutes and send a pdf out to all my buddies here and there, but nothing else really. I played a lot of Counterstrike and League in the middle of Zoom class, not that anyone cared.
My junior year of high school, I finally did something after class. I did speech and debate. I was never all that good at it, I just enjoyed the fact that I was learning more about the world. It was from this that I picked up the habit of reading the news every day. I didn't need to win (God knows that I never did), I just needed to learn. Somewhere in this time, I also began to read Plato and Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre.
When it came time to apply for college, suffice to say that I didn't know what I was doing. I had no extracurriculars other than essentially hobbies. I landed on selecting computer science because I had a few programming experiences here and there and it was a well-known career. Come March, I was accepted into 4 schools: Rutgers, Penn State, Stony Brook, and UCSB.
I knew nothing about Santa Barbara other than that it was in California and California is a hell of a long way from Jersey. They were also giving me a few thousand dollars. I hit register not knowing of anything that would come. Near the end of my senior year, I found out about this thing called cold emailing and also learned that my Congressional district had no leading Democratic candidate for the primaries. I found the email of a political consultant in the area and gave it a shot.
If you ever have the chance to be an unpaid intern for a campaign that hasn't even started, I would say don't do it. I supplemented my lack of income by getting service job that summer and gambling whatever I had on risky options bets. Still, I had definitely caught the political bug.
When you try to tell Asian parents that you want to study politics instead of computer science, you don't expect a positive response. I have never yelled or cried more in three months than I did then. Every day was an opportunity for a new fight. I was a failure who couldn't get into a top school and now was walking away from a stable, lucrative career. I was an ungrateful, ridiculous, and insane child. How could I eat their food and sleep under their roof when I couldn't even study something that would mean they succeeded?
I was given an ultimatum: either study computer science or transfer to a top school. Every time I argued with my parents, it went back to that line. If I wanted my tuition paid for, I had to meet that line. I decided to leave home a little early to basically just chill out in San Francisco for a few weeks before school.
At the same time, I had also been applying to internships like crazy and learning everything I could about the transfer process. If there was any time in my life where I felt like a tryhard, it was then and there. While I was in SF, I coincidentally happened to be there at the same time as TC Disrupt and a few other startup-y oriented events. I did my best to sneak into afterparties and events with moderate success. Learning about and meeting people who build things for a living was a new concept to me. Not being from the Bay, I didn't know that there were just people trying to make new products and companies all the time. It's kind of crazy the people you can find there.
A week before my flight from SFO to SBA, I got a phone call from a recruiter giving me a verbal offer to that Fortune 500 company. The first thing I did was call my parents and bargain with them. If I could show that I can get an internship on my own, then I could hopefully study what I want, right? Of course, the answer was a succinct no.
My first quarter at UCSB, I took an intro to CS class and some gen eds. I also went to Cal Hacks in October and met some really cool people. For winter quarter, I was loaded up on CS, math, and science classes. I soon found myself skipping lectures; for instance, I only went two linear algebra lectures that whole quarter (to be fair, it was an 8am). In late February, I went to Tree Hacks and once again met really cool people. By 'cool people', I mean people my age who have raised millions, worked in big tech already, or have published amazing results in various fields.
As the weeks passed, I aced midterms and then finals. As the end of the quarter wrapped up, so too did transfer applications for college. I wrote all the essays for 8 schools in the span of a month. For Spring break, I decided to just stay at Santa Barbara, alone, for 9 days.
I don't exactly remember what happened then. There was some mounting anxiety and depression from meeting people who seemed incomparable to me combined with the dissonance of skipping lectures and acing exams. I was doing the bare minimum and seemingly getting away with it. I wasn't learning anything, I wasn't growing, and I sure as hell wasn't building.
I didn't get away with anything because the whole year took an immense mental toll on me, not in the form of rigor, but in the endless comparisons that fueled me and my parents’ motivations. At some point in those 9 days, I dropped all the CS-related classes I had in my spring quarter and replaced them with a full-on social sciences and humanities course load. Being late to the registration at a large public school, I had slim pickings. That quarter, I was probably the happiest that I'd ever been. I was reading philosophy on a beach, playing poker with friends on Thursday nights, and doing... a lot on the weekends.
In mid-May, I got an email about college results. The second time around, I had been accepted into two colleges: the University of Michigan (T5 political science, in fact) and Duke. Upon hearing the news, my parents already knew where I was going because they were the ones effectively deciding. In the same way that I begged for a computer nearly a decade ago, I begged to stay. To no avail, I waited out the full time before the registration deadline. In the eyes of my parents, paying $300,000 for a 'useless' degree at Duke was better than even paying less than half that for a computer science degree anywhere else.
I am not the one with money, but I am someone with an incredible amount of privilege to be able to control that sum of money for my tuition. Reluctantly, I registered. In the same way that I had no clue about anything related to UCSB, I had no clue about anything related to Duke. Two days after registering, I was leaving school two weeks early to go to my summer internship.
And now, you're pretty much up to speed. Don't get me wrong, all of this is great to have. I am in an incredible position. Great school, internship, pay, prestige, whatever.
It was my birthday a few days ago and I can't help but reflect on my life when that happens. Nothing that has happened to me in the last year and a half, give or take, has been anything I truly wanted. At every point where I could stand to make a decision, fortunate to even have that choice, I defaulted to what others, namely my parents, wanted of me. The thing is, if I were anybody else, defaulting would be no problem.
Who wouldn't want a top tier school on their resume and cushy desk job to go with it? Very few people would turn that kind of opportunity down; I realize that I'm the person who didn't turn it down as well. A year ago, I could have said screw it and just went a local community college for next to nothing before transferring to Rutgers to study political science on student loans being as disconnected from my parents as possible. That would have also been an idiotic thing to do.
By appeasing others, I have stumbled into a position that many would covet. Selling out, in most cases, is the path of least of resistance. Getting a return offer at my current internship job would be trivial. Landing some SWE, product, consulting, or finance role from a school like Duke would also be trivial in the same way.
I transferred for one thing and one thing only: to study what I truly want to. But I am an exception in a sea of people who do the exact opposite. At the same time, I worry that my perspective is too insular, too upper middle class so to speak.
I study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music. - John Quincy Adams
I might just be the last son in that lineage, perfectly sheltered from the realities of the world. Above all, I don't feel like I deserve any of it. I have done nothing special to warrant my position in anything and there are absolutely people who are more hard working than me vying for the same things as I was. Part of me genuinely wants to go back to Jersey to the cheapest school I can and just study there. But now I'm at a place where it feels like I can't refuse. My parents certainly wouldn't let that happen.
So, I shut up and take their money, hoping to finally do something for myself.
Good one!