Even though I did a bit of everything, I also didn’t really know much at all. Professors would ask: what do you do? And I recall answering: systems, ML, graphics, PL, HCI, math, … and for an undergraduate it was too much. Still, that curiosity was key; I think when you’re curious the whole world opens up to your eyes, and you unlock the intrinsic beauty in so many places.
Honestly, I may have been kind of annoying to work with. I remember within a week of joining, I had reformatted the whole codebase, encoded it into CI, and then written an essay on Slack about how we should rewrite the frontend in Svelte + Tailwind and the container runtime in Rust. People said no, but then I went ahead and did it anyway.
College is a stepping-stone and increasingly it’s more about launching yourself into a lucrative career or developing a business foothold; but it wasn’t always this way. And for me, I wanted to learn a lot of different things, so I went back to school to finish that up.
• Took a class on nanotechnology fabrication at MIT. Seriously, this is an actual class you can take, where you make perovskite nano-electronics! • Took a neuroscience class where my first assignment was to go to an art museum, pick an artwork and silently stare at it for an hour. I think the class permanently changed how I look at art. If this sounds like fun, yeah school can be like this! It doesn’t just have to be tests and problem sets. I didn’t get better at programming, but I derived a lot of personal fulfillment, learned about many different fields, and figured out what I truly care about.
