An accelerated timeline to today
The incredible adventures inside my childhood bedroom
August 2016- May 2019
I attended a small liberal arts high school. Think of those remote campuses in rural Maine and plop it in the middle of a San Antonio city block. Imbued in me was learning for the sake of learning. We would nerd out about foreign policy, quantum superposition, or Macbeth. My teachers railed against the AP system because they believed it limited the potential for intellectual exploration. They pushed us to think about critical reading, persuasive writing, and problem-solving. It was rarely about the test but the learning. For some teachers, grades would be a relic if they could decide.
With such an emphasis on learning for its own sake, I never thought or cared about careers, neither did many of my friends. But I wasn’t just indifferent towards conversations about careers, I resented them. When the topic of careers did come up, I could count the available options on one finger. If you like business or numbers do management consulting or investment banking. If you excel in your science classes, put on the white coat and scrubs. If you write well, try law school or academia.
But none of those jobs felt right to me. They didn’t match up with my personality. And when people talked about careers, I’d often resort to ad-hominem judgment. Take this conversation in my junior chemistry class. (I was often an obnoxious ass when it came to these topics.)
I chatted with a friend who explained how much she hated chemistry. I challenged her, explaining that chemistry explores the beautiful mystery of how tiny molecules comprise everything we see and feel. Unimpressed, she blew me off.
Two days later, I overhead the same friend answering a question about her intended college major. Her response: chemistry, for pre-med. While I clearly was not involved in the conversation, I interrupted to point out the contradiction in her two statements.
Returning to my seat, I thought, “She is a naive careerist who is chasing prestige over real satisfaction. She will most likely drop pre-med after running into organic chemistry sophomore year.”
I entered college believing that anyone who had a confirmed field of study and career path was misguided or close-minded. I frankly didn’t understand how someone could know what they wanted to do. Ironically, I applied to colleges as a pre-med because I viewed it as the only way to meld my vague career goals. I liked being intellectually stimulated and helping others and with my limited scope of careers, medicine stood out as a solid choice. But, I also hated the concept of pre-med: entering four years of precious intellectual exploration with a pre-determined destination.
Along with my loose med-school ambitions, I strutted onto campus with two simple goals: improve my critical thinking and writing. I naively believed that with these goals in mind, the rest would fall into place.
August 2019- May 2020
That mindset hit a brick wall my first semester at UNC. All around me, I heard the dreaded phrases “professional development” and “for my resume.” It seemed like everyone, zooming across the quad, had somewhere to be in pursuit of clear, long-term goals. On the quad, I was a leaf, drifting along with the strongest gust, never sure where I’d head next. I would find my big passion in a New York Times article and that spark would disappear before the next edition hit my email inbox.
My half-baked interests drowned in the sheer breadth of activities at UNC. Carolina has a club for everything, each nook, and cranny of possible academic, professional, and personal interests. I’d spend some nights aimlessly scrolling through the directory of all campus organizations, even though I knew such an exercise would only heighten my anxieties. I was told that in college, you have time to dive deeply into only a few things, but deciding what those few things would be felt nearly impossible considering all my interests and all of the unknown; what about all the things that I could be interested in that I didn’t even know about? Sure. I enjoyed doing student government in high school, but I didn’t want to miss the possibility of discovering I was born to play the saxophone or college handball.
My innate curiosity no longer spurred me towards exploration; it merely paralyzed me into inaction. Drowning in self-doubt, I felt too lost to maximize the resources and people at UNC. “What was I doing here?” I wondered. At the same time, my friends catapulted into leadership roles, and the deadline to declare my major loomed. Staring at a Zoom screen at home would not produce the epiphany I craved. I needed to hunker down in my childhood bedroom for the year to figure out how I’d spend my remaining years at Carolina.
August 2020- December 2020
During my stop-out year, I wanted to hone some technical skills that would position me well for future internships and other opportunities. I entered college with the concept that the only skills required were good thinking and good writing. I hadn’t learned as much from my introductory classes, so I felt behind my peers who would whip up data analyses, write strategy pieces, or conduct extensive research.
Without much work experience, I struggled to receive responses from my applications to start-ups and think tanks. It made sense: I submitted a research paper from 11th grade to compete against a master’s thesis. I didn’t have a plan for the fall until a start-up that was co-founded by a UNC alum replied to my email. The company was hiring college students taking time off, and a few friends who worked there over the summer had positive experiences. I overlooked the grandiose, yet vague website, and the contract.
My internship started with an introductory project, an internal assignment to acquaint us with the company’s work process. Our bosses tasked my team of bleary-eyed undergraduates to produce a “world-class podcast” for a fictional university. Beyond the baffling expectations, there was no additional guidance and no one on our team had produced a podcast before. After hours of interviewing and stitching together audio clips, we bumbled through the presentation after neglecting to check if the podcast could play over Zoom. It could not, we soon learned.
As time moved on and I settled into my role, the social isolation of living at home prompted me to fill my time to the max. I joined some friends to develop software for companies to better schedule their offices post-pandemic. By December, balancing two job commitments, I plowed through around 85 hours of work a week. I stopped exercising and rarely ate dinner with my family, a cherished tradition. Despite the grind, I soon learned that not much of my work was very good. I had overextended my schedule and over-promised to my friends working on the scheduling platform. I pledged to complete a fleshed-out competitor analysis but left them with a measly outline. While trying to prove that I could contribute to the team, I let them down and was stripped of my responsibilities.
In January, after my commitments ended, I tried digesting the whirlwind of a semester: all the communication hiccups, unrealistic expectations, and silly oversights. It became apparent that for a successful career, I needed to learn something more fundamental than how to code. I needed to learn how to work. Things like attention to detail, nuanced team communication, and effective feedback often determined the outcome of my projects. But these weren’t the skills my professors emphasized in classes. For my next semester, I wanted to sharpen these newly discovered skills but wasn’t energized by the thought of another remote internship. I also wasn’t in a position to travel around the world or summit peaks, the idealized gap year activities. Rather, I would remain in my childhood bedroom in suburban San Antonio.
I was stressed, uncertain, and a little embarrassed. My friends, family, and school have invested so much in me. With all these resources and time, I sat in my bedroom without a plan.
January 2021-present
I thought about the most enriching elements from my busy semester and always came back to my conversations with the interesting people I’d met. I spoke with Fortune 500 executives, health equity activists, and renowned social science researchers. Learning about their work and approach to pressing issues energized me. I wanted more of these conversations and to turn them into something tangible and accessible. While a simple concept, it fired me up. My tires finally trudged through the mud. I envisioned my magnum opus―an all-encompassing guide of the professional world from the perspective of a kid trying to figure it out.
I scheduled conversations and ran through books, recordings, podcasts to fill my days. I intended to find narrow my career path, but my bedroom Zooms calls produced a much richer experience. While immersed in this project and withdrawn from the hustle of school and work, I started a process of genuine self-examination.
I annotated my conversations with peers, professionals, and documented the media I have consumed. I’m stoked to share these conversations and lessons that I’ve learned but want to do so authentically. This process has been characterized by disruptions, procrastination, and total uncertainty. I look forward to sharing the joy and anxiety of ditching a regimented schedule to pursue an independent project.