A studyblr of sorts

2021 - definitely a lot to unpack there. Started off with peak COVID cases and massive pandemic anxiety and just a glimmer of hope keeping us sane through the cold, cold days. Funnily enough, that’s how it ended - peak COVID cases, massive pandemic anxiety and again, just a glimmer of hope, though this time, the glimmer might be a facade. 2021 brought us quite a few - once with the vaccines and then in the fall after delta tapered off a bit. In the face of the wax and wane of the pandemic, life ended up continuing, trying to pretend like everything was fine (even though, no it quite wasn’t at times).

This year was a lot of trying to concentrate fun and sanity into the brief months in which COVID was not rampaging around the world. I somehow managed to cram a lot of things into the year, which was impressive given that I spent a lot of my time wrestling imposter syndrome, and pandemic anxiety, and loneliness, and adulthood, and all of the usual things.

For instance -

[a post-mortem is what we call a reflection, or a summary, of some project or process we went through after it's wrapped up.]

I recently travelled to New York to find an apartment, and if you don't know anything about the housing market in NYC, here's a quick sum-up of what it's like: it's awful, ridiculously competitive, and expensive. If you're thinking of moving to New York, or want to see what everyone's complaining about, feel free to read on!

Friends are so, so, so important. But they will change, with people coming and going, with existing friendships always evolving, groups growing and dissolving. A few, you'll find, will stay for longer than you might grow to expect, and those are the ones you should hang on to. The same goes for interests, hobbies, majors, routines - so many of these might change over the course of the next four years, and that's ok.

On that note, try new things. Try things you were always interested in, but never got the chance to do before college. Try things you'd never heard of. Even try things you aren't interested in, just to see if things change. With lots of clubs and hobbies and even classes, it's ok to try it out for a couple weeks, and then dip if you're really not into it. I wanted to try dance, so I did that for a year, I tried Model UN (literally hadn't heard of it before college) and loved it. I went into student government (which I did NOT want to do) and was a part of it for three years - it changed my life. On the other hand, I also ran a research conference (wasn't into it, quit), tried a leadership program (didn't mesh well with my learning style, quit), and dabbled in biology before focusing on my computer science major.

Understand that it's actually hard to do ....things in the adult world, such as acquiring a job, doing laundry consistently, learning to cook. Sending a literal single email. Taking a bus. Making a doctor's appointment. It takes time to get used to, but also understand that years from today, you'll have accomplished all of those things you struggled to do on day 1. Be patient with yourself as you learn these skills. By then, you'll also have a lot more to learn, such as acquiring a lease, finding a car, moving across the country, and trust that you will figure those out too.

Taking care of yourself and your body is extremely important, and the long-term effects of doing so (or not doing so) are very evident down the road. This means exercise, eat healthy, and breathe in fresh air as much as you can. The sun is so incredibly crucial to a lot of people's wellbeing, including my own, and it's crazy how much just being outside in the sun (or conversely, not seeing the sun for a week) can affect your mood. Overall, these three things can translate to better sleep, more energy, and more focus, which are all things that are important for academic success anyways. Losing track of these things is also really easy to do, so try as hard as you can to not.

Sometimes, you need help. Actually, it is quite inevitable that you will reach a time in your life when you need help, whether it's with a homework problem, or a relationship issue, or a combination of a million different small things that you can't even begin to verbalize. As soon as you can, identify people that you can trust and on-campus resources you can leverage for help. For instance, people might == your RA for roommate problems; on-campus resources == your career center for career questions or student support services for those other million things. Then, if/when the time comes, you will know that you can turn to these places for help.

There's a lot of rushing around campus that goes on, like between classes, or grabbing a quick bite to eat for lunch, or oversleeping your club meeting. Once in a while, just stop walking so fast and look up at the sky, around the main yard, down at the university seal in the center of campus and remember that you worked really hard to stand where you are today. Take a second to take it in every now and then.

There will be times where you think you might not know anything - not a single thing, when everyone around you knows it all. Everyone goes through this at some point, so while it seems like the people around you are literal geniuses in some specific subject, they might not be as strong of a writer or debater or lab technician or musician. For what it's worth, they might be looking at you and wishing they could be as good as you in some other strength that you might not see. It's also something that might recur from time to time and it's ok that it does, but talk about it out loud instead of keeping it bottled up inside.

At some point, you might feel that there is more out there that you don't know that you do. That last part is true - there is so much out there to learn about, and there's no way you're going to know it all, but the trick is to identify what you don't know, figure out what you do need to know, and then go out and learn it. Learning how to learn and learning how to ask the correct questions are probably two of the most important skills you should take away from college and continue to develop long after that. It's super funny - during my last semester of college, none of my friends nor I took a single class within our majors. We all took a bunch of classes in random subject areas we never even touched throughout our 4-5 years, I guess because at the end of it all, we realized there was so much in the world that we were yet to hear about.

Your time in college will go by so fast. Hopefully at the end of it, you'll wish you had a bit more time. Even if you think you have some amount of months or years left, remember that in a split second, everything could change (e.g. global pandemic). So never take the time for granted, always try to be present in the moment. For so much of my life, I had lived to prepare for the future, but I finally took some time to enjoy the present in the last couple years of college. In hindsight, I wish I had lived for the present a lot more than I already did.

hello friends, i definitely just abandoned this whole blog, now didn't i

well i am happy to report that i am still alive, and am thriving!

Here's a rundown of everything that has been going on:

[inserting a readmore because this is long af]

Ah, so I have forgotten to update in a million years, per usual

~ Random thought section ~

I woke up this morning and read this tweet thread about Alice Wu's director's note for her movie The Half of It. It's streaming on Netflix, and I highly encourage to go watch it, it's probably one of my favorite movies from the past few years. Anyways, she talks about how she produced the film while digesting the heartbreak of a friendship breakup - the whole thread hit me on a different level, but here's a quote that really hit home for me, especially a month from graduation: "The end of the film is each of their beginnings. And for my characters, I can think of no happier ending." We spend a lot of time worrying about the end of things and the uncertainty of things to come. Yet, there was a time where we worried about the exact same things for the very chapter we are now so nervous about leaving.

1. I'm nervous about leaving school and starting the..... rest of my life???

2. I'm nervous that my friends will slowly fade away. I'm nervous that they'll get on with their lives and I'll be slowly still trying to get my bearings, stuck in limbo.

3. I'm nervous that starting adulthood will be difficult because there are no more college orientations, no more awkward freshman dinners, perfect opportunities to meet new friends who are just as nervous as you are.

In writing this out, I felt a sense of deja-vu, like I had written these words before. So I just looked back at some of my posts right before entering college, and lo and behold:

08-18-2016: Today I said goodbye to one of my closer friends, and i realized that without even knowing it, Sunday’s party was the last time I would see some of my closest friends. It’s awful that way, that you don’t even know it’s the last time until it’s passed, and you’re left to pick up the the end of a chapter of a relationship from the scraps of an unexpected and improper farewell.

I feel like I’m in a weird twilight zone between college and high school where my present friends are all beginning to fade away to move on in their lives, and I’m yet to really meet anyone in my class yet, so at the moment,,,,,,there really isn’t anyone.

