I once started going down the Investment Banking route. The summer before my senior year of college, I worked on Wall Street. Despite proudly proclaiming that I’d never work at an Investment Bank, the forces pushing me in that direction were too strong for a directionless college student to resist.

When I accepted the offer for the internship, I remember telling myself, “I’ll just do it for two years, and then I can go and do whatever I want.“

I’m very open about the reasons I didn’t like working at an investment bank. Most reasons are to be expected—I didn’t like formatting excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides for 14 hours a day, I didn’t like being a small cog in a big machine, and I wanted to build things—not just facilitate things.

However, there’s one thing I rarely mention to people when I explain my past—fear I had forgotten about it until reading Andrew Yang’s new book, “Smart People Should Build Things”.

Andrew writes:

“Spending your twenties traveling four days a week, interviewing employees, and writing detailed reports on how to cut costs will change you, as will spending years editing contracts and arguing about events that will never come to pass, or years producing Excel spreadsheets and moving deals along. After a while, regardless of your initial motivations, your lifestyle and personality will change to fit your role. You will become a better dispenser of well-presented recommendations, or editor of contracts, or generator of financial projections. And you will in all likelihood become less good at other things. You will not be the same person you were when you started.”

This was my biggest fear. Throughout the internship, managing directors would come and talk to the interns in my group. They’d share what their current responsibilities were, and talk about their long tenures within the bank and how they climbed their way to their high-ranking positions.

The scary part? Each person that spoke to us echoed the same phrase—“I thought I was only going to do this for two years, but here I am.” Hearing this very familiar phrase that I’d said myself to rationalize my future career path shook me. While I didn’t enjoy working at an investment bank at the time, I feared that maybe I would start to like it. Maybe I would get used to the money. Maybe I would get really good at pricing deals. Maybe, after working for two years, my values would change and I would stay. And maybe, 20 years later, I’d be back in that same room, giving that same speech about how I thought I was just going to be there for 2 years.

When I tell people about my path that included a brief stint as an investment banker, I conveniently forget to mention one detail, which I’m now realizing is the most important part of the story—I was not extended an offer to come back.

With about two weeks left in the internship, I had a meeting with one of my supervisors, discussing my performance thus far and the possibility of receiving and offer.. I went into the meeting thinking it would be a normal meeting about my performance, and afterward I would just go back to work, and everything would just continue as usual. That was not the case.

During the meeting, my supervisor started explaining that he wasn’t seeing the same level of commitment and passion about investment banking from me that he was seeing from my peers. As he was saying this, all at once I realized that I was not faking it good enough, and that I didn’t wanted to fake it anymore—I blurted out, “Have you heard of Venture for America?”

There was no turning back. As the conversation continued, I explained to my supervisor what Venture for America was, and I thought it was really cool. I told him about my aspirations as an entrepreneur, and that I wanted to either start my own business or join VFA.

That was it. I had taken off my mask that I’d been wearing for 6 weeks and pushed the big red button. No chance receiving an offer. No future as an investment banker. The previous 6 90-hour workweeks down the drain.

Two weeks later, I had my final exit interview. This is where full-time offers were extended, and most interns anxiously wondered how it would go. Here is how my predictable exit interview began.

Supervisor: “So, Venture for America?”

Me: “Yep.”

When I walked out of the building, I was both relieved and scared.I was relieved that it was the last time that I’d ever be called an “investment banker.” I was scared because it hit me that I’d just taken a huge leap of faith.

For the next two weeks, there was no offer letter to mull over. Despite being so sure that I didn’t want to work at an investment bank, if I had an offer letter with big numbers and amazing benefits sitting there on the kitchen table every time I sat down to eat, I’m not sure I would have been able to resist.

Fortunately, I’d already pressed the big red button, and I had limited my post-graduate options to paths that were much more consistent with my values and aspirations.

Now it’s been over a year since I accepted an offer to become a Venture for America Fellow. The funny thing is, Andrew’s point still holds. I am not the same person I was over a year ago, and that’s a good thing.

By joining VFA, I surrounded myself with people who inspire me, and I began pursing a mission that speaks to me. As a result, certain characteristics about myself have risen to the surface. These characteristics are some of the most fundamental elements of who I am, but they had been buried by the same forces that had pushed me into investment banking.

Thinking about my path over the course of the past few years has taught me an extremely valuable lesson: When you align yourself with an organization whose core values are the same as yours, each sip of kool-aid makes the person in the mirror look more and more familiar.

I now have a better understanding of who I am, and I like myself a lot more now. I don’t have to filter my thoughts or hide my values. I know that in a year, in 5 years, and even in 10 years, I will continue to change, and I will be an even more different person than I am today. But now, instead of being scared of who that person becomes, I’m excited.