Homecoming

PERSONAL: An alum revisits and reflects on the University of Michigan.

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I graduated from the University of Michigan in August 2023 and started a Fulbright Teaching Assistant grant in Poland in October. At the end of March, I returned for a week to catch up with friends and revisit the campus. This piece is a reflection on that week, my four years at college, and all the ups, downs, and growing that I went through during that time and after. If you haven’t read anything by me before, my guiding principle as a writer is to be as honest as possible. Your honest self may be weak, immature, foolish, and outright wrong; but dishonesty manifests itself as guilt and uncertainty, two silhouettes eyeing you from the shadows. Against those enemies, honesty is radiance.

Suggested music: Nujabes - Aruarian Dance; Alex Roe - Dark Souls Firelink Shrine Remix (Kindle the Soul)

Picture an old photograph - maybe one of your parents’ wedding, your grandmother holding you as a child, you and your old high school friends at a party that you still remember so many years later. A photo that, when you look at it, makes you step back in time for a short while.

Here’s one for me. This was from one last hangout I did with some of my friends before leaving for Europe.

Coming back felt like stepping back into that photo and watching the shadows brighten, watching the black-and-white swim together into reds and blues and greens, watching the people go from static figures to walking and talking and laughing and skipping along the path. Briefly, the photo came back to life.

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Ever since I was very young, I believed that other people were the most important part of my life. There’s probably a reason for that? Some sort of natural affinity for connecting with people or bringing others together? I don’t think I was ever the best at anything I did at Michigan, and I don’t even think I developed particularly good social skills until the very end; but I did consistently think about how people were feeling, and even at my worst, part of me always asked what I was doing for my friends. When I start reflecting on the mistakes I made, what stings the most are questions like “What if I had been friendlier to…”, or “What if I did a better job keeping in touch with…”, or “What if I had been there for them when…?”. I recognize now that it’s not my job to support all of my friends 24/7 or to connect with every single person on campus, but you can look at my thought process and see how much I valued other people.

I’m an emotional person, and before dropping my keys off at the office and leaving my apartment for the last time, I looked out the window at the setting sun and tearily whispered goodbye to all my friends. Cliché, right? So grossly cliché you might mistake it for the end scene of an aggressively mediocre coming-of-age movie. I was just so scared of leaving my little Ann Arbor-sized bubble and going out into the world alone, alone to face the big questions. Who is Kevin Wang outside of this bubble? Who is he when he doesn’t go into the BBB¹ every day where he can find and chat with someone he is familiar with? In that moment of farewell, I honestly didn’t want to find out. I wanted nothing more than to go back to school later that August and stay there forever.

The short of the issue was that I had come to believe, consciously or not, that the people I cared about made me who I was. I’d become terrified that going so far away from these people would mean becoming nothing.

When I finally arrived in Lisbon for the first leg of my pre-Fulbright trip around Europe, I laid in bed until 4:00 in the morning², staring up at the ceiling with my heart beating out of my chest, and I thought about my decision to put 4,900 miles³ between my friends and me - the people who I believed made me me, and me - and my brain was screaming to itself, “How could I have done something so stupid?”

For a long time, I had no answer. People come and they go Some people may stay with you though I am all alone tonight and I kept on asking myself questions

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I got into Ann Arbor on a Sunday and went to north campus on Monday. The car ride there consisted of a lot of me pointing and shouting “I TOOK CLASSES THERE!”; thankfully my driver is about as much of a looney as me and took it all happily in stride.

The pond by Moore looks nicer when the trees are green. Also when the geese aren’t hissing at you.

During brunch, I came up with an explanation for how Panda Express is an allegory for Protestantism in the 16th century, which I’m not going to explain because it’s probably wrong and will likely offend Protestants, Catholics, authentic Chinese restaurant owners, and marketing managers working for Panda Express.

I saw two people from the clarinet studio on Monday and Tuesday. It fascinates me to compare and contrast a dedicated musician with a dedicated engineer; the hard work and enthusiasm are shared, but musicians have a knack for empathy and communication that I’ve seen very few engineers match. Not that I’d ask a clarinetist to help me architect a job system for a game engine, but if you want to learn about passion and high performance and doing things to serve other people, then try to find some time to chat with a professional classical musician.

While putting this together, I realized I never photographed the bubble tea. So instead, here’s a picture of me looking miffed.

Michigan happened to be holding an event related to Fulbright on Tuesday. A lot of people were confused why I was there, but I got free food so I’m not complaining.

Both my host and I had some extra time afterwards, so we wandered the fishbowl⁴ and Hatcher library until it was time to go.

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There’s a lot of things from college I don’t want to remember.

I started at Michigan in SMTD (School of Music, Theatre, and Dance) majoring in clarinet performance. I then switched temporarily to a German major⁵ before locking in computer science, transferring to engineering, and earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

I quickly dropped out of SMTD because I felt that my skills were drastically behind those of the rest of the studio⁶. It would’ve been possible to stay, and I know the professors would’ve worked with me to get me up to speed. However, the onus would’ve been on me to catch up, and I wasn’t willing to do that when I had other paths. I was already taking EECS 203⁷, enjoying the material, and doing well enough to confidently switch.

In hindsight, my decision to drop out of SMTD was at least as much about that feeling of inferiority as it was about rational consideration of my best options. I was genuinely enthusiastic about computer science; after that first semester, I don’t think there was a time I was strictly unenthusiastic about the subject. However, because I was switching over from a major where I was comparatively having a very difficult time, much of my enthusiasm came from being closer to the top of the class for a change. You’ve heard the whole big fish-small pond thing before - I think I refused to accept being a smaller fish, and as I got A’s early on, I let those grades go to my head and inflate my ego. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do better or taking pride in your accomplishments, but at some point it turned into the main thing keeping me going.

