I don’t talk to a lot of people from my high school but I met up with someone from the grade above two days ago. Our conversations are always entertaining, though this time I believe we both realized we had much less to talk about. However, we did touch on some good points. One that struck me was her admission that Arizona was a reality check.

What?

Arizona, the reality check? The state that people only pay attention to in national elections when the fate of the country’s representatives rests in the hands of painstakingly long vote counts? The state only known for its cacti?

What?

Quickly, I began to understand. We had almost the same circles in high school. When I checkin on the people I looked up to in high school, I’m amazed at how many are still doing what they said they would do when they graduated high school. Appellate judge. Foreign service. Research engineer. Social good. As someone who experienced firsthand how mimetic and conforming aspirations are at top institutions in the US, I know how hard it is stay true to your goals. I’ve succumbed to the phenomenon of selling out at times, too.


A few weeks before, I had another conversation with a friend about the selling out and mimetic desire that plagues students at top colleges. “Who’s going to build the rockets my code is going to run on?” he posed. “The shit that actually matters.”

Selling out is a painful reality for those who start their college journeys wide-eyed and dreamy. We lamented how most people around us eventually switched to major in CS and how the smartest people don’t end up working on the most important problems. Instead they sit in front of trading desks or bug bash on an ads team. I then brought up that the people I know from home that go to less prestigious universities, where finance and consulting recruiters don’t heckle you from the moment you step foot on campus on your visit weekend as a high school senior, they’re actually studying shit that matters. Public policy, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, all the rest. Though we came from extremely different public high schools, we both noted how kids who either attend top high schools or grow up in high-achieving areas e.g. the Bay, almost grow into a trope that’s expected of them – as high-achievers, you must continue being high-achieving, with means work in fields with the most prestige and/or highest pay.

We overachievers are our worst enemy.


That conversation, plus another point how tech people love to blog, forced me to think deeply for the first time in a year. I spent the past two days reading personal blogs. This one has been, and still is, my favorite.

Reading makes you think. It makes you ask yourself tough questions. A lot of them have crossed my mind recently. Am I making the most out of my brief time on Earth? What do I want my legacy to be? How can I hold myself accountable towards my goals?


Here is one of the first, and hopefully not the last, culminations of my musings.

Hi ____,

I don’t know if you remember me, but you interviewed me for Yale undergraduate admissions nearly four years ago. I was admitted, but I made the decision to attend MIT instead. Though I know I probably would have also thrived at Yale, I don’t regret a second of my choice.

My time as an undergrad is coming to an end, and recently I’ve been thinking about how I got where I am, how far I’ve come, and of course, what I hope to be in the future. Then I remembered the first time someone told me they saw something different in me that hinted that I could be bigger than who I think I am. That led me to a memory of a conversation I had with you outside a swimming pool in 2019.

Looking back, I probably didn’t understand more than half the things you told me about Yale, Ivy League culture, and “real life”. But throughout college, I gradually gained an understanding of what you were trying to tell a naïve high schooler. I’ve worked in Big Tech, Wall Street, and troubled research institutions (MIT Media Lab) these past 4 years, but I’ve learned my future work lies elsewhere. I’m an electrical engineering and computer science major at MIT, but I started as a computer science major, like half my school, before realizing mid-way that I was doing something that everyone around me was doing rather than what I actually wanted to do.

With that said, I’d love to reconnect and follow-up on that initial conversation if you’re still in Arizona. I’ll be leaving for my last semester of college at the very end of January but I’m free anytime before then so please let me know if you would like to catch up.

Best,
Mindy