NYC Science & Engineering Fair Keynote

I am going to discuss fortune & fortitude, happenstance & hardship, privilege & persistence. I am going to touch on 2 subjects dear to my heart: immigration & education. And I am going to do this without quoting a single statistic or showing you any charts. Instead I will draw on material from the one subject about which I am the undoubtedly the world’s leading expert: the story of my own life. I aim to entertain, enlighten & embolden but I’ll settle for 2 out of 3. The only thing I can promise is that I won’t subject you to any more gratuitous alliteration.

I am a first, second and third generation immigrant; not only I but both my parents and all 4 of my grandparents left the countries in which we were born to live in different ones. In fact, I’ve actually migrated twice — Donald Trump is probably not my biggest fan!

I was born to an upper-middle class family. All 4 of my grandparents were born in Karnataka, India. My maternal grandmother had a college degree, could speak 5 languages and read 4. My grandfather, on the other hand, ran off to sea before he was a teenager and never finished school or spoke to his parents again. My other pair of grandparents passed away within a year of each other, shortly before I was born. But all 4 of them moved from India to Karachi, Pakistan for work a few years after those 2 countries had been created.

My father was born in India but his family moved to Karachi when he was a toddler. My mother was born in Karachi, as was I. By then both my parents had graduated from college and my dad was well into his career as a marine mechanical engineer. When I was 3 years old I pleaded with him to stop going off to sea. After I turned down his attempts to bribe me with a regular supply of foreign toys, he quit sailing and started his own engineering firm. I’m pretty sure that was the first time I unilaterally won a negotiation, although my bargaining position may have had a modicum of help from the imminent arrival of my baby sister.

Before I continue, let me tell you a little about the country in which I grew up. Pakistan is the 6th largest country in the world by population but it remains an economic backwater due to a history of terrible governance and political unrest. The public school system is abysmal, the government is rife with corruption and until I was around 8 years old it was run by a military dictatorship. Not exactly a place I suggest visiting on your next vacation.

Although Pakistan is not an English-speaking country, I grew up speaking English because that’s what the British empire taught my grandparents. My parents taught me to read before I was 3 years old and my dad exposed me to computers before I could use a pencil. Those 3 advantages ended up mattering a lot.

Around the time I began elementary school, my father imparted a valuable lesson to me. He wanted to upgrade his computer but virtually nobody in Karachi wanted to buy an old computer at that time. He realized that what he needed to offer was a solution to a problem instead of a toy. He happened to know a chicken farmer who was having trouble figuring out how much of what ingredient to feed his chickens at what time. So my dad wrote an app for that and sold the whole shebang to the farmer as an integrated solution!

Despite having taught me to read very early and encouraging me to do so initially, my parents later began worrying that my eyes would go bad from reading too much and tried to limit how much time I spent reading. Of course, being the rebellious little hell-raiser that I was, this only served to make me read even more! Pro-tip to parents: reverse psychology works wonders.

Things were pretty good for several years. My father used to take me with him when he occasionally visited client sites on the weekend so I could see what he did for a living, which mostly involved repairing complex industrial machinery. It was always fascinating for me, since the staff would let me wander around exploring all sorts of interesting factory equipment.

One day when I was 9 years old dad took me to a scrap metal recycling plant. He was supervising the installation of a new generator for the hydraulic press that compacted old car frames. The structure was dozens of feet high with a footprint to match and situated in one corner of the scrapyard. I spent the day exploring the metal scrap scattered around this yard.

As dusk began to fall, I was on the far end of the yard from the generator when I saw the entire structure light up in a blaze of fire for a couple of seconds before dying back down. Wondering what had just happened, I sprinted across the yard towards the generator, only to be stopped by one of the dozens of technicians standing beside it. Lying in the dust was the charred body of a man. He spoke out to me and I realized it was my father. That was the last time I ever saw him.

I later found out that the technician responsible for fueling the generator had used the wrong fuel, which caused it to catch fire when they turned it on. My dad had instantly realized what was happening and powered it off before the entire contraption exploded, severely burning himself in the process. Although the factory staff rushed him to the ER as soon as they could, 3rd degree burns covering over 90% of his body meant that the best they could do for him was put him on the strongest painkillers they had. His heart failed 2 days later.