This kind of motivation is naturally accompanied by fear. I was not so afraid of not knowing something so much as I was afraid of being useless. I needed to be of value; I wanted to have an impact. From reading others’ experiences and talking with other people, this is common for a lot of ambitious middle-class⁸ American immigrant children: I tied value and impact strongly to results, and so the feeling was that I needed to have the results to validate my existence. Writing down makes it obvious how unsustainable all this is, but I was blinded by my perception of my own success. To me, that’s the silliest part - I got good grades and had a good understanding of class material, but objectively I had no right to call myself super successful. I just wasn’t doing much that was substantial⁹. I was participating in student orgs and some research, but I didn’t produce particularly strong results, and I was either too arrogant or too afraid to ask how to improve. Worse, I convinced myself and my friends¹⁰ that I was doing great and that I was basically a full-fledged professional (hah!). I talked the talk, mostly to myself, without walking far.

Cliché again, isn’t it? A classic tale of hubris, the big fish from a small pond refusing to accept that he was small. I am being harsh, in all honesty; of course my 22-year-old will judge my 18-year-old self as immature and shortsighted. If things stopped there, if I had humbled myself, if I had accepted where I was and decided to earnestly earn my stripes, then I might not view my past so critically. Alas.

I got an A- in EECS 281¹¹ during the spring of 2020. In other words, I was taking the weeder course¹² at double pace (not optimal) online (not optimal) due to a global pandemic (about as far from optimal as you get), and the grades would inevitably be a little harsher because of the smaller class size. Can you believe how upset I got at myself over this? As far as I was concerned, I may as well have failed the course. Of course that wasn’t true, but all the fear burst out from beneath my surface-level enthusiasm, and I began to push myself to ridiculous lengths in an attempt to confirm that I wasn’t stupid.

Failure would be a long time coming. I had a tough semester in fall 2020 (370¹³ + 376¹⁴ + 445¹⁵), which still went well; winter 2021 was when I completed my senior design project on top of two other upper level classes, which was the first time I neglected sleep and nutrition for the sake of getting work done. Fall 2021 was the 6-credit version of 482¹⁶ on top of 11 other credits of coursework plus a grad school application¹⁷ plus an NSF-GRFP¹⁸ application plus figuring out what I was doing for research next semester plus internship hunting. See how ridiculous it gets? Eventually, you ask what exactly is the point of doing all these difficult things, and here there’s no answer - either I still wanted to show everyone else how capable I was, or I felt like I had to. I had at least one mental breakdown (maybe more? can’t remember), and by the end of that last semester, I was so mentally fraught that I could barely look people in the eye.

Graduation didn’t feel real. I remember after everyone left my graduation party, I sat down and started sobbing because I could not think of a reason to be proud of myself. My first semester of SUGS¹⁹ was the trough. I skipped all my classes, stopped doing homework and research, and stayed up night after night struggling to get started on anything. I had spiraled - gradually and then suddenly all at once - through a cycle of pride, reality check, fall, shame; and I’d finally reached the bottom.

This might sound insane if you’ve never been somewhere similar in your headspace²⁰. I don’t think most people get to the point I got to, and of those people, I don’t think many articulate it. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I feel ashamed to have reached that level of self-loathing.

You wouldn’t know it today from reading my GPA or my resume; you would only know if you were one of the very few people to whom, in desperation, I finally opened up. And you’d be right to ask, “Kevin, what point is there to reprimanding yourself now for being young and not having things figured out?” I did do good things, and yet when I think back to undergrad, I don’t think much about the accomplishments: the leadership positions I held, the projects I completed, the internships I landed - heck, I graduated in 2.5 years with a 3.95. Surely all of that counts for something, right? But I rarely feel anything good from those three years²¹. What always comes to mind first is this sense of guilt and a sour aftertaste, like licking a penny, of the mental hardship I caused myself.

Three things are hard for me to let go of. One: besides grades and resume items, I don’t feel like I did anything. I’m certain I could’ve produced more tangible, meaningful results if I went slower, sought out mentorship, and stopped thinking that I had to prove myself better than everyone else. Two: instead of helping and inspiring people to grow with me, I focused on beating everyone else and proving that I was superior. Sometimes I made other people feel smaller, and I felt good about that. Three, maybe the most important thing: at some point, I wasn’t really working towards anything. In that third year, I never sat down to think about whether what I was doing was intellectually interesting or useful for other people; I just chased a vague sense of validation that I needed to stay afloat.

More than anything, I’m just mad that I was so mean to myself. I’m kinder to me nowadays, and I can see now that I deserved to treat myself better.

I don’t regret trying. I don’t regret failing. College at Michigan is supposed to be hard. You’re supposed to be pushing yourself. What makes us engineers is the ability to, armed only with our technical know-how, dive into a jumble of vague, uncertain requirements, find the problems, tease out the details, test and break your prototypes ad nauseam, and eventually cobble together something that works. If it weren’t such a tricky, delicate, intricate process to build a working computer program or a working bridge or a working jet engine, then it wouldn’t be engineering. Failure isn’t just natural - it’s required.

The arrogance, the lying to myself, the energy wasted on the wrong things, all the self-loathing and all the good I didn’t do. That’s what still stings. Conceited I was at the time I never really doubted myself But tonight got me thinking about it all If I am a fool or what not

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I stayed with a new host on Wednesday, and we got lunch together at a sandwich place that opened some time after I left.

These potatoes…oh man, these potatoes.

The men’s bathroom in MLB is slightly better than four years ago, but not by much.

I met up with a friend later that day and wandered the Vault of Midnight, which I highly recommend if you haven’t been before! Even if you aren’t particularly into comics or board games, I think it’s neat to see the variety of goods on display.

We got some very nice Asian food for dinner. Poland and Europe in general don’t have as much good Asian food²² as the US, so this was a godsend.

Some nighttime walking…

Cat tax!

