2016 Annual Review: A Year of Magical Thinking
This has been the 3rd time that I do this, so I sat down to read 2014 In Review and 2015 In Review before starting this off. I couldn’t help but felt quite accomplished when looking at the goals that I set for 2016. Usually I will answer the 3 questions — what went well, what didn’t go well, and what am I working toward. However, this time I decided to go straight into the things that have made my 2016.
Semester Abroad @ Copenhagen
This experience tops my highlight of the year. 4 months in Copenhagen truly opened my perspective and made me a more worldly/global citizen.
Academics I took a Game Development class while abroad, which exposed me to new aspect of programming that I haven’t contemplated before. I worked with a program called Unity, a cross platform for programmers to make games. Throughout the semester, I learned a lot of different phases that go into the game development process, such as 2D/3D graphics, level design, attributes, physics etc. I worked in a team of 5 for a final project that results into a 2D adventure game, which can be found here.
In addition to that, I took classes on Artificial Intelligence, Sustainable Design, and Design Thinking. All of them lend knowledge that enrich my learning scope in significant ways.
Cultural Integration I stayed in a living and learning community with 21 other American students, all interested in entrepreneurship. I had a magnificent time living, hanging and going out with them. To integrate to the local culture, I volunteered in a student-run coffee house, met a bunch of cool international and Danish college-aged peers, and most importantly, learned to brew coffee. Besides, I had a Danish host family that I visited a few times throughout the semester, ate traditional meals with them and delved into good conversations.
Travel I hit it off the park with this one. I did a pretty extensive array of travel throughout Europe over the course of my study abroad program. In total, I have been to 11 countries excluding Denmark: Germany (Berlin, Frankfurt), Spain (Barcelona, Madrid), Italy (Venice, Florence, Rome, Milan), Czech Republic (Prague), Austria (Vienna), Hungary (Budapest), Sweden (Stockholm, Malmo), Norway (Oslo), Netherlands (Amsterdam), France (Paris), and Portugal (Lisbon). Each place is unique in its own way, and I felt truly blessed to have experienced the magical feeling of seeing a famed attractions multiple times.
I took a lot of pictures and videos throughout my travels. The vlogging project turned out well — I made a total of 37 videos that encapsulated all the memories abroad. It’s good now to watch them again and relive those good times.
Summer @ San Francisco
I spent 3 months over the summer in San Francisco, the tech and innovation hub of the world. The experience has been well worth it:
· I got a product internship with an early stage nonprofit startup called New Story that fundraises money to build houses for communities in 3rd world nations. I learned the ins and outs of how a startup operates, and built good skills such as user research and data analysis via assigned projects.
· I went to a whole lot of meetups in the city, ranging in a wide variety of topics — software development, user experience design, artificial intelligence, mobile app business etc. I soaked up the tech culture and widened professional network through these events.
· I had a chance to explore sunny North Cal weather, SF’s beautiful public spaces, coffee shops, nightlife, concerts, food places. I stayed in a co-living/co-working space throughout the summer and met awesome people from all over the world coming to SF for internships, jobs, startup funding.
Senior Year @ Denison
The first semester of my last year in college has been phenomenal. Living in an apartment and with great roommates is awesome. I was stoked to catch up with friends after 8 months away from campus. College wasn’t just about class. These 3 activities I did outside of class keep my engagement with school high:
1 — Beta Theta Pi: A family away from home for me. I met the new members who pledged when I was abroad, and they are all super dope. Joining a fraternity was probably the best decision I made towards personal growth in college. I would miss this experience a lot after graduation.
2 — Denison Enterprises: A super cool student-run ventures group for those who are interested in business and entrepreneurship. I joined earlier in the semester and devoted a big chunk of my time on this group. The people are great, the projects are interesting, and the learning curve is tremendous. I am working on a mobile app that does food delivery to campus with other talented individuals, so I am exciting to see the outcomes in the spring.
3 — Career Center Advisory Board: A low-time commitment I picked up at the beginning of the term. It is a group of 5–7 students who recommend ideas and execute projects to spread awareness about the career office at Denison. We plan to make a PR video for the office and organize a career fair for upperclassmen next term.
Writing
I wrote quite a few over the summer, 12 posts to be exact. One of them, “The 10 Algorithms Machine Learning Engineers Need to Know”, became a hit on Medium! As of now, it has more than 800 recommends and gains me more than 600 new followers on the site. People even reached out to me asking for permission to repost it on their publications.
Besides, I took 2 upper-level Communication classes this past semester and turned in 2 lengthy research papers, which I am quite proud of.
Reading
With a lot of travel and work this year, I didn’t read as much compared to the previous year. I only read 10 books this year, but they are all super useful and enjoyable:
· Founders At Work — Jessica Livingston: I was really excited to get a hold of this book, as the author is the founder of the renowned Y-Combinator, the most popular tech incubator in the world. The book recounts the early struggles for independence and acceptance of many of modern technology’s giants through personal interviews. I found these stories to be super interesting, because they’re about the early stages, when the founders were young and inexperienced.
· The Innovator’s Dilemma — Clayton Christensen: An innovation classic, this book explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. I found it very hard to read, but nonetheless useful because it gives a set of rules for capitalizing on phenomenon of disruptive innovation.
· The Art of the Start — Guy Kawasaki: Very easy book to read — Past Apple’s chief evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, shows how to start a business the right way.
· Naked Statistics — Charles Wheelan: A brilliant book about statistics, a subject of my interest for a long time. Wheelan strips away the arcane and technical details and focuses on the underlying intuition that drives statistical analysis.
· The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman: A design classic, this book shows that good, usable design is possible. I recommend all aspiring designers to read this to get a good intuition about good vs bad design.
· Joel on Software — Joel Spolsky: A really good book that covers every conceivable aspect of software programming. All programmers will surely relate to Joel’s musings.
· Never Eat Alone — Keith Ferrazzi: I actually wrote a whole post about the lessons that I learn from Keith’s book. It’s a great book on the topic of Networking 101.
· Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love — Marty Cagan: I found this one to be the most useful as it is all about Product Management, the field I want to go into.
· So Good They Can’t Ignore You — Cal Newport: I finished this book in less than 7 hours on my waiting time on my flight back home a couple days ago. It changed the way I think about crafting a remarkable career.
· Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman: This book takes readers on a tour of the mind and explains the 2 systems that drive the way we think.
Online Learning
I took 6 online courses this year: Intro to Machine Learning, Algorithm Design & Analysis, Managing Big Data with MySQL, Exploratory Data Analysis with R, Data Visualization with D3, and Data Wrangling with MongoDB. I am very interested in a career in Data Science for the long run, and these courses significantly improved my knowledge on the topic.
Onto 2017
I decide to make 2017 entirely focused on the future. That means I’ll practice a forward-looking, goal-setting mindset for most of the time. The priority is getting a job after college, which I am in a crazy midst during this winter break. Another one is to finish my last semester strong, making a lot of memories and maintaining close friendships with the amazing people I met in school. Last but not least, I am more serious about relationship and go in casual dates, so let’s see how that works out.
There’s more I could say about each of these things, and many other things I could say. But since I’m 95% focused on looking forward, I’m going to stick with that.
Yours in the future,
James Le
