Departure
“I have this theory. You ready? So we are on earth for a finite amount of time. And time is a manmade perception. And we perceive time passing through change — seasons, aging, things like that. So to expand our time on earth, we must incite as much change in our lives as possible.”
—a Human of New York
NOVEMBER 20, 2014
I am a recent college dropout. Also a high school dropout. I’m a Thiel Fellow. I emancipated from my parents a year ago when I was 17. I’m getting my braces off next month.
In six weeks, I’ll be moving out from San Francisco and traveling to the city of Porto in Portugal. A year ago, I moved from my childhood home in New York City to San Francisco.
Since middle school, I thought I wanted to go to MIT, then get a PhD, then become a professor. Because that’s what you do when you’re a good student, right? While I still adore MIT, my life has now evolved into a journey beyond anything I’d ever imagined.
A couple months ago, I logged into AirBnB, added a monthly price filter, and zoomed the map of search results all the way out. Seeing the pins scattered everywhere, I viscerally realized the whole world was open to me.
It turns out that many cities in Europe have a far more reasonable cost of living than San Francisco, so living across them is actually more feasible on a small budget than staying. Porto sits at the end of the path closer to America, so I’m starting there, and I’ll see where it takes me.
I once longed for stability. But I’ve realized that for now I don’t want to settle down; I don’t want to settle for the daily grind. I want to be nomadic, unbound from geographical and temporal constraints. I’m excited to travel to beautiful places while exploring beautiful ideas and building beautiful things. Being in new places makes me viscerally aware that I need to make good use of my time because every moment counts.
DECEMBER 9, 2013
When I packed up all my belongings for the first time, I couldn’t believe they fit in a suitcase, a carry-on, and a backpack. Unfortunately, I had to leave almost all my books behind, less a couple math textbooks given to me by a mentor (I’m somewhat sentimental). I optimized for the most irreplaceability per size and weight; I brought my ice skates and analog film camera, but just two pairs of pants.
Fixing my sweat-drenched hair back into a ponytail, I mentally checked I hadn’t left anything actually important. The essentials had been stowed in my backpack for a few weeks: birth certificate, US and UK passports, medical records, external hard drive.
And then I left.
I closed the door to my father’s apartment for the last time. Two hours packing. Three days crashing with a friend in NYC. Eight and a half hours and one layover that Thursday on the cheapest flight of the month.
DECEMBER 13, 2013
The first morning I woke up in the Bay Area, I was confused by how it didn’t seem like winter anymore. Sunlight poured through the sliding glass doors. There wasn’t any snow.
Riley, the friend who had invited me to crash at this small mansion in Atherton, came in to ask if I wanted to go on a run. I realized that I was free. I laughed and rolled back to sleep.
But I had little money and no plans. I had to walk 3.7 miles to the Caltrain station whenever I needed to get someplace. I managed to spend less than $10 on groceries that month; Riley worried I was anorexic. But it was a fun challenge to work around my constraints. I started going to Stanford because I could get food from the dining halls with friends, and then I realized I could also sit in on computer science classes.
Atherton quickly became my home, and the odd collection of residents felt almost like family. I loved spontaneously learning from housemates at the chalk-dusted blackboards in the tea room. I loved the weekly candlelit dinners and lectures. On Wednesday nights, we would pack into a car for a long-standing tradition of roller soccer at a Google parking lot.
It was holiday season, and we celebrated Newtonmas on December 25th. There were swinging pendulum trees (complete with planet and apple ornaments) and homemade test tube candles. One night when we were bored, we baked cupcakes and climbed the hill behind the house to listen to Carl Sagan’s original Cosmos under the stars.
It was also college application season.
“What can I do?” I stressed to Riley. “I can’t afford all the application fees. Maybe I should just give up on going to college.”
“You should do a crowdfunding thing.”
“I can’t do that,” I dismissed. “It’s too… embarrassing.”
“What do you care more about? Avoiding something a bit embarrassing now, or getting the chance to go to college?”
Eighteen hours later, I had raised a thousand dollars. A few days after that, I sent in my applications.
NEW YEARS EVE 2013
The house was full of bubbly people and interesting conversations and model planets strung together for the “Revolutionary Celebration” — at least, that’s what I heard, because I was stuck in a room doing another, different kind of application.
The Thiel Fellowship, in case you haven’t heard of it, is an alternative to college and the traditional life paths which follow. The two-year program gives young people the freedom to pursue research or entrepreneurial interests via a $50,000/year grant and a broad network of mentors and advisors. While the fellowship sounded ideal, I was still hooked on the idea of college (especially after having just raised those application fees), and anyway, I couldn’t allow myself to actually imagine I might be qualified. For months I’d been avoiding thinking about it, and it was due today.
I had little time and even less confidence.
But my friends barred me from joining the party until I submitted my application, so eventually I conceded I might as well just do it. I snuck three green and pink cupcakes from the kitchen and settled down to work.