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Growing up, I read this series of self-help / personal story books called Chicken Soup for the Soul, simply because that’s what we had in the house²³. The stories that stuck the most were the ones about addiction, which I read up more on during middle school and high school²⁴. Addicts often describe hitting a “rock bottom” moment where they know they can’t keep going the way they are, the moment where they decide to themselves that they need to stop. Without getting into specifics, someone reminded me about this in my last semester of undergrad, after I’d fully beaten myself down and had nothing left to give.

I haven’t experienced alcoholism or other kinds of substance abuse²⁵, but I resonated with that conversation and the idea of being “stuck” until reaching a rock bottom. Heck, you might’ve wondered when reading the previous section: “Kevin, why do you write as if you didn’t have control over yourself?” I’m genuinely not sure I did? The entire time, there was this voice of doubt in my head egging me on, starting as a whispering stream and growing into a waterfall-like roar. I stopped feeling like I wanted to do all the things I was doing and more like I had to, like something terrible would happen to me if I didn’t. My rock bottom was that first semester of SUGS where I got nothing done and stayed holed up in my room; I understood then that I needed to stop.

I started seeing a therapist. Therapy isn’t a panacea to mental or personal issues, and I don’t want to push a narrative of “just pay tons of money for therapy and everything will be okay!”. In my case, though, it helped a lot to verbally unload everything onto someone who wasn’t a busy friend or classmate. A very dear friend, someone I got to know mostly by chance, went out of her way to check in with me and take us walking together once a week. I don’t feel like I was able to talk with every friend simply because everyone else was also busy, but I tried to open up more and got better at honestly telling people how I was doing. None of this really helped with that first SUGS semester; I dropped out of one class, barely produced results for research, and ended up deciding purely based on my mental exhaustion not to do a PhD - which I emphasize because I don’t think that’s objectively how you should make that decision²⁶.

I tried to make sense of what I experienced. During the summer, when I wasn’t at my internship, I worked on an interview series on burnout and imposter syndrome called Brilliant Little Fires²⁷ to try and better understand what I experienced the past year. Today, I wouldn’t say the results are what I want: my own experience very clearly bleeds into the questions²⁸, the project is too generous with the definitions of burnout and imposter syndrome (that is, two different people’s experiences are counted as the same thing, even if one drastically differs from the other), and the analysis does not provide enough meaningful pointers to overcoming these issues²⁹. I had meaningful personal takeaways for myself; I learned that I wasn’t alone in both my overall experience and my problematic relationship with myself, and I figured out some sort of average experience based on the interviews I did. Above all else, it represented a major shift in how I analyzed my inner thoughts³⁰.

By far the most gratifying part of my final year was teaching EECS 280, which I was fortunate enough to land a GSI position for. For me, teaching felt like an opportunity for redemption³¹; after all that time I spent focusing on myself and putting my own success above others, I could finally give back to people at the start of that path. I think I did a good job teaching the technical content, but what I’m proudest of is the camaraderie I established in my labs.

In one of the conversations I had during my week back, my friend paraphrased a quote from a book she’d recently read: “We aren’t afraid of the darkness within us; we are afraid of our light.”³² What teaching did for me was to affirm that I did have that light within me, that I was greater than the sum of my mistakes. I could dismiss everything I did for myself: the coursework, the search engine, the papers I read³³, the work I did for all my research labs and all my internships - I could deny every bit of that by saying I was greedy and self-centered and had no interest in helping anyone but myself. I couldn’t deny students coming up to be at the last lab of the semester and saying thanks for everything I did.

I still had failures in my teaching. Not all of my students ended up enjoying lab, and there were moments where I got frustrated. Whenever I think about students who dropped out halfway through the semester, what-if after what-if runs through my head; but I hold on tightly to memories of the students for whom I know I made a positive impact.

My second graduation felt…mistimed. Like a book that cuts off mid-sentence before the pivotal turning point. It felt like I had so much more to give but then just suddenly got up and exited stage left. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure it would’ve been wrong to stay one more year, because I felt comfortable learning on my own and didn’t feel that school had much more to teach me. The confusion came from me not knowing what was supposed to come next.

In a strange way, I felt cheated: cheated of clarity, cheated of a chance to have all the things I did wrong and all the things I did right coalesce into a single meaning. I didn’t cry this time, but a vague sense of unease settled in that would follow me for the next year.

Perhaps you already see the problem? On several surface layers, I’d turned it all around; but if you dug deep enough, you would discover that it was still the same - I still relied on other people to prove myself worthy. I left college behind without understanding that lesson, and I would have to learn it myself across the Atlantic.

I do not regret my choices No, I’m rather proud Yet I know I won’t change anything Because I can only be me, so

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Thursday was mostly free for me, so I did some wandering.

Why are M-Den mannequins so cursed?

Oh Frita Batidos, how I missed you.

A hawk had killed a squirrel near the law quad and sat itself down near a tree to start eating. Another squirrel in said tree climbed down to look at the scene and was clearly giving the world a squirrel equivalent of a thousand-yard stare. Poor guy.

I’m not posting pictures of that, so here’s a live squirrel, plus the law quad.

DOG

I missed the arb. Even if there wasn’t a lot of vegetation yet, the sound of the Huron river brought back memories of other treks. I remember we always went in winter.

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I got the idea of teaching abroad from that rock-bottom point. I was still mentally unwell, and I had this idealized vision of freeing myself of the oppressively competitive atmosphere in academia³⁴, finding my true calling, and finding my true self (whatever that meant) in a different country. It’s a bit embarrassing to write that now - if that’s your goal, do you really need to go to a foreign country for that long in a completely different professional position? Or are you just running from therapy³⁵? To be fair, there is some merit to this reasoning. Going abroad exposes you to different cultures, different problems, and different facets of life. It also requires you to adapt to an unfamiliar professional environment³⁶ in order to operate effectively. I believe I’ve experienced both of those things while working in Poland.