I wrote this less than a week from moving to Boston, and it's so shocking to me that I also experienced the "unexpected and improper farewell" part in senior year. It's almost the exact same thing that happened in COVID and is continuing to happen. You never know when the last time you might see someone might be, except instead of consolidated over the course of one pre-college summer, it's over the course of more than a year, the time that this pandemic has been going for.

And I hate that I said the "fade away and move on" thing verbatim, literally nearly five years ago. To be honest though, it's true, a lot of them did fade away and move on. But so did I, I wasn't left behind. To some extent, I was the one who did a lot of the moving away. And like many things in life, a couple of us continue to hang around, and maybe our friendships cycled in and out over college, but have come around again after a few years. I guess those are the ones that you know will stick around. The limbo period between chapters is a hard one, and it's nice to know that present-day me isn't the only one who has felt this. It's nice to know that past me met so many incredible people so fast, that I forgot this limbo period happened.

I know this part is getting a little long, but there's just a couple more snippets I want to share:

08-13-2016: I recently read Marina Keegan’s essay The Opposite of Loneliness, and one line resonated with me a lot: We’re so young. It seems silly and almost pretentious for me to think that this party would be so final, and yet it does, even though we have decades upon decades to build and connect or reconnect.

We’re so young, but that doesn’t stop the understanding that we are going to a new chapter in our lives and that it’s going to redefine our relationships. I hope it doesn’t change them too much.

I suppose much of the anxiety of going to college results from having to build my own community from the ground up again.... I tell myself the pieces will fall together and everything will be ok, but it doesn’t stop the increasing anxiety from, well, increasing.

I loved this collection of essays, if you haven't read it, I recommend you do. In moving around for so many years, I haven't been able to keep a lot of books in my possession, but I kept this one because that essay really hit home for me, and continues to, no matter what part of life I'm currently experiencing.

I think moving to college did change my relationships. But change is not a bad thing - your childhood friendships, the few of them that survive, end up strengthening and growing into adult friendships. And in the end, isn't that better than not changing at all? I'm hoping that a few of my college friendships will do that too - we'll go from college friends to family friends, and my kids will call them "Aunt" and "Uncle" and they'll grow up watching their parents talk for hours in the front yard before finally getting in the car and leaving for home.

08-13-2016: But hey, this is part of what I signed up for, I knew I wasn’t going to have much of an initial safety net, but I’m sure I’ll survive. We, as humans, always find a way to adapt right?

I think I survived and adapted. Not in the way I saw things going, but we can never really fully predict things, can we? One day, I'll learn to give myself a safety net for the next chapter, I'm sure. Today's not that day though.

Going back to her director's note, there was one more thing that just struck an emotional chord for me:

Fun fact, Alice Wu actually went to MIT for a bit before transferring to Stanford, and then she became a software engineer at Microsoft! I relate a little too much to her. Maybe one day I too will dump coding for my art form. But for now, in this above example, I relate far too much. I worked on my album, Imperfect, a little too obsessively this past winter while trying to digest the throes of heartbreak from one of my own friendships that ended. I still don't know if there was an ending for that friendship. I think I've spent a lot of time trying to put off the end, like a TV series that just keeps adding more and more seasons. Regardless of whether it needs to end or not (which I have not decided and will continue not to do so), I spent a lot of time thinking about who I was before and after that friendship, and I've concluded that a lot of who I am now, what my life looks like now is a result of that friendship. I'll give you a hint: I really like who I am now, compared to who I was before, and it showed me a lot of parts of life and friendship that I never expected would happen. That friendship was (is?) one of the most beautiful things that has happened to me in my life.

Let's finish off this reflective post with a quote from Khalil Gibran, that's kinda related to that point about how transformative the past can be, and how we're far better off in future chapters of our lives because of it.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;

For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

Again, if you haven't read his collection of poems, you should absolutely 100% drop whatever you're doing right now and do so! Wow, I really just assigned an entire reading list in this post.

I hope in making this movie, Alice found peace. I would hesitate to say that I found peace when making my album. I wrote a lot of songs about the heartbreak I felt from that whole experience. But the last song I wrote, "Best Friends," ends the whole thing on a positive note, that at the end of the day, I remember how my friends (past and present) literally saved my life and how things are looking a little better, and whatever happens, I hope my best friends will be there waiting for me, whoever they end up being.

- OK I PROMISE I DIDN'T SET OUT TO BE 100% SO EMO -

so in addition to being a CTO, a CS major, and a dorm vice president, i was also a campaign manager for 2 weeks (the exact campaign that I was managing is not entirely difficult to figure out if you really want to know, especially if you click on the links BUT i will be trying to not mention it specifically here lol). You might be wondering - (1) why and (2) how did you end up becoming a campaign manager..... you're not even a poli sci/gov/humanities/literally anything vaguely related to this major??

You're correct, yes, how did this happen? Well that's a great place to start this story:

How in the world this happened

Friends drag you into stuff. This happens to be the same friend that dragged me to New York, and then was 20% of the reason I got dragged into the negotiation class, and then was maybe 15% of the reason i got dragged into nonprofit activities? In terms of providing unique opportunities in my life, she definitely takes the cake. So one day, she says "I'm running for this position," and me and the squad says "we gotchu." What does that mean? Clearly wasn't sure in the beginning, but we were texting campaign strategies and slogans and tiktok ideas in the chat for fun. None of us had any real responsibilities, especially since the actual candidates were still weighing the playing field and figuring out their platform.

I also was a course 6, so I guess there was some expectation that I would make the website, even though I didn't actually code the website from scratch.

but anyways, it was actual campaign time.

CAMPAIGN SZN

After they figured out the campaign platform, it was game on for the campaign materials. We spent a lot of time on artwork, we photoshopped pictures from a photo shoot, we came up with campaign motto ideas, we brainstormed strategies for officially announcing the campaign. We had an actual campaign meeting to talk over things in mid-April where I met like six different people, friends from both candidates on this ticket, who were supporting this effort. We had a google drive AND a Dropbox. Look at this:

Despite this seemingly organized effort, it was not that organized because this publicity team didn't actually actively do anything for like a week. Many reasons for this: one being it was actually the semester, and it was also CPW weekend. Unfortunately for me, that weekend was literally hell for me, because I was managing this site for our nonprofit, CPW events (so like five zoom calls on a Saturday), classes (because those are still happening), and then the campaign thing finally started, about a week before voting opened. In the form, of a website.

So the tl;dr is I developed an entire Squarespace website in one night. Yes, one night. I had to model it from I think the website from a Harvard campaign site, which took me like three or four hours on a Saturday night, which is a very fast time in my opinion to learn how to use Squarespace. I also bought a domain and figured out how to connect it to Squarespace at like 1 in the morning, which was the first domain I ever bought in my life!

(It expires in a month. I am absolutely going to let it die.)

Also, if anyone from squarespace is reading this for some reason, yall made a really solid product. I actually was very happy with my experience. You all should use it, I am 100% not sponsored by them at all, but honestly it was a very good experience. If you need to develop a website in four hours and don't have a lot of webdev experience, definitely consider it. You can even see website clicks and user analytics, it's actually really put together.

