A Letter to My College Self (And Other Students in Tech)
When you were young, a lot of your goals were set for you. You were told to get straight A’s, excel in your extracurriculars, and get accepted into a prestigious college. Once you did that, you were instructed to choose a successful major, pad your resume with internships, and secure a high-paying job. As you have grown older, you have started to take greater ownership over what exactly these goals are and how you achieve them. But I’m here to tell you that there is an even more fulfilling way to live.
The truth is, most of your decisions have still been driven by a system centered around the social construct known as “success.” But once you’ve graduated college, secured that job, and started working for a few months, you will find yourself in a position where you suddenly have everything you’ve ever wanted. Your parents finally told you that they’re proud of you. Not only do you have disposable income from your new salary, but now you don’t even pay for most of your meals. Your biggest decisions are whether you’re taking Uber or Lyft to which activity with which group of friends, now that your nights and weekends are no longer filled with all-nighters.
But this contentment with where you are will freeze you. The goals that you used to set for yourself, like founding a start-up and saving the world, will no longer seem to matter.
Why expend energy when you’re already content with where you are? What is success, if not this? Why does success even matter? Wait, why does doing anything in life even matter? And suddenly, being faced with a string of superficial decisions has made you question if your life is even meaningful.
That’s when you’ll realize that being content is not the same as being happy. Instead, happiness is derived from something deeper — from when your decisions are in alignment with your inner self. For your entire life, you were so preoccupied with playing life as a game with points and structured levels that you never stepped back and realized the absurdity of this way of living.
This realization will begin to spiral you into an existential crisis. But as long as you see a chasm between who you are and the constantly shifting image of who you want to be, there is still tremendous meaning in living. Instead of asking yourself “What’s the best way to achieve what I think my goals should be?”, you’re simply asking yourself “How do I actually want to live my life?” If you do this, everything you do will be meaningful. The question “Is life meaningful?” becomes irrelevant.
I believe that this way of thinking explains why student organizations like Blueprint have been so successful. The seemingly impossible feat of students dedicating the tremendous amount of time needed to build standalone applications for nonprofits becomes possible with the right people. When you choose people that deeply care about doing good, even amidst the mess of studying, hacking, and prepping for interviews, motivation to still find time for altruism becomes second nature. And that is immensely powerful — to lead a group of people to find alignment with their inner self, all through working toward one common goal of doing good.
The problem is that when the structure of a student organization is replaced with the comfort of a stable job, you can no longer rely on others to find this alignment. This is why so many graduates go through a misalignment without even realizing it. However, I believe that succeeding and being happy after college is as simple as being in tune with who you are and aligning your actions with who you want be.
At the end of the day, the mid-twenties existential crisis is mostly a phenomena of the tech industry. So many people spend it as robots controlled by external forces that they don’t realize how tremendous of a privilege it is to not live day-to-day, and actually have the time to self-reflect on what they find meaningful. Forget wealth, status, and achievements — the true privilege is the autonomy to align yourself with a life worth living.
Michelle Chow studied Computer Science at UC Berkeley and was actively involved in Blueprint during her time at Cal. She is now a software engineer working in San Francisco.