However, I take issue with doing a Fulbright (or any experience where you’re teaching or serving abroad) for the express purpose of changing your life. The people who run Fulbright will tell you that it’s a life-changing experience (which it is), but what does it mean if you’re a young person and you’re not currently going through life-changing experiences? You don’t need to do a Fulbright grant - or go on amazing trips, or have the perfect friends / romantic partner(s), or work at that one really cool company that is genuinely making the world a better place, or whatever people see as a shortcut to self-affirmation these days - in order to grow. If you’re stagnating, then I believe you should put the onus on yourself to climb out of that stagnation. What’s the alternative? Sit there and wait for life to happen to you³⁷?

With how starry-eyed my motivations were, I think I’m lucky that this past year of Fulbright has gone so well. I don’t think my day-to-day duties are as demanding as my future software job³⁸ will be; the major challenges have largely to do with my identity and figuring out what I want out of life. In this regard, the past year has provided more questions than answers.

There were answers, to be sure. I realize now that a lot of the problem was that I desperately wanted to matter, to feel like I was making an impact on the world³⁹. Wanting to matter I think by itself is perfectly reasonable, but for me it became a be-all end-all. I didn’t care about the actual meaning of my work as much as whether other people noticed what I did. Because of this, I was unduly proud of myself for achieving proxy goals like good grades or being able to remember what Prim’s and Kruskal’s algorithms were⁴⁰, and I didn’t pay attention to whether I made progress towards genuinely interesting or beneficial things. Not to say that you need to figure out your life goals before finishing your freshman year, but you shouldn’t think that memorizing the content from your DS&A course equates to you being the greatest engineer there ever was. Deep down, I understood that it didn’t really mean anything to know Prim’s and Kruskal’s algorithms, but those little moments of validation felt good enough that I kept chasing them, almost involuntarily, at the expense of true growth.

Another important note there: I don’t think I was really that stupid. I knew I was arrogant, and I knew not to believe my own internal bombast. That meant I was destined to bring myself down, but since I genuinely didn’t have enough to stand on, I think that’s a good thing. In software engineering, there’s an argument between fail-safe systems and fail-fast: the former is resistant to failures, but in its resilience it masks those failures and hinders diagnosis and repair of problems. Fail-fast leads to more crashing, but you can find and fix the issues quicker than if you had hidden the errors. I’m happier that I failed hard and forced myself to change; it would’ve been worse if I kept going and convinced myself that I was living life the way I wanted.

Some of what I call past arrogance I think is really indignation for never receiving what I felt were just rewards for my hard work. Underneath this misplaced feeling is an assumption that everything I did should - and by “should”, I mean obligatorily enforced by some unspoken law of the universe - have had a corresponding payoff. I don’t think that’s true anymore. Objectively, hard work does not translate 1:1 to results⁴¹; but more fundamentally, I no longer believe that anyone owes you for anything you do⁴². At first, this was an unpleasant realization that made me feel unloved and inconsequential within the grandness of existence⁴³. Over time, though, I’ve come to take comfort in this. If you push yourself towards a goal and fall short, that’s not some grand injustice in the universe - that’s just life. As such, instead of looking for happiness in the results and the rewards, I’ve learned to find joy in the doing itself.

Ultimately, I feel that I’ve come to terms with the arrogant young man I used to be. I’m still critical of the mentality I had and the decisions I made, but I also recognize that I genuinely didn’t know better and had to learn one way or another. I care. I want to do the work, I want to make an impact. Given the choice between a limousine equipped with chauffeur, Wi-Fi, champagne, and crunchy biscuits versus a rusted, beaten-up bicycle that you got from eBay for 50 dollars with a chain that jumps every half-mile, I would take the bicycle every time. That’s not to glorify the magnitude of my self-neglect or the impact it may have had on others. I should have been kinder, I should have reached out to my friends earlier, and I should have admitted earlier that I didn’t know what I was doing and needed help. The fire I lit beneath myself didn’t have to scorch so long, scald so deep and red.

But I couldn’t have left with my chin up if I hadn’t pushed myself to the limit. I look back on the past now with few regrets, because with how little I understood back then, there was nothing else I would have done.

This self-forgiveness is by no means an excuse for complacency in the present. I have a better understanding of my limitations, but just because I acknowledge I am fallible does not mean I don’t want to try. It’s not about proving myself anymore⁴⁴, but rather finding answers to “What do I want to do?” “What value do I provide to other people?” “What things do I really need to have, and what things can I let go of?” I just want a good life, y’know?

By far the biggest questions had to do with who I was. Now that I was no longer at home and no longer around friends with whom I’d been comfortable for years, most of the time I spent was with myself. Even after getting to Poland, I spent a lot of time with myself. You can see in an earlier post how avoidant I was of new people, instead clinging to my own sense of self and memories of my friends back home. I usually have a lot of social energy, and I enjoy meeting new people and bringing people together. Some part of me must have wanted the isolation.

Just like how I knew that I was arrogant and that something was wrong during those first three years of college, I must’ve known, too, that something was still off when I left Michigan. I did not think of myself as having much value without teaching and serving others, and that made it hard to be with myself. It was like living with a roommate who you only saw as causing problems and who you didn’t want to acknowledge, except that roommate is you. My mind goes back to that quote about how we fear the light within us; I think I naturally like my darkness because it’s a great excuse to dislike myself and do nothing. Because I am a bad person, the reasoning goes, it doesn’t matter what I do - on moral grounds, all of my accomplishments ought to be disavowed anyway. It’s when I truly believe in myself that it becomes frightening to be wrong.

Teaching showed me that I could do good by others, but I still didn’t believe in my own goodness when I was on my own. So I did the equivalent of locking myself in a room, throwing the key out the window, and shouting to my own shadow “come out, come out, whoever you are!”. There’s probably more sane ways to approach self-discovery, but I’ve figured some stuff out nonetheless.