The next day we spend a lot of time going through website changes and artwork changes. It's bad. We had so many discussions about color palettes and the advantages of a 3 column vs 4 column layout. Yes. I'm serious. I'm starting to go crazy.

If anyone's interested, I would say that our website definitely was better than the other campaign's website. Like objectively. Like both campaigns were great, but the website? well. Here's the link (archived because I only paid for 1 month of squarespace :D) The amount of detail that went into it is actually incredible, the amount of spacing, i even had to custom CSS the header image so that mobile headers would show up correctly.

THE CAMPAIGN VIDEO

so sometime during this week, I had this thought about making a really good campaign video. I was very inspired by some of these Google ads that started with a Google search bar. (Yes, I am aware that I am that much of a Google simp.) To be honest, rewatching this ad, I really definitely just copied this entire ad lol, it's ok we don't have to talk about that.

That Wednesday, we coincidentally talked about what makes campaign videos successful. We talked about how Trump's incendiary imagery helped stoke the flames and how it was really effective in getting people to vote, and eventually helped him beat Clinton in the presidential election. So I went and took that and grabbed news clips and campus videos and overlayed that in the video, and it went from like a solid 6 to an 8 immediately, in my honest, unbiased opinion. You can see what I mean in the video itself: [link].

We also had to put together quite a few interviews about what they wanted from the school and were looking for in their candidates, which took a million years of coordination, but we somehow got it done in three days, and everything was put together in a flurry of a weekend, unending changes and small fixes for sixteen hours straight. I could not even tell you how much I learned about premiere pro and how to use layer masks and everything. I even composed the music for the first fifteen seconds of it. Literally, composed, it.

And so on a Sunday afternoon FINALLY right before voting, the video drops. I'm sitting in my backyard absorbing the sun because I hadn't left my computer for 48 hours straight.

It gets like 1000 views or impressions or something in like two days, which is incredible for me, since I'm not a professional by any standards, but I am considering being a professional campaign manager at this point. By the way, we're also managing an Instagram page, a Facebook page, a tiktok page, a website, our individual social media pages, and we're trying to synchronize this video drop and all of our publicity efforts across every single one of these channels. It's chaotic at best.

VOTING SZN

So it's voting week, where we give everyone an entire week to vote. Across the week, it's mostly a waiting game, we make a few more tiktoks and funny videos that we publicize to get out the vote more. The last day, we're thinking about it, and we know the final vote's gonna be close, so we message every. single. person. in our Facebook friends list. I think I singlehandedly convinced like twenty people to vote (and hopefully vote for our ticket).

There's a lot of drama about different stuff. I won't really talk about it because I think it got really messy, but this week and entire couple weeks was a lot to get through honestly. As a reminder, I'm also working on my senior thesis and my nonprofit website work is peaking at this point, so everything is very, very bad and none of us have slept in a while. Also it's the pandemic.

Finally, the results come out. We lost by like 20 votes or something, out of 1500 or so total votes casted or something like that. It's one of the highest voter turnouts in school history or something, I don't quite remember. After that, we're so emotionally drained from this whole thing that we just don't talk about it for a while and that's that.

If the ticket won, I wonder how it would've turned out. I feel like things would've continued to be busy, and maybe that's not a great thing. So maybe everything happened for a reason. I don't know, but those three weeks were quite interesting, quite fun, quite odd. I'm putting those videos in my personal portfolio and am putting Adobe Premiere Pro and Squarespace on my resume and moving on.

This post has been difficult to write, so I've been putting it off for a while, not gonna lie. The reason I put it off is because I'm not quite sure how yet to reflect on my MEng experience so far. I didn't have a great experience last semester because of social isolation, neverending confusion, lack of guidance, imposter syndrome, zoom fatigue, etc., so I was really hoping IAP would be better so that I didn't just write a really depressing half-assed post about "how my MEng is going/not going" here.

Well, IAP did go better! I finally figured out a path forward and have been able to make progress on my project on my own. This has led to a generally improved sense of purpose in life, which was VERY missing last semester. I think what was missing was my usual shenanigans that I randomly find myself in with my friends, whether it's hackathons or spontaneous trips or literally forming startups. But in my own way, I've done a couple things of interest in the past few months in addition to my research, just to keep this blog fun haha, no other reason

My Actual Research

So last semester was rough because I was ramping up to a somewhat new project, a new direct supervisor, and a new degree program/way of life..... all remotely. I thought it would be fine, and yet it wasn't? I talked to some of my friends who started a full time job, and nearly all of them agreed, that ramping up to a new job in zoom land was extremely difficult. One of them said they hadn't even finished ramping up yet (T.T) I reflected a lot on why it was hard, and I determined it was because I only had one or two hours of scheduled face to face with my direct supervisor per week, and little to no other guidance outside of that. I was trying to learn as much as I could about existing research, which was not only in compilers (which, to be honest, I didn't know a lot about), but also in computer architecture (which I also did not know much about at all) and trying to understand things from discussions where I barely had a foundational knowledge to begin with. I struggled to even find the questions to ask that would help me out.

At this point, my supervisor was also really busy with his own deadlines, and I don't think he had much management experience of his own, so it was also probably hard for him. If we were in person, he'd be able to sense the confusion in my face and I'd be able to pop by his office whenever I needed, even if that was every day. But zoom calls are laggy and poor resolution and emails asking for help are often left unread. For the first two months of my MEng, it was mostly like this, just kind of feeling I was bumbling along, not really sure what I should be doing.

Wow, my imposter syndrome was off the charts. I began to panic about whether I’d be able to finish my degree on time, even though I was like literally like. two (2) months into this endeavor. At some point in November (I think literally right around the election), I felt really, really worthless, as a researcher, as a contributing member of society, and I felt really, really lonely and constantly anxious because I didn’t have like //my job// to ground me to reality. The Thursday after this, I sat on the Esplanade with my friend, our feet hanging over the water and we watched the sun go down. As we talked, I felt myself grounded again, and my overthinking brain calmed down for the time being.

When I went home, I decided I was going to find outside things to occupy me if my research was going to. I signed up to be a tech lead for my school’s Google Developer’s Student Club (yes, I really cannot leave Google), and I signed up to interview for MIT. I decided to #manage #up and make things better re:research by asserting my confusion??? if that makes sense lol

By Thanksgiving, I was home in California, and I felt like I had a way better plan moving forward for my research and was busy planning a few things here and there for my various obligations. I was also taking microeconomics for fun, which was actually.... really fun (as it turns out).

IAP

This IAP was pretty much just an extension of the semester, I mean like I guess that is just how MEng goes lol, but I actually did a good amount of /stuff/ this IAP. I would usually work on my research for the morning and some of the afternoon, and in the afternoon I would bake or go on walks with my mom and workout, and in the evenings, I would work on my other obligations, or read, or other random side projects. Such side projects include: investing in penny stocks, writing music, creating tiktoks

tl;dr go stream “Best Friends” by Clur on Spotify and Apple music, and all other platforms that exist

Spotify and Apple music

Spotify and Apple music

Spotify and Apple music

When I was in high school, I got really into making mashups of songs and posting them on my other tumblr blogs and soundcloud. This grew into remixing songs and adding my own bits to them. Unfortunately, DCMA was always behind me and taking down my music for copyright strikes. At some point, I got really annoyed and said to myself, “F*** it, I’m just gonna make my own music.”

