Schurr High School Alumni Speaker Speech
Hi everyone! Let me start off by saying it really is an honor to be back here at Schurr. It feels surreal to be back because I was in your shoes 6 years ago, and it only seemed like yesterday when I was sitting in those bleachers! I hope all of you can look back at your time in high school with great fondness for the wonderful friends and teachers supporting you in your future endeavours.
I’m going to be completely honest with you and say that I don’t remember much from the NHS speakers during my time at Schurr, so I’m totally cool with it if all of you forget everything I say. I’ll try to make it memorable, and the key takeaway I want to share is that the most valuable resource we have is time. Not money, not status or prestige. Time. Time is composed of three elements: 1) the past, 2) the present, and 3) the future. Our time on Earth is limited, so it is important that we make the most of what we have been given to pursue what we truly love.
I’ll share a bit about my past here at Schurr. I was an overly ambitious kid who thought he had his entire life planned out. 1) Graduate from high school -> 2) Study computer science -> 3) Become the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and change the world. Sounds simple enough right? Not quite. I learned early on that there will inevitably be struggles along the way no matter what you want to pursue, and it is from these struggles that we push ourselves to our limits and unlock the enormous potential that each of us has individually and collectively.
A daily struggle that we all can relate to is time management. I’m sure you all have homework due tomorrow and tests later this week on top of all the other extracurriculars you want to pursue. It is a difficult challenge balancing all of these things, and I want you to know that you’re not alone. This is a universal problem that we all share, and there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for it. Each of us handles stress and prioritizes things differently, but the one trait that everyone needs to reach his or her personal best is perseverance.
Looking back, I can’t help but remember the countless homework assignments I had to complete or the thousands of serves I had to hit during tennis practice. At that time, I questioned what was the purpose of all this repetition. Did my teachers and coaches want to torture me? Nope. The important lesson they taught me is that there are no shortcuts in life. It was hard to memorize all those vocabulary words, solve those polynomial equations, and improve my tennis game, but there’s no substitute to hard work if you want to be the best you can be. Focusing on the fundamentals really did help instill the self-belief that I could achieve my personal best in school or in tennis matches.
This brings me to my next point about striving to be your personal best. The great John Wooden once said “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” Everyone here has the ability to do truly incredible things, and naturally, there will be some rivalry and jealousy that comes with that. I want you all to think of your peers not as your rivals but as friends on the common journey of self-fulfillment.
From my personal experience, it did hurt to get rejected by Stanford and the Ivy League schools during my senior year of high school. Those were my dream schools, and the fact that I gave my best and it still wasn’t enough was devastating. When I was at UCLA, I applied to hundreds of companies during my senior year including my dream company Google and received rejection emails from 99% of them. It was painful to be constantly rejected when I put in so much effort studying for the interviews that I began to doubt myself when all my friends were getting job offers left and right from places like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon.
In hindsight, getting rejected by all these schools and companies was a blessing in disguise because attending UCLA and working at Apple were some of the best experiences of my life. Both places opened my eyes to new perspectives I might never have considered otherwise, but let me first start with some of the scarier experiences when I felt extremely vulnerable.
At UCLA, I had a lot of self-doubt during my freshman year. I came in with zero programming background, while some of my peers had been programming since elementary school. In high school, I was able to pick up most concepts on my own, but college was much more challenging and I failed a Computer Science class because I was afraid to ask questions or clarify things even though I didn’t fully understand the material. It made me question whether I wanted to keep pursuing Computer Science, but I decided to give it another go. I have always been self-conscious, but I learned to stop caring so much about what other people thought about me and focused on using all the resources available to help me improve. I retook the class and attended office hours and tutoring sessions, and it proved to be valuable when I got an A the second time around. This also helped me befriend many of my peers and professors, who have served as valuable mentors as I progressed through college and in my career. I can’t stress how important networking is. More often than not, it is who you know rather than what you know when getting your foot in the door, so don’t be afraid to reach out to your peers and professors to establish that connection.
At Apple, my manager warned me that I was underperforming because I had missed an important project deadline. My team worked on Apple Watch Podcasts, and I was responsible for reporting the stability of the download feature. I had made a few bad assumptions and failed to clarify some requirements, which set back the project’s completion date several weeks. While this situation could have been avoided if I communicated with my teammates better, sometimes one learns more from failure than from success. After this incident, I began reaching out to my teammates more often to understand the bigger picture and regularly scheduled 1:1 meetings with my manager to communicate any difficulties I was encountering.
On a more positive note, I did overcome my fear of trying new things while at UCLA and Apple. During my time at UCLA, I joined a beginner’s dance group focused on contemporary dance, and at Apple, I joined their A Cappella group and learned more about music theory and how the voice works as an instrument. This is something I would never have considered while at Schurr, but I am so glad I did because it made me appreciate artists and performers so much more nowadays. Even though I made a fool of myself numerous times for both activities, I learned not to fear failure and made a lot of great friends I wouldn’t have met otherwise.
Computer Science and software engineering continue to be extremely challenging for me, but what motivated me to keep going was the ability to create products that my friends could use. I became passionate about mobile app development and released 3 apps to the iOS App Store and 2 apps to the Google Play Store while at UCLA. I haven’t forgotten about my dreams of becoming an entrepreneur, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and leave Apple to join a startup called Zoox that develops self-driving cars. It was a scary prospect to leave a stable job at one of the largest companies in the world, but I followed my heart and feel that it was the right decision for me.
Zoox’s mission to lower the number of traffic fatalities really resonates with me because one of my teachers Alan Lee from Macy was killed in a car accident last month, and I want to help prevent incidents like this from happening in the future. As I mentioned earlier, our time is finite, and Mr. Lee’s death makes me appreciate life a lot more because it can be taken away too soon. I didn’t intend to make the mood so sentimental this morning, but my wish to all of you is to pursue what you truly love. As cliche as it may sound, it is your life to live. Not your parents’. Not your friends’. Yours. Whether you want to win a national championship, produce a hit album or film, or inspire others, the most important thing in life is to be happy. Life can be tragically short or fortunately long, but it is a life worth living.
Sitting in the bleachers 6 years ago, I thought I knew what my purpose in life was. Today, I realize I do not have my life entirely figured out, but the sum of all my experiences helps paint a clearer picture of what impact I want to have, and I am excited to see what the future has in store for all of us.
Thank you.