I talk a lot. (You could probably tell.) The more positive way to look at it is that I’m a diligent and proactive communicator - I want to have conversations, so I start conversations and do my best to include everyone in those conversations. It’s easy to twist that into professional speak (“I’m a great team player”, “I like helping people with problems”, “I’m great at sharing knowledge with users and other product stakeholders”), but at a more fundamental level, I believe in the power of sitting down, listening to other people’s stories, and telling them in a fair way to the rest of the world.

I learned, too, that I am a doer. It turns out I really do enjoy programming; during my pre-Fulbright travels, one thought that frequently went through my head was “I should make a blog for this!”, and I was actually looking forward to getting my hands dirty with Jekyll and other bits of web dev⁴⁵ technology. I don’t always stay up late at night tinkering with a program, but I like it every now and then⁴⁶ - it’s just fun to go down rabbit holes about thread fibers and Python futures and structuring your projects to avoid dependency hell on a UNIX system. Granted, there’s a sense of obligation too, the feeling that if I am not doing something, then I don’t have the right to say that I am contributing to society. I’m not great at sitting back and relaxing, because I inevitably get the itch to get up and make something for someone.

It would be a lie to say I know myself fully at this point. I’m deeply uncertain on pretty much everything; it’s a little exaggerated to say I have no idea what to do with the rest of my life, but it’s very early to say, and I think I still haven’t gone out into the world enough to accurately assess myself.

There’s still things I’m unhappy with, too. I’m a control freak, and I care about being the authoritative voice more than a young learner should. I also work slower than I want to these days⁴⁷, and my schedule is too fluid for my liking. But my self-perception is not “this is wrong, that is wrong, everything you’re doing isn’t enough” but rather that “huh, let’s keep trying something else tomorrow”. I have faith that I’m a work in progress and that I will be interesting in the future, and the foundation of that faith is believing that I understand myself far better than I used to.

What’s next? Machine learning? Systems engineering in games? Maybe I do software for a while, then quit to pursue the social sciences or a creative writing venture? Or maybe I get fatally struck by a car in May and don’t have to worry about any of it⁴⁸. That would be kind of funny - all this introspection and thought and hopes and dreams getting squished by…a Toyota, probably? Haven’t thought about which model car would run me over.

It’s a lot to think about, but uncertainty has its own kind of joy, and I remind myself to focus on everything I can do instead of falling again into that trap of things I have to do - because really, no one is giving out orders here. In this moment, I feel comfortable. How can I be so sure? At a crossroads I’m afraid too But I can’t let fear get the best of me Someone once said “burn my dread, babe”

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The weekend was the most chaotic part. For Friday, I gave a talk to the EECS 280 staff about my experience in Fulbright so far. We then got some nice Indian food for lunch, and I spent the rest of the day running into former students and colleagues on north campus and catching up.

I went out to dinner that night with a specific group of people that previously made Korean BBQ into one of the most gasping-for-air hilarious experiences in my life. This time, we did the sequel - Peking duck at Hot Pot Chen. The duck was pretty darn good! We, on the other hand, slowly lost all our brain cells to each other.

We then discovered one of us had a fundamental misunderstanding of oranges, so we somehow got lost finding a Kroger and proceeded to purchase an orange (and a pomelo and copious amounts of alcohol) and spent three hours…eating fruit?

The day after, my one friend and I did a photoshoot for professional pictures. Apparently some of these would be good for Tinder? Honestly I’m not so sure; I mean, are people into guys with that deer-in-the-headlights look?

Are people into guys who run away? Man, online dating is weird.

I proceeded to get sushi with some other friends, and then I managed to be about two hours late to a giant hangout with all the boys, including the ones who weren’t available during the work week. That party was one of the most deranged events I have partaken in, so please enjoy some pictures of nice, peaceful sushi.

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I thought a lot about what it would feel like to see everyone again. Part of me worried that we would have nothing left in common. That’s a well-founded concern, right? Leaving college means you have significantly fewer things you can relate to: no coursework, no job hunting, no Friday night hangouts after class…part of me wondered how many of our conversations would be awkward and quiet.

I think the worry stemmed from how much I had changed, too - would people really recognize me for who I’d become? I actually asked that to two of my friends, whether or not I seemed different, and they replied, “No, you seem a little nostalgic, but you’re still you.” Something was still familiar to them despite all my growing, and I’ve been wondering what that something is.

We have that shared college experience, of course. We can relate on late nights spent figuring out projects, celebratory dinners at Tomukun and Kanbu and B-Dubs, all the extremely stupid situations we got ourselves into…but like I said: now that it’s after college, you’re not doing those things together anymore on a regular basis. In some ways, that’s nice to think about: it signals that our connection is based on more than just geographical proximity.

All of my friends are incredibly intelligent and hard-working. I wouldn’t consider myself stupid, but I would rank myself around the 50th percentile among my friends for raw smarts. I used to be scared of this; before my nadir, anyone smarter than me at something was, in my eyes, through no fault of their own, a threat to my own value. Now that I’ve grown and detached my sense of self-worth from my surroundings, I can finally appreciate them and everything they do. Finally - finally!, even if it was too late for my college self - I could truly be awed by the people around me! Wow, I know a girl who has her pick of 12⁴⁹ grad schools for CS! I know a guy who was making games from scratch in high school! I know a Churchill scholar! I know a guy who made rocket fuel when he was thirteen!

I did always feel that my friends were looking out for me⁵⁰. None of them were psychiatrists who could professionally help me, but they always did their best to make time, and especially when things got bad during my third year, I remember people checking in on me and asking if I was holding up alright. There’s a trust between us, and that trust doesn’t need to be reinforced by me messaging each and every one of them every night. I sincerely believe that if I come calling for help at any point, they will answer.