It was a lot of figuring stuff out on my own. Like I literally went from sine waves to full on synthesizers tryna figure stuff out. It was also a lot of finding everything free on the Internet and watching a lot of YouTube videos and connecting a lot of stuff together. By junior year, I had a couple really simple piano based electronic tunes going, but nothing professionally done or past a few distinct voices.

And then in junior year, I bought a guitar and started writing songs. But unfortunately, I was like the world’s worst singer. Like absolutely tone deaf. And looking back, I was also not a great songwriter. Nope. But it added another dimension to my music, and soon I was adding guitars and rhythms and words and melodies to my stuff. Still though, nothing was actually well done, mostly just smatterings of instruments thrown together.

In senior year of high school, I wrote this in my MIT application:

After school, when my mind is tired and spent, I wander to the music room in my house and start producing. I jot down a few notes and words, tap out a rhythm, and put it all together. Whether its electronic, piano, or acoustic music, I find a way to convey what I want to say. Instantly, all the stress of my life disappears for a few minutes as my creation comes to life. Whatever results usually ends up on my blog (ashexmusic.tumblr.com), where I share it with the world, so they might escape for a while too.

I wrote at least ten or fifteen songs in high school, and I think one of them was not cringeworthy upon first sight. It’s true though, I always thought that in some alternate universe, I would be a music producer or some form of musician because doing music things takes me to another world. If you’ve seen the movie Soul from Pixar, that “in the zone” thing they’re depicting is what I feel when I play and write and produce. Sharing it with others means that maybe a few other people can also feel that when they listen to my music, whether it’s taking them back to a day in their past, or some place they visited, or a person they had forgotten until now. Just for a few minutes, we’re somewhere else.

In college though, I stopped a lot of what I did because I didn’t bring my guitar to school and I stopped my piano lessons. I had kind of let go of this part of me that had been around for years and years. In my sophomore and junior year though, I took a lot of music classes for my concentration. For a couple of classes, I had to go through music theory, which was learning a lot of formal progressions and chord resolutions and a lot of classical music writing, and also sightsinging, which was learning how to sing on-pitch....ish..... and listen to harmonies.

After a while, the music came back to me. In quarantine, I had a lot of time to sit with my thoughts. I’m also definitely one of the kinds of people that communicates ~feelings~ through music because writing them down in actual journal words is too difficult. And so I wrote through a million other songs, trying to find the words to describe everything I felt in the past year, which was trying to communicate a million different feelings in about 3 and a half minutes of song. In the fall, I also had my MIT sponsored iPad, which I quickly discovered had GarageBand, which led to a huge spiral down making music in GarageBand, since it is stupid easy to create new tracks using synthesized instruments and loop effects.

Now, Best Friends. I wrote four of the lines way back when, probably in September. I don’t even remember when I wrote them, but I tried to put them to at least five different instrumentals and nothing stuck. It wasn’t until early December of last year, I finally had a breakthrough, just doing whatever on my guitar when I thought of this riff, a simple guitar pick rhythm on a I-IV progression. After that, the rest of the words came to life and the rhythm practically added itself to what was already a pretty catchy verse.

So most of the roughly drafted song came through by mid-December, but I got really stuck on the pre-chorus and the bridge, to the point that I had tried seven different styles and hours and hours, and absolutely burned myself out trying to fit this cube through what felt like a circular hole. My friend advised me to rest for a couple weeks, so I completely separated myself from the song for 6 or 7 days, until I sat down again. I sat myself down and started producing the song on FL Studio, taking some recordings off of GarageBand, re-recording the lyrics, and composing extra synths and layers, one afternoon in December. And as soon as I did that, the rest of the song came to me, and in the end, I had this bop.

In the end though, it was like coming full circle from me, starting in high school, playing with literal sine waves to creating an entire, fully produced, fully written, fully performed song and putting it up on Spotify. It’s like what the admissions officers must’ve thought I would’ve contributed to the community finally materialized, just a little late.

So obviously 2020 was a bit of a shitshow and everyone is eagerly awaiting 2021 as if it will automatically grant us mercy because of the hellhole that 2020 was. Honestly - same, I really have such low expectations for 2021 that they make my 2020 resolutions seem like such high reaches.

Even though 2020 was ... 2020, I still feel like I did accomplish to some extent my goals for the year. I didn’t write them out on this blog, but I think broadly, my goals were

to work out more - I definitely think I did this on and off. Like many, I took up running, and actually stuck with it for a while, so I’m very happy about that. I think I’ll keep that as a goal for 2021, and probably every year, otherwise I won’t actually keep myself accountable on it lol

to follow through on things more - this was the high key most vague goal I have ever published on the internet omg, but I think this was in reference to how I always flake on my hobbies halfway through, like if I’m trying to learn a language or write music or actually learn photography skills. I think I did accomplish this - my Duolingo streak is up to 200 (though not in Mandarin smh) and I dropped my mixtape a few days ago. I think I would say I did a good job here.

advocate or something?????? - something something Amplify!!?!??!? there was definitely a very solid attempt here, and i have no idea what this was referring to anyways, but I definitely feel like this is a long-term goal for the next 5, 10 years regardless.

How the year went:

Honestly in the beginning of it all, I wasn’t feeling 2020 very much. There was a lot going on in my life, and I wasn’t feeling my classes. I think I just needed a bit of a shakeup. And then there was a shakeup, and I was like, “no, not that kind of shakeup.” And then we went home, and then I graduated from college, I interned at Google again, I started my MEng in Cambridge, had fun with my friends, got a full-time job for next year, went home again for the winter, and now we’re here.

For better or worse, the main theme of this year was definitely “reflection” -  a whole ton of it. With so much time at home, I had a lot of time to think and overthink everything in my life, past present and future. I thought about my friends from years past and why we didn’t talk anymore. I reflected a lot on my MIT years, how I wish I had made a couple key decisions very differently, and how that would’ve affected my present. I thought about all the things I should’ve done. I thought about who I was, and how I changed, and how it took me years to finally find a skin I was comfortable in. I thought about my current friends and whether they’d stick around. I thought really hard about how I treated other people and how they treated me, and whether that was ok. I journaled a lot, and read a lot of poetry to find answers, and failed to find them. I thought about whether I’d have friends in the future. I thought about whether people were supposed to feel alone in this world, or whether I’d find a home in New York, where I’m going next year.

And I changed a lot of my expectations from life - after some time, finally I started to expect less of myself in a time where getting things done is literally impossible sometimes. From other people, I expected less, and am unsure how to feel about reaching that conclusion, whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. From life, I expected it to give me nothing and to throw everything bad possible in my way, because for a while, it seemed like that’s what it was trying to do. (That actually sounds really depressing, but it means that I started making the moves to make my life better on my own, and I don’t stop anymore to wait for the universe to magically make it happen.)