Despite owning our home and receiving a decent sum from his life-insurance policy, our quality of life took a massive hit. The emotional fallout was even worse than the financial one. My mother struggled mightily to keep it together but a severe lack of social support put her through the wringer. Our lives would almost certainly have fallen apart entirely had my maternal grandparents not stepped in to help out.

After school each day my siblings and I used to spend the afternoon at our grandparents’ home. They fed us a delicious spread of home-cooked dishes for lunch and then we did our homework before playing games with each other. In the evening our mother came over for dinner and then took us home.

A few years later, after taking an introductory programming class in middle-school, I found myself endlessly fascinated by computers and the uses to which they could be put. The ability to precisely control what was displayed on a screen using words felt like magic to me. Because we no longer had a computer at home, I took to writing code on a whiteboard in the afternoons after school so that I could devise programs to try during our weekly programming class. Many years later this proved helpful during job interviews!

A few more years later, my mom — with a great deal of help from her parents — managed to convince the Canadian government that they should allow her to migrate to Canada with 3 kids in tow, primarily on the strength of her experience as an executive secretary. That allowed us to escape from a bleak future to a one with far more opportunities.

Finding an apartment to live in would have been untenable for us if not for the generosity of my mom’s childhood neighbour, who leased it for us in his name and had it furnished for us before we even arrived! He even got us a phone line in his name, which confused telemarketers for years to come!

Despite having produced Justin Bieber, Canada does a pretty damn fine job of incorporating new immigrants into the systems that define life in a wealthy industrialized nation. Although my mom continued to struggle financially and our household income never exceeded the poverty line, we had no trouble excelling in Ontario’s publicly funded school system. While she had to frequently dip into her limited savings to make ends meet, we qualified for free bus tickets to travel to and from school every day and all our healthcare needs were paid for by the publicly funded system. Well, I did go 8 years without visiting a dentist because that wasn’t covered. Fortunately, I still have all my teeth.

By the time we moved to Canada I had already come to enjoy computer programming so when I realized that my high school offered a class on it, I signed up for it right away. Although most of the other students in that class found it marginally interesting but very difficult, it made me look forward to school each day. The teacher was an immigrant from China with a masters degree in computer science and his enthusiasm for both programming and teaching changed my life as he encouraged me to pursue far more advanced projects than everybody else in the class.

Meanwhile, my uncle had been living in Canada for many years already so he came by to visit us when we arrived and gave us an old computer. Although already ancient at the time, this computer was functional enough to let me work on programming projects at home and then demo them to classmates in school later.

Because it was so much slower than the computers in school I was forced to write extremely efficient code. An amusing side-effect of this discrepancy was that games I wrote at home ended up being unplayably fast at school so I had to add artificial delays to the code!

After we were settled in Canada, my grandparents came to visit us. When my grandfather saw how slow our computer was, he sprung to buy us a brand new one. I kept that computer in service for quite a few years by upgrading one component at a time as I could afford to.

Instead of buying a computer from a store like most people do, we ended up buying it from my friend’s uncle, who built them as a side-business. While most people were terrified of opening up their computers, he showed me how to disassemble and reassemble one. Every time I upgraded a component, I would try to install it myself. Sometimes, the computer would no longer power on afterward! When that happened, he came by and showed me what I’d done wrong and how to fix it. That freedom to experiment let me learn a lot about computer hardware.

The same guy, realizing that I my ineptitude with hardware did not extend to software, asked me to teach his 8 year old son how to create web pages in HTML. He was so pleased with how much I taught his son that he later got me a contract building websites for a couple of his friends who ran small businesses!

I also spent a lot of time reading every computer-related magazine I could find at the local library. At first we didn’t even have Internet access at home so I would scribble URLs from magazine articles in a notebook that I took to the library with me so I could investigate them! Later on we had dial-up Internet access at home so I only had to wait for the phone to be free. Many of you might be too young to remember dial-up but I definitely do not miss it one bit!

Although the guidance counselors at my high school had low expectations, I was phenomenally lucky when it came time to pick a college and major: a classmate casually suggested that my love of programming could translate into a career. After overcoming my initial disbelief at the existence of a college major that perfectly matched my hobby, I decided to do some more research.