Maybe these commonalities are emblematic of the University of Michigan? I’m sure that’s what their marketing team would tell you⁵¹. I prefer to think otherwise; I still want to make new friends throughout my 20s, and I’d like to think that I’ve made meaningful connections during my teaching and my travels this past year. It does feel like my friends from Michigan have some shared quality that makes them very difficult to replace.

But at the end of the day, I can’t give you a single universal reason why my friends are my friends. Each one of them means something different and recalls different memories for me. I’d be sipping bubble tea and chatting with an old studio mate, and between our words about auditions and self-discovery, I could hear her say, Do you remember how it felt to sit in a practice room for hours on end practicing and perfecting the same throat tone exercises for weeks? I’d be listening other friends going on about their interests, and our discussions on category theory research and Elon Musk’s treatment of the California rail system reevaluate to Do you remember becoming so obsessed with machine learning that you gifted people books about it? I’d catch a former student or an EECS 280 IA in the atrium of the BBB, and beneath all the rambling about classes and campus goings-on I’d hear a voice in my head ask, Do you remember how proud you were to see people younger than you flourish with just a little push?

Practicing our German and talking about clarinet performance opportunities in Vienna. Seeing her face light up as she talked about all the books she’d read the last few months. The shinto 2-2-1⁵² we did to each other to say goodbye (how did that even start?). Being teased for calling myself old, which I did precisely because I knew she’d tease me about it. All our idiosyncrasies and inside jokes and the little things that you wouldn’t notice if you were our coworker or classmate or teacher, if you were less than a friend.

Could I ever express to you how much they mean to me?

---

I was worn out from all the socializing, so on my last day in Ann Arbor, I decided to sit back and clean up my LinkedIn page a bit in preparation for job hunting. My photographer friend helped me pick out one of the photos we took, and after cropping and having some fun with the filters⁵³, I got this:

Leaning back on my buddy’s couch, I looked at my picture and thought to myself, Man, I’m proud of myself. Then I sat up a bit and narrowed my eyes. Wait, what? Why would I say that?

I toyed with the statement, turned it over in my head, held it up to the light for inspection. Proud of myself. Proud? Proud. Yeah, I’m proud of myself. That…works.

I’d come to Michigan a hothead, all fired up and ready to beat everyone else in some imaginary race of life. I shot up fast, came back down even harder, and rose again. I left just as I started embracing the people around me and realizing all the good I could do, and as I made my way around another continent, I asked myself what I was supposed to make of it. I got lost, realized I had to look for me, and I’m still looking.

My therapist says I still push myself too hard. Maybe that’s true; at some point I figure I’ll settle down a bit. In this moment, despite it all, I still want to do big things, and I still want to do the work needed to achieve those big things. There is a hesitancy within myself because of how poorly I treated me in the past, but at the same time, I got to do and experience so much. After all my mistakes, I still have so much love and hope and this forward feeling in my life. I truly believe that I can turn that into something amazing - that prospect used to mean fear and anxiety, but now? I’m excited! I’m ready! I can do it - I’m me, I know me, and I know I can do it.

I thought about it all then, and I felt grateful. Who knows what tomorrow holds? Just wanna live my life the way I want What fills up my soul is passionate Music that makes me want to sing

---

And so it was time to exit the photo.

If I went back a few months earlier, I’d probably write something about a Michigan-sized hole in my heart - something disgustingly cheesy, like a cheese pizza from that one mind-bogglingly mediocre pizzeria downtown that you only order from because the location is good. I feel sadness and longing as the Ann Arbor city limit sign flies back in the rear-view mirror, but there’s no desperate clinging this time, no voice saying “don’t take me; I want to stay”. I know I belong somewhere else, because I am me. I am more than home.

Part of me wishes I had spent the week sitting down and talking with all my friends one by one. We could’ve grabbed bubble tea⁵⁴ and chatted until 3AM, like old times, about everything that happened in our lives since we parted ways. I don’t think it would’ve been enough; I don’t know if any amount of time with these precious people could ever be enough. Isn’t that just life? The time we want to spend together is far longer than the time we have.

I used to be so afraid that I would never get to tell them all the things I want to say. I no longer believe that’s something we should fear, because for the people you care about, that’s just a fact: there will always be something left to say. That’s okay. Love need not be spoken to be true.

Farewell, my friends. We’ll see each other soon.

My story will be starring me Just like yours Who knows when will it end What matters most is how you bring joy to life, So…

---

1. Bob and Betty Beyster Building, which is where a lot of computer science students work and hang out. ↩

2. This may also have been due to the time difference, but I think it was more because of an emotional rush - I remember feeling physically tired but mentally frantic. ↩

3. about 7980 km. ↩

4. Computer workspace in one of the central campus buildings. ↩

5. There’s a whole thing here about planning to go to Germany for the summer to take coursework, then coming back, moving to a German minor, and then switching to a CS major - I think it’s a strategy the department encourages because A: they’re glad to have people even if they don’t major, and B: a lot of people who would have switched back to a minor often like it enough to major or double major in German. The German department is great here, and I highly recommend it if you’re interested! ↩

6. I was self-taught. Other musicians say it’s impressive I got into Michigan self-taught - which I suppose is true - but I learned so many bad habits, failed to learn many other good ones, and most importantly had almost zero understanding of professional musicianship, how to talk with other professional musicians, and the process of getting hired for a job as a clarinetist. ↩

7. undergraduate course that broadly covers most of the discrete math needed for a typical DSA course. ↩

8. Maybe middle-upper or upper. This is something I still haven’t really figured out, because my family lived in a wealthier neighborhood but never had nearly the same kind of money as other people in the area. My family made less than 100K up until I graduated high school; however, my parents managed to buy after the 2008 housing crash and survive the financial crisis. We never had money for vacations or cabins up north, and from what I remember of childhood, we never figured out how to blend in socially with our more financially comfortable neighbors. That said, I never worried about getting food to eat, and compared to friends whose families struggled to make ends meet, it would be grossly insensitive of me to say that I was disadvantaged. ↩