A lot of this reflection surrounded events in my life - finally, mentally letting go of people in the past (i.e. giving up on them lol), losing a friendship, feeling incredible loneliness and anxiety during the pandemic, failing to find fulfillment in my research. I wonder if COVID didn’t happen, if 2020 would’ve gotten better for me. I think a lot about how I was supposed to go to Europe, go to Michigan, go to New York, visit DC, Seattle, Chicago, etc. I think a lot about if COVID didn’t happen, would I still have the friends I had, would I still have made the friends I did, would my expectations of myself and others have changed in the ways they did? I don’t know. My mental health would probably not be in shambles though. I’d probably sleep easier at night. To be honest, I think a lot about this post, and I have no real, solid conclusions about 2020, it was a very rough year, and the only thing I can say is “I’m glad I’m alive, and that’s all the good I need to extract out of it.” 

But of course, there were some pretty key highlights that still happened, so I’ll just bullet that here

I interned at MSFT! Everyone was very very nice, though it fully cemented the fact that I absolutely do not want to do data analytics, ever

I took this negotiation class, which will likely be the peak class I took at MIT, which is fine tbh. Honestly wish I took more adventurous classes at MIT, but that’s a topic to dissect another day

I actually got published this year lol, first authored a paper, I sometimes forget about this [x]

I spent like literally 80 hours helping my friend campaign for the undergrad assoc election over 2 weeks, which was a really strange tangent in my life

I graduated!! from MIT!! What a dream <3 honestly still shocked they accepted me

I became the CTO of amplify, our nonprofit org

I interned at google cloud and absolutely rocked my internship project

I chaired for the alibaba committee for mitmunc china (virtual)

I started my Masters program

I joined this new club on campus, which is our campus chapter of the google developer student club, which is really just me refusing to actually ever leave google

I became an interviewer for MIT

I got like 6 job offers and accepted an offer to work at Stripe next year!

I dropped a mixtape lol and have some exciting stuff planned in a couple weeks re:music if things go through

Ah, I should have some goals for next year:

graduate with my Masters! can be from Killian, or from living room. I have an entire photo shoot with my friends for grad pics and you know I have an entire countdown waiting for the day I can post those pictures

continue to learn languages! because what else am i going to do with my time. maybe this will finally be the year i learn mandarin....... nope that’s setting the bar too high

read more! I should read more. I really should because it is embarrassing how little I read. I should really read more. I should have a goal of reading 12 books next year ! Yes, we are setting the goal low, but again, low expectations!

Actually, I also want to apply to some MBA programs, so I’m writing that down here to manifest it

See my friends again - I have pretty reasonable hopes that 2021 will let us at some point see each other, whether it be during the spring, the summer, the winter, maybe exactly one year from now on 12/31/21, idk, but it will happen! Manifest that

Make like 2 friends..... ok make one (1) new friend.,,,,,

Let go of old things from 2020 that I miss or wish would happen. Open myself to new things.

Hi everyone, so I just published some music online and would love for yall to hear it because it definitely took me > 100 hours over the past couple months to do this lol. And yes! I have hobbies, yes I do, incredible

Some notes on this:

I called it Imperfect because, well literally, some of the music is imperfect, like a little off beat here and there, off pitch here and there, but that’s ok! Because I recorded this using a $20 mic I bought off amazon in my bedroom while sitting on the floor, and I used Garageband on my school-provided iPad to help produce a lot of it. Also, I googled “imperfect” and as a verb tense, it means “denoting a past action in progress but not completed at the time in question“, which is how I feel about a lot of themes throughout the few songs.

I got my friend to design this album cover! honestly what a star

I’m thinking about putting the last song on Spotify because, wow, what a fun fact it would be to say “i have a song out on Spotify.” It doesn’t get funner than that

I’m really proud of this because it’s been like six years coming since I first started experimenting with synthesizers and DAW’s in high school, and takes in a lot of music theory I learned from piano and college, and guitar influences from when I picked up guitar in junior and senior year of high school, and words from stories all through college. I read some old lyrics I wrote in high school, and wow I .... I got way better at song writing. Putting it all together too was something that took a while for me

I literally worked on this like 6 hours a day whereas I worked on my actual schoolwork for like 4 hours a day lol we love priorities

I never talked about Amplify on this blog because I didn’t know how its story was going to turn out, and then I was a bit disappointed in it to talk about it. But I think there’s a lot of really important lessons in this story and it was a big part of 2020, so I’m going to share a story of how I was the CTO of a startup I started with my friends that, unfortunately, didn’t turn out how we planned.

[also i hate how none of my posts have pictures smh so i’m going to put up some pics that were designed by someone on our team and various screenshots]

Amplify is one of my largest side projects, a nonprofit startup that my friends and I built over 2020. Here’s the link to our site if you wanna see it: amplifynow.org

How it started

Someone on our team mentioned this virtual hackathon a couple weeks after getting kicked off of campus in March from JHU, centered around COVID-19 related solutions. I’d never done a hackathon with this particular set of friends, who were largely bioengineering majors, so I thought it’d be fun to see what it’d be like to work with people who weren’t CS majors for once. We ended up doing the hackathon with a few friends and spent the weekend cycling through what must’ve been ten or fifteen different ideas before I got this idea while working out for a text-based platform that would help organizations trying to distribute donations or find volunteers reach their communities. 

Here’s a general idea of what we were trying to do. I got this idea because I was thinking about my friend in Michigan who lived in a really tightknit community, like the type that knows everyone else and what’s going on in everyone’s lives. Meanwhile, I was back home in Southern California, where I didn’t really know most of the people on my street, much less my whole neighborhood. As a result, I had no idea how to donate or how to volunteer or how to help my community during this pandemic.

We ended up building a prototype, presented our idea, and at the end of the weekend, I thought that was that, but people were actually really interested in pursuing the idea. “Unprecedented,” I thought. I never pursued any of my projects after hackathons were over.

... And so it continued

But that’s how Amplify was born. We brought a couple people on board to round out marketing and publicity needs, and we enlisted another developer (who is probably the one (1) friend I made in 2020) to help me develop the entire website. Every weekend we made steady progress, we found a partner with a local hospital, talked with another potential partner at our university, applied for funding with Sandbox, and by summer, we got official nonprofit status. We started a whole Slack for planning and developed an entire marketing strategy from Sandbox mentors.

On my end, I was the designated CTO - I did a lot of coordinating with the rest of the team and my dev team to build out the entire website. Me and the other developers spent a LOT of time on zoom that summer, multiple hours at a time to debug stuff that we’d never seen before. I never experienced zoom burnout like that. On the technical side though, I learned a lot about Google Firebase, Heroku, Python Flask, etc. God I learned so much about DNS. I bought a domain. 

As CTO, I organized the team with weekly meetings and Github workflows. I basically made sure that every week during our exec meetings, everyone knew the dev team was rocking it. If I were to frame it as a capstone of my undergrad education, I would say that I was really proud of myself for putting together all my project skills and leadership/organizational skills. And in the end, I looked at the whole entire website and thought to myself, “Wow I really did that. I never thought I’d be able to build an entire thing from the ground up and yet.” It was the kind of thing I saw other people at school do that I never thought I’d be able to do. And yet here I was, with a responsive dynamic UI with a functional, secure backend that I designed and spearheaded. If anyone’s interested, this is what our system design looked like:

Note: In the beginning of all of this, I knew how to use literally just Twilio, and I learned everything else on the fly

Because I am also obnoxious, I also created an entire developer workflow (unit tests, continuous integration pipeline, feature/staging environments, testing data) for us because we kept on breaking prod on accident. It basically involved just taking everything I learned from Google over the past three summers and finding public tools to do that exact thing and integrate it into our system design. It was also really challenging, but also really satisfying to see the entire thing work together and to watch prod stop breaking.

