2015, Highs and Lows

This year has been inspiring, exhausting, frustrating, energizing. I’ve grown closer to my best friends, and developed a stronger sense of what I want to do with my life. Some of the good and the bad times:

• Visiting New York with Grant Timmerman, Karan Goel, Skyler Kidd, and Mahir Kothary for HackCon. We spent a sleep-deprived weekend exploring the city, meeting other hackathan organizers, and learning how to make DubHacks better
• Waiting for months in host matching for my Google internship, and worrying I would be on a project that wasn’t a good fit with my interests. Finally reaching out to friends for help finding a team
• Spending 12+ hours a day, for several weeks, working on the class project for operating systems, and realizing that this is what I want to do with my life
• Starting to date my best friend

• First time cooking a burger, jet skiing, and trying to light a fire with napkins
• Fearing that that job hunting would be fruitless, and over-compensating by embarking on a marathon of interviews (I talk about what I learned in “Lessons from 49 interviews at 21 companies”)
• Coping with rejection from my top-choice company after flying out to London for onsite interviews. On the upside, visited London for the first time
• Hosting the second DubHacks at the University of Washington. More attendees, more buildings, more sponsors, more food trucks, more craziness, more fun than the year before.

• Attending to Grace Hopper for the first time, and dancing with one of my best friends after we both received offers
• Working on and presenting a research project at OurCS, a weekend-long research conference hosted by Carnegie Mellon
• Overcoming my fears that by accepting an offer at some company, I’ll miss out on opportunities and hamstring my career. Finally deciding to commit and work past my worries.

Some goals for 2016

• Graduating from the University of Washington with honors
• Reading a research paper a week
• Setting aside time to spend with the people I care about most
• Taking my health seriously, instead of only when its convenient. Specifically, managing my time so work does not infringe upon exercising, sleeping, and grocery shopping
• Building connections with people at my office and in the city, before I relocate and start working there