9. If you’re reading this as an underclassman, the point isn’t “everything you do will suck because you’re young” but moreso “you’re young, so you’re probably not at the top of the world and you should remember that”. You can only really improve by doing things with a lot of intention - for example, research or personal projects you have a lot of personal interest in - and the more you do, the more you will improve. ↩

10. Another major regret here is that I feel like I created an atmosphere of toxic oneupmanship with a lot of my friend groups. I talked a lot about doing things better or being “good” at things, rather than just talking about things because I genuinely liked them. I think that made some people insecure. Not to say that I alone am responsible for how my friends feel, but I don’t feel like I was an encouraging influence back then. ↩

11. Data structures and algorithms, which is your core course in any competent CS curriculum. ↩

12. If someone from the EECS department reads this, then they’ll probably complain that I’m calling it a weeder because it makes the class sound more intimidating than it needs to be. To some extent, I would push back on that. Data structures and algorithms are the basis of almost everything interesting and worth doing in software, and people who have computer science as their main professional discipline should be able to pass a class on it. Not suggesting that leetcode skills define you as an engineer, but rather that if you can’t handle DS&A, then I don’t think anyone should trust you with any substantial real-world software engineering task. That said, I believe the department wants to avoid students psyching themselves out too much over what at the end of the day is just a stepping stone to real software engineering. That’s a good thing to communicate, especially for students who lack the support network to know “what it’s really like”. ↩

13. Intro to computer organization, which teaches intro-level architecture in a software engineering context. ↩

14. An intro-level theory of computation course we call “Foundations of computer science”. I actually really liked this class. ↩

15. Intro to machine learning. ↩

16. Introduction to operating systems. Here, it gets wrapped in with parallel and concurrent programs, which are radically different from sequential programs and thus require a near-total paradigm shift. Along with this, projects are bulky enough to give the class a challenging reputation. Once you get used to concurrency and parallelism, though, they just become additional tools in your kit - nothing fundamentally crazy like, say, the average Haskell program. ↩

17. I just did one simplified application, but I made such a big deal out of it in my head that it felt equal to the other things I was putting on my plate here. From my friends’ experiences, applying to many grad schools is much rougher. ↩

18. National Science Foundation - Graduate Research Fellowships Program, which is a three-year stipend of $37,000 annual to fund graduate student research in the sciences. It’s a popular and competitive scholarship for students who want to do or are currently doing research. ↩

19. SUGS = sequential undergraduate-graduate studies, which is basically a shorter master’s for students who are above a certain GPA cutoff. ↩

20. I mean, it might just sound insane with no other qualifier attached. I have an idea of similar challenges other people go through in college (read two sections below), but I can’t really tell if my specific experience makes sense. ↩

21. Also playing into this is the fact that I received a lot of praise back then, partially because I did some actual good work and partially because I had a very positive, enthusiastic exterior that made people reluctant to criticize me. (I don’t think I paid enough attention to the little criticism I did get, which didn’t help.) These days, I’m deeply suspicious of praise, in large part because I know I’m basically a kid and that I don’t yet have the right to say I’m an expert in anything. ↩

22. with a possible exception regarding Vietnamese food. I’ve noticed that a lot of European countries, mostly ones that otherwise don’t have a big Asian presence, have fairly large Vietnamese immigrant communities. This is just based on colloquial evidence, and it might be because I’ve mostly lived in Michigan, which as far as I know is not a hotspot for Vietnamese immigrants. I believe other states have much larger Vietnamese populations. ↩

23. I wouldn’t recommend them for people my age today, and I wouldn’t necessarily buy them for my kids. Like a lot of other non-scientific self-help books, they have a bit of Christian undercurrent that I’m not a huge fan of - there’s other religions, and religion as a whole is not the only way to develop morals and such. The series is still pretty good at providing perspectives from lots of other ordinary people, which was helpful for a young suburban kid. ↩

24. I don’t know how much other people know about addiction, but if you are curious for more, one book I liked quite a bit was Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation. Lembke uses addiction as a lens to view the current state of humanity’s dopamine intake and the problems associated with it. ↩

25. Addiction is far, far more difficult than whatever I dealt with. I had financial security from my parents and was fortunate enough to have empathetic friends and professors; by the time most addicts hit rock bottom, they no longer have either of those things. I also have to fight a physiological dependency; trying to better yourself is way harder when a substance rewires your brain. I have a lot of respect for recovered and recovering addicts because they are fighting a war with their own minds and somehow aren’t losing. ↩

26. I still don’t think a PhD is right for me simply because the things I want to do (software for storytelling, which for me translates into systems engineering in video games / film / other entertainment) aren’t really things you have to do in academia. Really, they’re not things I think you should be doing in academia either - it’s just too empirical for a research mindset to do well. I get more excited watching talks from industry conferences than academic conferences - no disrespect to academia or anything, just my personal preference. ↩

27. This links to a GitHub repo because the site itself is currently down. I wrote the website in React using some packages that have since had discovered security vulnerabilities, meaning AWS Amplify will refuse to host the website. Normally you can just do an npm update to fix things, but with what I’m using to build the site, upgrading one set of packages necessitates downgrading another set of packages, and this circular dependency prevents me from quickly fixing the site problems without doing a deep dive and changing the project’s structure - something I haven’t taken the time to do. ↩

28. which is fine for a personal project, but if the point is to tell other people’s stories, then the questions should have a more objective basis. ↩

29. Arguably, it shouldn’t. In general I am deeply suspicious of anyone trying to peddle quick-fix, one-size-fits-all solutions to problems that are deeply personal, and I wouldn’t want Brilliant Little Fires to be the same way. ↩