So in the end, the website looked great. But outside of tech stuff, people were working on legal stuff, marketing plans, like who we were going to contact for potential partnerships, maintaining existing partnerships, applying to grants, and running social media campaigns [our twitter]. Over the course of the summer, when I was also supposedly at my internship, I was also hopping on partner calls, and my friends all jumped even more calls with mentors, potential partners, our legal team through the MIT BU Law Clinic. Thinking back though, I think one of the reasons that I am currently so burnt out is because I was literally working two SWE jobs over the summer.

But it’s never that easy

Some time in the summer, our main partner pulled out after we took too long to sort out our nonprofit status. Earlier we had to jump through legal hoops to figure out our texting scheme to make sure we weren’t breaking any laws with integrating SMS texting into our platform. We then quickly realized a lot of people already had texting solutions. We also had a major problem of new organizations not wanting to partner with us because we didn’t have an established community base, and people in the community not wanting to register on our site because there weren’t any organizations partnered with us (i.e. chicken - egg problem). People were tired of running into obstacles. A couple grants we applied to didn’t come through. I think deep down, I knew (and maybe, we all knew) that we slowly didn’t come to believe in it anymore.

We tried to repivot to something else, but by this point, it was mid-August and people were getting ready to start the semester and for me, I was going through some personal stuff and had no spare brain cells to risk on anything that could possibly lead to disappointment. At some point, someone proposed taking a week long break to recharge and gather new ideas for a potential repivot. No one texted in that Slack after that (lol).

At that point, I was pretty disappointed with how it turned out. I wished that we had done things differently so that we could still be working together on something cool, something larger than ourselves. And I didn’t want to talk about this part, the part where we no longer talk about or work on Amplify, so I never posted about it. But I think it’s really important to talk about this because there’s a lot of important stuff for me but also for I think everyone to realize.

Reflection

I think on a personal note, Amplify was really important to me because it showed me that I could create an entire product, learn literally everything I needed to learn, and lead an engineering team, and absolutely kill it. It’s given me a lot of confidence as a software engineer and reaffirmed that I definitely want to explore engineering management and the startup life moving forward. One day I will be a CTO again!! Mark my words :D Also, I’ve always wanted to do a side project but I could never keep up with them until this one - I think the reason I stuck with this one was because I got to work with people I loved to work with (i.e. not just myself LOL) and I found what I was passionate about - knowing that my code’s going to help the world, one community at a time. One of my 2020 goals was to advocate for myself and my community and learn how to lead, and I think I got to do both of those things with Amplify.

On a broader scale, I think it’s important to talk about stories like this exactly for the last part of this story - the part where we fail and don’t actually reach what we want to achieve. Even though I knew things like this happened, I thought for some reason that they didn’t happen to MIT students, who follow through, who push through obstacles. Unfortunately, or fortunately I guess, we also fail sometimes (a lot of times), whether it’s on exams or on the startup scale. And we should remember that. At least for me, I know I hold myself to a really high standard, partly because I just always have, but also because I constantly hear things like “MIT students come out of college with six figure salaries” or I see like 15 people I know get prestigious fellowships (e.g. Rhodes, Knights-Hennessy) every year. As a result, I expect the same from myself, and when I fall short, it doesn’t feel great, but I should remember that MIT students also sometimes don’t get six figure salaries, and MIT students also sometimes don’t get fellowships, and MIT student startups also sometimes fail. 

After reflecting on it for a while, I think talking about this story is not a confession of weakness but a source of strength because we took a huge risk (in terms of time, pushing boundaries of what we thought we could do) to try something new, and it was an incredibly rewarding experience despite failing in the end. Not that many people would do that. Not that many people have a good idea and not that many people would follow through on it to as far as we did. To be honest, our only failure was really just inexperience, and going into whatever weird venture we go into next time, we won’t have that problem as much because we went through our little experiment with Amplify. It definitely stung at the time (well I’m not sure if it stung tbh because I was REALLY going through some personal stuff at the time so I had like 0 emotional energy available to be sad about this), but I’d still do it all over again even if we were to fail again. 

I turned 22 the other day. It made me think about all the things that happened when I was 21, what I wanted to accomplish during that year, what ended up happening. At the beginning of the year, I wanted to work out, I wanted to advocate for others, I wanted grow as a person. I thought it was funny that at the end of the year, I’d have a full-time job. That I’d no longer be an undergrad.

Things went all right for a couple months. And then obviously, there was a lot of drama on campus, and then suddenly we were evicted off-campus, and then there was a global pandemic, and then I had the worst anxiety-ridden, uncertainty-filled summer, and then I had some really bad personal drama, and then I moved across the country, and then moved back home. And now we’re here. But in the middle, I grew an incredible amount because of all that happened.

In the beginning, my life (5 year) plan was to graduate, do my internship in the city, do my MEng, continue living in Boston, start my full-time job at googz (likely photos), convince some of my friends to stay in Boston with me, get my MBA, become a manager, etc. But we all know how I am with plans and how I just never follow through with them. Pretty early on, I started wondering whether I really wanted to stay at Googz Cambridge, or if I really wanted to work on that team, and then COVID happened, and there would be more important things than do somewhat interesting, somewhat consequential work on a semi-interesting product, and that maybe after being a manager, I’d have dreams of becoming a CTO after briefly experimenting with being an actual CTO for a few months. Maybe I’d have dreams of owning my own startup one day. Maybe I wanted to go back for an MBA, 50% of the reasons one usually has for an MBA, 50% so that I could see my friends again, because seeing friends became much more important to me. And googz would not be my storybook ending, and that I’d see what else was out there and try something new.

So the 5 year plan has shifted a little.

I know that EA decisions are coming out in around an hour? And it’s kinda the same with that - you think this decision will dictate how the next four years are gonna turn out, that if this decision doesn’t turn out the way you want it to, then that 5 year path will be forever blocked. But that’s not how life usually works out - maybe the first step in that 5 year path is out of the question, but another first step could take you right back onto that path. Or that 5 year path might not have been the path right for you anyways. Or even if that decision does go your way, your 5 year plan might adjust, stretch, sway in ways you’d never imagine anyways.

For me, I had hoped I would walk down Killian, and that my parents would see me graduate, and that I would have such a fun summer in Europe, visit friends all around, hang out with my friends in the fall. that we had so many memories to make. And none of those memories quite happened. But others did. Instead of sitting at expensive restaurants in Back Bay, we sat in the freezing cold, huddled on a picnic blanket, spooning lukewarm food out of plastic containers with plastic utensils. Instead of celebrating our birthdays in person, we found each other on surprise zoom calls, and we wondered why we didn’t do this every year. Instead of working together on overnight hackathon projects with my best friend, I was working on an startup over zoom with people I had never met in person. But it wasn’t necessarily bad. They were just different memories that we made.

