be real

hello and good day to you, kind stranger. everyone seems to have a personal page so i thought it would be cool to have my own. i’m also a terrible writer so don’t mind my writing quality.

i’ve recently awakened after becoming aware of an illusion that i was living in. everyone wants to believe a certain narrative about themselves and others. for me, the narrative i had so carefully constructed was one where i belonged in business school.

when chatgpt came out in 2022, i developed this nihilistic belief that in the age of the LLM, no software engineer would ever make it without being extremely technical in which that software engineer would then go and work for an AI lab. every software product and all the “mid-tier” engineers would slowly get enveloped or made useless by the ever improving models being pumped out of those factories.

this nihilism followed me through the tail end of high school into my first year of business school in which i would tell everyone that my reason for being in business was so i could develop my “soft skills” and “product thinking” to make me a more valuable engineer. the reality, however, was that i had not gotten into any CS degree programs that i had really felt passionate towards and quite foolishly decided to early decision 2 to nyu as the “safe move”.

why did i gaslight myself? well, i really enjoy tech and am definitely more passionate about CS (not leetcode or comp programming, i hate that) than any of my other professional interests. i also have been programming for fun for years and am genuinely curious about many CS topics. this passion rubs off when i talk and people would always ask me why i wasn’t studying cs. i had no good reason lined up so i invented a compelling one.

the problem came when i started believing it too. 2 months into my freshman year, i had a career crisis where i suddenly felt like maybe i wanted to be an i-banker or consultant. i studied some simple ib technicals and did all the consulting case comp stuff while learning more about the recruiting process. at this point, i had successfully gaslit everyone and myself so hard that i thought i wanted to go down a “classical” business pathway.

when i finally realized that wasn’t what i cared about and wanted to work as a software engineer, i still was locked in a trance. i had seen examples of successful swes from nyu and thought that was all the proof i needed to know i would be just fine. so i continued talking myself into thinking that this was exactly where i was meant to be.

my wake-up call came yesterday. last year, i had considered filling out transfer apps, but got into a club with a great community, which enticed me to stay, as it helped me justify the story i wanted to tell about myself even more. it took going to an ai conference and feeling reinvigorated with applied ai development (thanks zg) to wake me up from this multi-year long trance.

i don’t know what i’m going to do now. being in this present and more aware state certainly is anxiety-inducing. but i’ve always held a firm belief that people just need to hear the truth, no matter if it’s what they want to hear or not. and how can i believe that for others if i can’t even apply it to myself?

thank you for reading if you got this far. i might write about more tech stuff i find cool very soon.