30. To some extent, this also started a pattern of working on personal projects to help figure myself out. Hey Dragon, Hey Falcon⁵⁵ draws parallels with Brilliant Little Fires: deeply rooted in my personal story, heavy focus on interviews, similar “figure it out as we go along” style. The emphasis is very much on “personal” here; both projects had enough of a selling point to attract interviewees, but at their core, both are guided by what I want to understand. Neither is particularly academic or is intended to serve as an authoritative source on the topic - I don’t consider myself enough of an expert in either domain to tell everyone “this is how it is”. ↩

31. This is not a good reason to teach, and if this were what I said in my interview I would rightfully have been rejected very quickly. I was hired because I had good interviews and had teaching experience from a previous GSI position + teaching at a student organization. I did also discuss my summer project, which I think tipped the scales in my favor versus other highly qualified applicants. ↩

32. Can’t remember the name offhand, but Googling suggests that it’s a quote from a spiritual guide by Marianne Williamson. That doesn’t feel like a book my friend would read, so maybe she heard it elsewhere and I’m thinking of a different book she brought up? She brought up a lot of books. ↩

33. I did honestly enjoy paper reading a lot, and I still think back casually to some of the literature. For example: honestly still don’t understand what a neural tangent kernel is and would love it if someone could someday tie up that loose end for me. Basically can you take this article or this article but dumb it down even more? It’s very much a subdomain for ML researchers with a strong math background, which I don’t have. ↩

34. To be clear, this was my biased perception at the time; I don’t feel qualified to say whether this is actually true. It depends on the institution, and as far as computer science goes, I just see the work in academia as fundamentally different from work in industry. ↩

35. Again, therapy is not a panacea! Honestly, maybe the correct thing to do here would’ve been to talk more with peers and professionals mentors who are better positioned to offer what-to-do-with-your-20s advice. Again, the point is to help unpack the emotions and thoughts going through your head. ↩

36. Unless you are a TEFL / TESOL teacher by profession, but in that case you honestly probably shouldn’t be doing Fulbright? Go for it if you want, but long-term the goal should be to find a full-time position that’ll have better pay and job security. ↩

37. On a second pass, this paragraph only has a reasonable message for young 20-somethings who don’t have much to worry about besides their social and professional lives. If you have kids, are taking care of an ailing family member, or have other similar things that take up most of your free time, then I think you’ll naturally have a harder time “growing” in the sense that is suggested. At least, I wouldn’t endorse prioritizing social and professional exploration over your child… ↩

38. knocks on wood ↩

39. “world”, which can mean or impressing your relatively tiny friend circle with your not-actually-that-strong abilities. ↩

40. I’m bringing the MST algorithms up specifically because I distinctly remember a moment where I remembered what they were and someone else didn’t, and in my brain a very loud and brash voice shouted “Ha, take that!”. The class was an upper level course that did not discuss MST. ↩

41. Important for anyone doing anything of sufficient complexity! Hard work needs direction in order to produce something that matters. ↩

42. We can view “owing” in terms of upholding the social contract, in which case yes, you are owed for some of the things you do. In my head I prefer to deconstruct the idea of a social contract to “everyone acts selfishly”, which in the long run feels nicer to me. If someone employs me or is my friend or otherwise spends time and effort on me for selfish reasons - rather than out of obligation to uphold a social contract - then that means I genuinely matter to them. ↩

43. which seems to be the typical result of dabbling in any kind of existentialism nowadays ↩

44. minus from the purely practical standpoint of demonstrating immediate added value, since (to my knowledge) most software companies are hiring on an as-need basis right now. ↩

45. Not that I want to become a web dev, but if you want to write or communicate stuff on your own little platform, then you kind of need a website. In turn, you’ll need to have some decent understanding of the web dev landscape and the basics of how modern website code works. ↩

46. Sometimes I feel pressure thinking about how other people will see it or how it will look on my resume. That doesn’t remove the joy, but it does get in the way and sometimes it becomes the prevailing emotion. Not a huge fan of those days; my solution is to say that it’ll be alright (maybe a lie) and that in the long run, it’s more important that I keep practicing. ↩

47. which may be actual lack of energy / clearheadedness or more an issue with my ability to estimate / schedule tasks. ↩

48. I don’t have a will or life insurance because I’m not expecting to die anytime soon (and again, if I do then it becomes someone else’s problem), so there’s really nothing for me to be concerned about regarding my death. Besides avoiding it as best I can, obviously… ↩

49. number might be slightly off, and knowing her, she’ll be too humble to confirm ↩

50. Honestly, if a friend wasn’t looking out for me, then they probably would’ve stopped qualifying as my friend. I think I’ve had a few instances of that, mostly with people who were too busy with work one way or another to give me the attention I needed. Maybe this point is trivial, then. ↩

51. I get why academic prestige is a thing - if your institution has too many applicants, then of course it’ll do its best to pick the “best” ones, whatever “best” means. However, I’ve met tons of people in industry who are way smarter and more dedicated than me, and the vast majority do not come from schools that are widely considered to be in the top X of their field (heck, one of my mentors mostly did community college!). ↩

52. To be clear, this is a mildly sacrilegious application of the last part of a shinto tradition that is done when visiting shrines. There is no religious aspect intended here; I think I did it on a whim once because I learned about it recently and wanted to show it off. For some reason, it stuck. ↩

53. Small things with brightness, contrast, and saturation - I didn’t make myself significantly hotter in the picture than I actually am, which…well, take that how you will⁵⁶. ↩

54. Yes I’m obsessed. Look, they don’t have the good stuff in my Polish city, alright? We have a bubble tea shop, but nothing of the same quality as in the US. ↩

55. On hiatus for the most part until I find a job. It’s hard to find the focus to work on more personal, non-technical projects when my professional stability is still up in the air. ↩

56. oh god it actually is tinder ↩