A few hours and one essay later, it was 23:00. The application was due at midnight. My friend Dylan came over to see how I was doing and was appalled at my status update. “I’m not leaving this room until you’re finished,” he said. “And I don’t want to miss the whole party.”
I buckled down to write faster and started churning out 10-minute essays. Dylan proofread my work for spelling mistakes and excised unfinished sentences. Luckily, it turns out it was due at Alaskan midnight, so I had an extra hour, and I submitted with 47 seconds to spare. I promptly forgot about the fellowship, and about the party, and collapsed into bed.
SPRING 2014
Over the next few months, I learned how to be okay with uncertainty about my future.
As much as I loved the little Atherton community, I didn’t want to impose. I moved out to manage a hacker house for a month, in exchange for free rent. Then I moved again to another wonderful group house, full of nonprofit folk and scientists.
I started diving into deep learning, and tested some of my ideas on standard datasets. Sometimes I’d lose the day to cowering in bed, alternating between sleeping and fretting, under the weight of imposter syndrome. But then I spent two weeks intensely focused on building a blogging system in Haskell and often forgot to take breaks to eat. I joined a feminist hackerspace (Double Union) and led a small workshop on GPG encryption. I took long, contemplative walks in Glen Canyon Park. I received my college admissions notifications.
But I still hadn’t figured out how to sustainably support myself. I tried not to think about it too much, but the anxiety would gnaw at me in bed and in the shower. I started to wonder if I’d ever have a Plan.
One time a housemate took me flying. She was preparing for her commerical license exam and sometimes brought friends to sit in the co-pilot seat. Halfway through, she informed me, “You have the controls.”
“I have the controls???”
A three-part verbal check: “You have the controls.”
All of a sudden, the little metal box in the sky that prevented the humans in it from plunging to death was controlled by someone who had never even driven a car before.
It was terrifyingly empowering.
With no sense of how vehicles move in response to controls, I accidentally overcorrected for every whim of the wind. But I got the hang of it. As we neared San Francisco, coming in from the north, I did two laps at a 35° turn around Angel Island. Passing over the city, my friend took the controls again, and I thought about how none of the ant people in their tiny pastel houses could see me, and how everything that mattered to them was reduced to no more than a few specks of color from here.
APRIL 23, 2013
The late afternoon sun teased me, boring through my black shirt, as I lay on the dry, dying grass. It was the week before college decisions were due, and I still didn’t know how to get financial aid.
I called my friend Kevin (who does interviews for MIT), asking if he had any last ideas. “Stay cool,” he advised. “This is important, but what’s more important is the direction you’re headed in.”
I sobbed into the phone, spilling my fears — that I’d be stumped by the system, that I’d be stuck, that I’d be a failure, that maybe I was already a failure — no longer clutching onto any remnants of grace or calm.
“Look,” he pressed on. “Keep in mind the bigger picture: you’re going to do great things. And you never know what’s right around the bend.”
That night, I went out for burritos with a couple friends. I didn’t order anything (as usual), but it was a fun night regardless. We stayed out late in the playground at Dolores Park, talking about Haskell and coalgebraic programs.
The next morning, I got a pivotal Skype call. “Would you like to be a Thiel Fellow?” Danielle Strachman asked me.
Throughout all the months of follow-up applications and interviews, I had never taken seriously the possibility that I would actually receive a fellowship. I was so busy smiling and laughing that I couldn’t respond at first. When I did, I could only babble: “Wow. Wow! Thank you so much. Wow. I can’t believe — wow. Thank you! Wow. Wow. Wow.”
My first coherent thought was “I don’t have to miss out on burritos again!”
And then, “I don’t have to go hungry at all again! I could buy lots of tomatoes! I could buy half a million tomatoes with this money! Or I could buy books! I could buy ten thousand books!”
I figured out a Plan.
I visited the house in Atherton and retrieved my postal mail, including an iPad Mini sent to me as an acceptance letter by a new higher education program called Minerva.
We made a fire tornado. Then I burned all the college spam and acceptance letters (except the iPad).
I enrolled in Minerva.
Aside from its intriguing descriptions and its promise to reform the university experience by bridging online seminars with world travel, I obtained a few merit scholarships that covered all the financial costs, so the only downside was opportunity cost. Despite its newness, it seemed worth trying; I figured there was a good chance that it could actually enable me to learn faster than I could outside of educational institutions. And if it turned out otherwise, I could drop out and take the fellowship.
I spent most of the next month with math and programming people at Masonic, a group house in the Haight. I was dubbed Squirrel for my depth-first approach to learning. There was a competition at one point between some of the residents about who could answer the most of my incessant questions. I felt loved.
SUMMER 2014
These months somehow filled themselves with travel: Montreal, Toronto, Boston, Berkeley, Hawaii.
