bonfire reflections

i've realized that i don't like school.

nearly three months ago, on the last week of my first semester in college, i made the choice to take a gap semester—we were offered a humble sum of money from afore capital to go and move to san francisco. the goal was to explore various startup ideas and validate them in person with my cofounders.

the moment i got the offer, i was initially excited. few things have taxed my body of that much dopamine (1. getting into stanford and 2. a girl who once rejected me gave me a kiss). we were given a very short turnaround time to sign all the contracts and make a final decision but somehow it soon felt like my excitement shifted entirely into a foreign new feeling.

after all i'd spent the entirety of my first semester in college looking for some reason to continue studying what i was studying. looking for a way to validate an endlessly long treadmill and search for more. the culture of cs and mit as a whole feels mono dimensional—you take classes and do research and practice algorithms to optimize your resume to do something in the summer that'll further optimize and the cycle repeats. it's a stressful process with some solace in the routine.

after months of barely hanging through temperatures below freezing and grueling exam after exam (shoutout 6.1210), i thought that honestly, either prestige or traditional success could be strong contenders for my intrinsic motivations. for the chance to be known at a school of people i looked up to and to secure a high paying job i surely could do any monotonous thing for four years.

so for the next twenty-four hours after receiving our offer i was our team's limiting factor. one of my cofounders hated school and the other could stay with a lighter course load so the pressure of the decision fell entirely on me. for someone who spent every day complaining about college and the workload, the decision was strangely cloudy. somehow my initial attitude of pushing through because i could see the light at the end of the tunnel had shifted. the routine of school had become comfortable and i was even starting to find my place there. i've also always been sure that i didn't want to go to grad school so i knew the tunnel wasn't that long.

i called many friends/mentors that day. their advice spanned a spectrum that was relatively predictable: the older they were, the more they encouraged me to stay in school. my friend sid had the most impactful advice, which i think i interpreted as one actionable sentence:

the younger you are the more balky you are to failure. leap earlier.

especially with mit's loa policies there was practically no downside. so i said yes, called my parents (who didn't bat an eye), and promptly started packing up my dorm that day. i moved to sf a month later after iap and suddenly, i genuinely discovered a new way to live. one that strayed far off the beaten trail and yet i could clearly see the path to both prestige and traditional success.

it's been almost ten weeks since all of this happened. still, every day i wake up, it feels like i impossibly have even more conviction in avoiding the beaten path. i've lost much of the routine that i used to have and while it used to be easy to see what the next four years would've looked like, it's arduous for me to predict even what the next four weeks now hold. yet my mind is clear and my confidence wavers minimally. i'm even getting paid four dollars an hour! in all seriousness, the chance to build and work on something surrounded by my closest friends has been the most memorable ten weeks of my life.

i'd like to revise my first sentence. here's a more acute statement: although i'm still unsure how i feel about school, after the last ten weeks, every fiber in my body yearns to not go back. for this goal i can find the agency to do monotonous things. i can put my head down and work and have the discipline to do hard things and make my own routine and so much more. i'm unbelievably optimistic.

a lot of my previous work was very reward-driven. i applied to scholarships even though i knew i'd get financial aid. i worked on a consumer app even though i had amp and college ahead of me. i applied to schools after earlying even though i was most likely going to choose stanford. thanks to my intrinsic motivations i had the agency to start new endeavors but somehow lacked enough agency to go all in. this time, beyond prestige and traditional success, i'm further threatened by the possibility of being forced to go back to school. that's enough to give me enough unbounded agency to learn and work as hard as i absolutely can.

p.s. thank you to jerry for spurring me to write and alex for much of my current worldview.