I would say that this year has really humbled me, but also showed me what I’m capable of. As in the past couple years, my worldview grew a bit. We saw a lot happen in the past year, and we saw how a community could come together, how it could fragment, how we can depend on each other, and how we might not. But one thing I figured out in 21 was that I have such a strong community to lean on, and I am so thankful. Today they did so much for my birthday I was absolutely blown away, and I am so thankful to have these people as my rock in this world that we live in. 21 was one of the hardest years of my life for a few different reasons, but it was also one that taught me a lot and showed me that at the end of all of that, I have so many people behind me. So at the end of it all, the people in my life became that much more important to me, even if it started out as one of the most important things in my life. Without people, I have nothing, and with them, I can get through anything.

For most of my freshman and sophomore year, I never felt like enough. Even two days before my internship at literal G00Gle, I recall wondering whether or when I'd ever stop feeling like I needed to chase some goal that was always moving further and further into the distance, from getting into the top colleges, to chasing the top internships, and to.... to what? Would I feel pressure to be the top “intern”???? How ridiculous would that be? What does that even mean??? And I would then drown in self-doubt about how ridiculous the thought even was and why I couldn’t be good enough for myself.

Looking back, I wish I knew and internalized that I was doing all right and that I was doing enough. From my sophomore IAP, when I got rejected from Jane Street Insight and GTL and every externship I applied to, to even freshman spring when I saw people getting internships left and right and I couldn't get a single interview. To sophomore spring, when I had secured a really great internship for the summer, yet 6.046 constantly made me feel like I was never enough, that I still needed to get better. It felt like a constant race to some light at the end of the tunnel. But I never really knew what that light or that tunnel I was in was.

That attitude isn't all bad - a drive to always improve is generally a good thing. But I've had to learn how to recognize that what I've done and what I've been able to accomplish is enough to be proud of myself for. That didn't come until after my sophomore summer when I had finally broken out of the MIT bubble. The bubble is sometimes good - the people are amazing and you learn a lot and are constantly pushed. But the bubble also encourages this idea of "look at what all these other people are doing!! And what are YOU doing.... hmmm?" After that summer, the voice in my head started changing to "Oh. I guess what I am doing is generally decent and in the grand scheme of things, pretty cool." I started getting actual positive feedback from my intern managers who thought I was doing a great job, and, at the time, I was /shook/ to hear anything positive about myself.

Being enough on the academic side was one thing, but even as a human, it was hard to believe I was ever doing enough. From balancing time between friends/family and getting exercise and eating well, I always felt like I was on the brink of having it crumble to the floor during my sophomore year. I rarely had it together, I was waking up at 1pm on weekdays, eating 1.5 meals a day, and forgetting to call my parents more often than remembering. Some people in my life made me feel like I wasn’t doing enough to support them, even though I was already stretched completely thin. I constantly felt like a shitty person. But with the circumstances and what I was going through at the time, it was all I could do, and that's enough. I know that now. I got up out of bed. I finished my classes. I survived. 

And once things got better in junior spring, I found myself able to do more, to wake up earlier, to maintain a healthier lifestyle, to call my family more. The types of people I surrounded myself with changed, and with that, the things demanded of me were lightened and I felt relief as I could put back together the various pieces of my life. People dragging me down turned into friends pushing me forward. Getting through every day became getting through every week, started becoming looking forward to the weekend, started becoming looking forward to the week, and finally became looking forward to every day. My productivity increased dramatically, but that isn’t to say that I wasn’t doing enough back during sophomore year - I was doing the most given whatever I was faced with at the time, and that’s enough.

Starting my MEng research now in COVID has been really hard to say the least, but recognizing that what I've accomplished (albeit not nearly as much as I'd wanted or expected) is enough. I think sophomore me would be drowning in self-doubt right now, fixating on everyone else seeming to float on by doing great, wanting to drop out or stay wallowing in self-pity. Not that I haven't been, but after a couple months, I've recognized that there are some things out of my control, like the literal pandemic and constant sense of national chaos. And how I've never been so burnt out, as I haven't had a break in nearly a year, especially when summer actually took a toll rather than refreshed me given the emotional and mental burden of whatever every day of summer 2020 decided to be. And oh how difficult it actually is to ramp up to a new job or new degree program remotely. And that when I need fifteen hours of sleep after literally two hours of work, it's probably a sign that I am just tired and getting through this degree program, although doing much closer to the minimum of what's expected than what I usually can do, is ENOUGH. And that is ok.

So even though I spent the majority of my last two years doing pretty well and having my “enough” mean slightly more than what it had been previously, COVID came and dragged me back down to calling my “enough” being able to get out of bed and produce one (1) productive thing out of the day. And that is ok, because quite frankly, it is a really f’d up time and we ought to celebrate every small thing we get done in these times and stop beating ourselves up about all the things we didn’t get done. It didn’t feel great to have to consciously go back to the getting through “one day at a time” mentality, but it’s what I needed to get through these pandemic times, and that’s ok.

I think a couple things led to this kind of character development - 1 being breaking out of the bubble and consistently remembering to break out of it every now and then through internships or externships or other opportunities and 2 being surrounding myself with people of different interests, majors and goals, especially those that hype up every small thing you accomplish (even the ones you've forgotten/overlooked), which are actually also quite impressive to accomplish. A lot of that helped me reframe my mentality over the past couple years, and I’m really thankful that I got to do that, especially before this pandemic, otherwise I think I’d be struggling a hell of a lot more than I already am (and I definitely already am). It’s still definitely an ongoing active effort to remind myself every day that hey, I am enough and I am doing enough. But I’m getting there, and I have good people around me to keep me there.

Every moment this weird semester has felt like a stolen moment. Every time I stepped on campus, every lunch I grabbed with a friend, every glance over I saw someone’s face, I felt like I lucked out and got a bonus round in life. So far for me, this farewell hasn’t felt as final, just because I had undergone all those feelings last March. Obviously, lots of the seniors feel differently, since this is likely the last time they will see campus and I’m coming back next semester, and for a lot of them, this is their goodbye to their friends, and I had mine for the most part, last March.

I thank god I still have these friends, that I was so, so lucky to have a social pod with people I love that I could always hang out with. A lot of people are stuck in this pandemic without that, and to have all those memories that I can hang onto that we made these past months, I am so, so fortunate. I think a lot of people’s friendships were tested this pandemic, and it’s good to know that some of mine survived and strengthened a lot.

I’m sure that when Sunday comes and I have to watch them drive off the airport, I will be devastated. Over the summer, I spent nearly every day praying I’d see them again, or counting down the days until I would. I remember it might’ve been late July or early August, and thinking to myself that 50 days was such a long, interminable amount of days. This semester, I had 68 days with my friends, and these days flew by in comparison. Of course, some of those days were very, very hard. Like most people, I imagine, my mental health honestly tanked a lot during this pandemic and is still hanging on by a thread - isolation, anxiety, seasonal depression all playing into it. There were several times I questioned whether trying to make this social pod thing work was worth moving back across the country. But when I think about the alternative - of not having those stolen moments these past couple months, I don’t question it anymore. These 68 days will come to an end, and I’ll have to start my countdown over, but not knowing what I’m counting down to. But for some reason, I’m filled with a lot more hope than I was in March - the news of a vaccine, the idea of summer 2021 and starting a new chapter of our lives in what is hopefully a post / semi-post COVID world and having the means to fly and travel to see them makes it a lot easier to envision a time in which we can see each other again a lot easier.