Yoshua Bengio funded me to visit his deep learning lab in Canada, perhaps the biggest university lab worldwide in that field. I was initially quite hesitant to talk to the researchers because I felt really intimidated — these people exist as authors of papers I can read, not as people who would want to talk with me! — but I pretended I wasn’t shy. Going from room to room to talk with everyone, it was interesting to meet the real people, the faces and voices and quirks, behind the names I had seen on those exciting papers.
I spent July at MIT for the Google Computer Science Summer Institute. One weekend, some friends from tEp piled into two cars, arriving an hour later at a barren beach. We couldn’t see the shoreline, so we walked into what should’ve been the ocean.
We reached the point where water splashed at our knees, and the star-filled sky erupted into bursts of green and blue. We watched glowing balls streak all around us, and then we drove off.
The next week, I built a basic little web app to generate Markov chain poems. The semi-random leaps through an author’s works delighted me, and I spent hours clicking the button again and again for more almost-sensical nonsense, voraciously compiling some of the best into an email to my friend Drew.
The wind is gonna blow the race
along that promised cave in a headlong deadlong haste.
Will you have withdrawn your self?His feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings of freedom.
The free bird leaps on the cold marble steps of
America’s white out house in the drop seats of buses.And rain, fall softly. Dew drops
and cool my brow again.
Storm, blow me from here with your fiercest wind.
Let me rest tonight.
When the last week of summer rolled in, I visited Maui with Davidad to meet Garrett Lisi (“the surfing physicist”) at his Pacific Science Institute. While Garrett was intent on introducing me to kitesurfing and stand-up paddleboarding, I also got him to tell me about his E8 theory of everything. I spent the rest of the week on loose ends of odd projects. Then September arrived and it was time to go back to school — for the first time in two years.
FALL 2014
“Welcome! We have been waiting for you for years!” excitedly declared Ben Nelson, Minerva’s CEO.
Orientation began with a private dinner cruise for the “Founding Class” of 30 (now 28) students. As the first time the inaugural class was brought together, there were many glorified proclamations, and the excitement stirred me(though perhaps that was mostly the wind). Passing under the Golden Gate Bridge and around to the Bay Bridge, everyone marveled at the glamour and sparkling lights, but I was already feeling somewhat out of place, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. Feeling introverted, I sat on the ledge of the stairs leading to the bottom deck and swung my feet while writing a poem in the little traveler’s journal Minerva had given each of us.
Unfortunately, the classes turned out to be a disappointment. It had become clear during summer sessions that they were still figuring things out, so I already had a suspicion that the curriculum might not deliver on its promises so soon. For all their talk of “Achieving Extraordinary,” I found the innovations incremental at best. But the students were humble and passionate, the deans knowledgable and devoted to students, and the administrators thoughtful and well-intentioned. I am glad to have tried it, but I feel confident that it was not the right fit for me, at least in its current state. I’m excited to see how Minerva develops as it grows and has more time to mature.
Since leaving school, I’ve been learning how to make programs performant with C and some Intel 64 Assembly, and exploring probability and measure theory. I went to my first hackathon, PennApps. I got an all-expenses-paid diversity scholarship to go to Strange Loop, a wondrous programming conference in St. Louis. At the party, hosted at this old-shoe-factory-turned-museum, I rode a Ferris wheel on the roof and went down a ten-story slide.
Sometimes I have nightmares about being back at my childhood home and being told that my fun is over and now I have to go back to school to take all the tests I missed.
When I first left home, I had to give up on my idea of “home” being a physical location because I didn’t always know where I’d be sleeping the next month (or even day). And the amount of switching between houses I’ve done since has only confirmed for me that “home” is more of an emergent property of the people who live there.
I’m excited to keep few belongings and have no commitment to a fixed location. I convinced Davidad, my partner (in science and in life), to quit his job and come on this journey with me, and I can’t wait to be able to collaborate more. While we have a few starting points and projects, we’re not tied to specific directions, and are free to pivot however seems most productive. I learn best by asking questions, and he learns best by answering them.
Without the flexibility of the Thiel Fellowship, this wouldn’t be feasible for any significant length of time. And I might still be worrying about how to get rent money, or eat.
My plan is unusual, but that alone doesn’t faze me. While I’m still in the learning phase of life, it seems best to make decisions based on what I’ll most regret not doing and follow what seems most interesting at the time. I’ll miss my communities in the Bay Area, but I can stay in touch digitally and hopefully visit occasionally. And this isn’t a permanent decision: if I don’t enjoy a given place, I can move; if a great opportunity comes around or if I find this nomadic lifestyle unfulfilling, I can change it.
DECEMBER 2015
Update: I greatly enjoyed my time in Europe before being lured away to help out a YC startup, and I’ve been back in America (still nomadically) since. I intend to spend this second year of my Thiel Fellowship primarily in the Bay Area, but as usual, who knows where life will take me. Feel free to get in touch if you want to hear stories.