After visiting a university fair and picking up several brochures, I discovered that the University of Waterloo offered a program that would let me mostly pay my way through college by alternating a paid internship with academic semesters! Despite adding an extra year to the time I’d have to spend in college and depriving me of summer vacations for 4 years, this was very exciting because there was no way I could have afforded to pay for college at virtually any other place. So I only applied to one program at one university!

Getting into the excellent CS co-op program at Waterloo is one of the few things for which I can mostly claim credit: I did work pretty hard for several months to clinch that one, with no unfair advantages over most of the other people in my graduating class. My secret lay in realizing that, although I needed to take certain classes to qualify for the program, acceptance was almost entirely based on the grades in the 4 classes I’d take in the first semester of my senior year in highschool.

In a move that I am still quite proud of, I engineered my schedule to take the 4 classes in which I was most likely to excel all during that semester. The logistical hack paid off: I managed to score an almost ludicrously high GPA that semester, pretty much guaranteeing me a spot in the program. Although my grades slipped a nontrivial amount the next semester when I took the significantly harder required classes, I managed to stay above the cutoff for not having my acceptance revoked.

Having made it into the program I wanted, I still needed to pay for the first year’s tuition, rent, food and books. Again, my mom managed to give me a few thousand bucks from what was left of her savings and I managed to get an interest-free student loan of several grand for the remainder. That was enough to pay for heavily subsidized tuition at an excellent public university plus rent and food.

While I’d had an easy time of math in high-school, at Waterloo I found myself in a much bigger pond being held to the standards of fish whose mathematical abilities dwarfed mine. It took me no less than 3 attempts to pass the required Calculus II class, where I learned absolutely nothing I’ve ever needed to use in real life. I would have given up after the 2nd attempt if not for a great deal of help from friends who took time out from their lives to help me with the material. When I struggled with a class on digital hardware, I once again found myself indebted to help generously provided by yet another friend.

As I mentioned earlier, the primary draw for me at Waterloo had been the world-leading co-op program, which offered students the opportunity to alternate semesters of classroom learning with 5 or 6 paid internships. But this meant having to move every 4 months for almost 5 years; during most of these moves I again relied on the generous help of my friends, who helped me cart all my stuff around several times.

As annoying as the constant moving was, I can’t recommend internships highly enough! They allowed me to graduate with very little debt and a solid 2 years of industry experience. Despite not having a particularly high GPA in college, the diverse array of work experience I had on my resume meant I was able to find a job at a great tech company in Silicon Valley before I’d even graduated!

I hadn’t even been looking for work because I was actually planning to go to grad school but I’d created a resume for myself when I was applying for internships and I happened to post it on my personal website. A recruiter found it via a Google search and sent me an email asking if I was interested in working for a software company called VMware.

I had been pretty set on grad school but after they flew me to California to meet the team, I decided that this was probably a better opportunity than I was originally hoping to get after grad school so it didn’t make much sense not to take it. When life gives you lemonade, drink it!

Compared to the years I spent getting my undergraduate degree, the decade since then has been much easier: I have mostly spent my days doing what I love with brilliant and highly motivated people and been compensated very well for it. While I certainly wasn’t handed this life on a silver platter, I’ve tried here to illustrate how my own efforts were vastly aided by help from family, friends, teachers, colleagues and the Canadian taxpayers.

I strive, therefore, to pay this debt forward as much as I can: In addition to financially supporting several projects that try to improve the lives of people less fortunate than myself, I also spend a considerable amount of time and effort teaching and mentoring anybody who thinks they could benefit from such help.

Most recently, I have been mentoring a few promising software developers through the very impressive Access Code program at Coalition for Queens, where they have been learning how to build Android apps. It’s been a very rewarding experience to be able to share with them the lessons I’ve learned about software development in the past decade. In many ways, passing on that knowledge feels like going back in time to advise my younger self!

When people think about poverty or the underprivileged, they often think that’s it’s hard to have a significant impact on people — but from my experience, even a small amount of help can make a big difference. The next time you encounter someone who needs help but you’re not sure if it’s worth the effort, think of me and my story, and imagine the possibilities.