Every night before I fall asleep, my head does loops of mental gymnastics - if I come back in January or February, then I’ll have two or three months to April, which is when vaccines are supposed to be widely distributed (? not sure on this don’t cite me on this). And then May is the end of classes and basically when I graduate. And then I’ll have the freedom to go, whether it’s to visit family or visit friends. And so I have month-long sprints until the end of this all. I’m not even thinking about my Masters anymore.

On Sunday, I’m waking up before the sun rises because one of my friends is leaving for the airport at a god awful time of day/night. I’m going to stay there for a bit and wait for the sunrise, and then watch it on the bridge with my other friend. In spring of 2019, I pulled an all nighter for a project, and I watched the sunrise with one of my closest friends. The sky turned all shades of red, pink, gray, and white as Boston awoke. It felt like a new beginning, and in a lot of ways it was. This time, it feels like the end of a chapter. But there’s no better way then, to end a chapter with a sunrise, as it’s a hint to a chapter just beginning, and who knows what’ll happen in that one?

Here’s to the memories of Fall 2020, the last hurrah - 

the meals we ate together on the front lawn,

the walks we took along the river,

the times we said we’d miss this,

the nighttime trips to Boston,

the pictures we took on Killian,

the hikes we took, the real ones and the fake ones,

the cannolis we ate, eyes closed and open,

the tiktoks we filmed,

the routes we biked,

the dogs we petted,

the pumpkins we carved,

the tennis matches we played,

the jobs we got and oh how we celebrated,

the apple cider bottles we popped,

the miles we walked,

it’s been like four years coming, but now announcing the next adventure i will embarking on after college: i’m really excited to share that I accepted a full-time software engineering position at Stripe! (a mid-sized company focused on payment platforms, responsible for a large portion of e-commerce, chances are that if you’ve ever bought something on the internet, your money’s probably gone through Stripe) If you thought that this blog would die after I graduated, you were wrong haha you cannot get rid of my shit content

How it happened

The past few months have been a lot of interviewing (read: a lot), a lot of leetcoding, and a lot of managing timelines and emails. I actually haven’t slept through the night since like September because of my anxiety levels (which is really bad!!!!) so I’m really glad that this whole thing is over. My application season started in mid- to late- August: I had a goal of applying to one company every day, and I kept that up for a couple weeks. Going in, I kind of had a plan of what kind of companies I wanted to apply to - I was planning on taking my return offer originally, but I wanted a few more potential offers to have negotiation leverage when the time came, and I also wanted to see what was out there too. A couple places also reached out to me, so I followed up with them. All in all, I ended up pursuing 10 companies across big tech, a couple unicorns, and some finance firms.

Interview Hell

I have this grand idea of writing a really in-depth guide to how to do interviews + how to find internships + how to handle the system because there are a lot of weird tips and tricks that make it a thousand times easier to get a job, but only if you’re in the know (which is really dumb, as the industry is still pretty gate-keepy). But until then, I’ll just talk about what the interview process was like after this. So I heard back from a lot of those companies asking for what we call “online assessments”, which are basically timed coding tests where you have to code a solution to problem(s) in some x number of minutes or hours. These questions range from coding merge sort to coding a recursive dynamic programming solution to some optimization problem. A lot of companies send these out to everyone and then resume screen, and some might resume screen and then send these out. I admittedly didn’t prepare too much for these, I got pretty lucky and knew how to do most of the problems based off of the years of practice I’d had already (turns out coding every day for like 3 years is actually really good practice already).

A couple companies skipped ahead to the first round phone interview stage. After the online assessments, I got a wave of several first round interview requests, which are usually over the phone for an hour. One of them was a Karat interview, which is some third party, unbiased interview company, and all I remember from this was trying gauge how I did from the body language of my interviewer’s tiny Zoom screen, and I could tell absolutely nothing. It was nerve-wracking. One phone interview lasted for 20 minutes out of the hour it was supposed to take, and I thought I had failed on the spot. I did actually leetcode in preparation for these problems, and most of them ended up being easy - medium questions, usually simple applications with tricky twists, like implementing certain data structures from scratch with O(1) runtime methods. Most of these were early-mid September, squeezed into hour-long breaks in my day.

Final Round Hell

After all these, I ended up moving forward in all of those interviews to the final round, which are usually series of 3-4 video interviews, back to back, usually technical in nature. I thought the one hour phone screens were rough, but this was a real test of stamina. This is also where timing got really tricky for me, because I was trying to time my interviews such that any offers I got would align together in as much of an overlapping window as possible, so that I could negotiate offers a lot easier and see all my options at once.

Preparation for this was also hell - it was a lot of Leetcoding, a lot of interview research online, a lot of going over my stories. I vary between three main stories for all the possible behavioral questions people could ask me: the nonprofit project Amplify that my friends and I worked on, my intro CS class final project, and my previous internship project. In the end though, it was a Lot of leetcoding, I learned so much about graphs and searches and backtracking and DP, I cannot even tell you. I haven’t thought about topological sort since 2017. And somehow, some way, it actually came up in one of my interviews, and WOW i knocked that one out of the park.

My Stripe final round was actually one of the first ones I had way back in mid-September. It was four interviews back to back, three technical, and one more behavioral. I remember feeling generally confident, but not 100% afterwards, mostly just exhausted. Most of my on-sites were in early-mid October - I think I had six days of final interviews over 2 weeks, so I was literally about to pass out at all times. I was really looking forward to travelling this semester too for final rounds (I would’ve gone to New York, Chicago, SF/Bay, Detroit ..... sad). I also had several calls with career centers, people from different companies, recruiters, other info sessions, etc. I started out wearing nice clothes, but in the end, it was over for me - I was in sweats and a tshirt. In this two week period, I was lucky enough to grab a few offers - my return offer, but also a few offers from other companies, including Stripe, whom, at this point, I had given up all hope on, since they told me in late September that they wouldn’t know whether they’d have a spot for me. I remember getting the call back while picnicking with my friends, absolutely shocked I was in the position that I was.

Decision Sweat

At the end of the day, from the places I interviewed with, I ended up getting official offers from 5 places (1 of them being my return offer), 1 tentative offer (I think they ghosted me though because my deadline was too soon), 1 ghost (again, my deadline was too soon so I think they gave up on me), and 1 reject (that one was a really rough interview).

Let me be clear - I hate decision making. I am really bad with any sort of decisions. This process was worse than my college application decision. I’ll make a separate post in about a month or so detailing why I made the decision I made to go to Stripe instead of back to Google, but broadly it was because I wanted to try something new and take risks. It was a really hard decision because my last internship was really awesome and I loved the team I worked on, but ultimately the lack of a guarantee of returning to that team and the allure of working at a new place was too much to overcome. I talked about this every day with my friends and family and mentors, I made a whole decision matrix, but at the end of the day, I did end up flipping a coin on Facetime. Stripe was tails, and the coin flipped tails, and then I screamed and went to sleep. so that was that

how its going