Dropping Out of My Dream School was the Best Decision of My Life
How I got into Berkeley with a 2.5 GPA, built a startup, failed, and found meaning in life.
I remember refreshing the page over and over again — something must’ve been wrong. How did I, a high school student with a 2.5 GPA, get early admission into one of the top universities in the country?
It took me a few weeks to really convince myself that email wasn’t a mistake — I would be spending the next 4 years studying Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley.
My first month at Cal was a dream come true. I did well on my midterms, made lots of new friends, and explored The City with a newfound feeling of optimism. I was exceeding everyone’s expectations, and it felt amazing. But fast forward two years, and the situation couldn’t be more different.
By the time Junior year came around, I’d become frustrated with school, dreading every moment I spent in classes I couldn’t care less about. My grades tanked, I stopped talking to my friends, and before I knew it was being prescribed the maximum legal dosage of antidepressants to rein in my emotions.
Getting into Berkeley as a “C” student
Let me give you some context. As you could probably tell from my GPA, I was never really a star student growing up. Getting decent grades and passing was enough to keep me content.
But halfway through high school, I began to realize that unless I turned things around, I wouldn’t be going to college like all my other friends. Everything my parents had sacrificed for me to get a good education would go to waste.
These fears eventually led me to join my high school’s Academic Decathlon team (yes, the same competition from Spider-Man). I worked harder than I ever did before, pulling 12-hour study marathons nearly every day in the hopes of doing well enough to counter all the academic damage I’d done to myself over the years.
Fortunately, by the end of it all, the work had paid off and I was crowned National Champion. This, along with a 2300 SAT, was enough to convince Berkeley to take me in.
Finding meaning in life when everything sucks
It often feels like the first 18 years of my life were spent with the sole purpose of getting into a good college. At least that’s all my parents would ever talk about. But now that I was here, wasn’t sure what was supposed to come next.
I didn’t particularly enjoy mechanical engineering, but I didn’t necessarily hate it either; it was a classic case of too good to leave, too bad to stay. Deep down, I always knew I wouldn’t be happy continuing down this path I was on.
The longer I kept going through school, the more it felt like I was running at full speed with a blindfold on towards a future I didn’t want.
Everything changed in when my friend Jen and I entered Cal Hacks, Berkeley’s annual hackathon. Originally planning to just go for the free snacks, we looted the entire stadium in 2 hours and quickly got bored. Since the event would go on for 2 days, we decided to try building something.
We chose to tackle a problem I’d been struggling with for a while: scaling up a business I started my freshman year. Many classes required students to purchase remotes called iClickers for in-class quizzes and attendance points, but most people only needed them for one semester. I saw an opportunity here and bought up as many I could, renting them out to other students.
The business was making money, but having to run around delivering clickers was not scalable; I needed to automate the process. The idea was to build a locker full of iClickers people could rent and pay for with their phones.
To be clear, I’d never coded anything in my life. Jen, on the other hand, has taught kids how to code at CalTech and is now working at Twitter. She spent the night showing me everything from prototyping tools to Javascript and for some reason that night, everything just felt so doable.
For the first time in a long time, I was excited to learn.
I woke up the next morning with that same energy, eager to dive deeper into the knowledge I’d just acquired. Now that I’d caught a glimpse of how things could be, I knew I needed to see more.
I immediately decided to drop out of school to work on projects like this, projects that would reignite in me a desire to learn again. It was an abrupt decision — one that would result in many, many arguments with my parents over the next few weeks — but in my mind it was an obvious choice.
After being so frustrated with life and hating myself for so long, this newfound feeling of hope and excitement was like a breath of fresh air, and I was not about to let it pass me by.
From college dropout to startup founder
This is where things really started to become fun.
The next 7 months of my life were spent working on a problem I saw becoming more and more prevalent in the Bay Area: stolen mail.
A postal system built in the 1700s to handle letters and the occasional package couldn’t deal with e-commerce’s meteoric growth, paving the way for porch pirates to roam free. When 3 packages were stolen from me in a single week, I’d decided I’d had enough. I brought together a team of friends to help me solve this problem, and SafeBox Inc. was born.
Without any background in product design, I was forced to learn everything from scratch.
Everything from user interviews to VC pitches to wireframing prototypes was new to me and the process was incredibly difficult. But despite all the pains and failures I faced, I was learning more each week than I’d learned the entire two years I’d been in school.
While Safebox never really took off, those 7 months were the most incredible months of my life. I was thrilled at the possibility of leaving my mark on the world. More importantly, I was happy to finally be completely independent, working towards something I wanted rather than chasing someone else’s dreams.
Moral of the Story: Starting with “Why”
Something about my journey really baffled me for a while.
How is it that I was able to pull off 12-hour study days in high school, yet unable to bring myself to complete homework assignments in college?
How did I convince myself to stay up all night designing features for my app when I couldn’t even show up to group project meetings in class?
Looking back, the answer was clear as day.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
In college, I never found a compelling reason to care about the work I was doing. I studied not because I wanted to acquire the skills to become a great engineer, but because everyone else around me was doing it. When I would work hard and get an A, it just felt like another letter going on my transcript.
School wasn’t helping me go where I wanted to be in life, because I never took the time to figure out where I wanted to be in life.
And that’s really the point I’m trying to make. So many kids go into college to study things they don’t really care about, hoping their “passion” will one day magically jump out nowhere and slap them in the face, giving them purpose and meaning.
That’s just not how life works.
To find your passion, trying lots and lots of new things isn’t enough — you also need to commit to them long enough for them to bear fruit. And the only way to get yourself to commit, even when things get hard, is to find a good reason why it’s worth doing in the first place.
You don’t become passionate about playing guitar after picking one up and strumming along for 10 minutes. It isn’t until you’ve kept at it for weeks and weeks that calluses begin to form and the pain in your fingertips begin to disappear.
When my parents forced me to learn guitar at 6 years old, I hated every minute of it and constantly begged to quit. The pain was too much to bear. But when I turned 12 and decided I wanted to impress that cute girl at lunchtime, all of a sudden that exact same pain was nothing but a tiny hurdle on the journey to love.
The same goes for everything else in life. I remember trying all these new hobbies — rocket building, photography, business — only to end up quitting when things got hard. I never found my “why” to continue on despite the growing pains.
It wasn’t until I found a bigger reason (in my startup’s case, the desire to leave my mark on the world and be independent) that I was able to persevere through hardships and finally learn something.
Are you on the path you want to be on?
By no means am I saying you should drop all your responsibilities and start a company. It’s definitely not all fun and games; in the end, Safebox was a failure.
What I am encouraging you to do, though, is to take a step back and really ask yourself whether the path you’re on is leading you towards where you ultimately want to be. Is this something you care about enough to keep fighting for even when things get hard?
I’ve found that we often put up mental barriers to protect ourselves from the truth. It’s much easier to keep doing what we hate for years than to confront reality and quit. But that’s just prolonging the inevitable.
If deep down you know that you’re not going to love what you’re doing for the rest of your life, why continue investing time and effort into it? Things will only keep getting harder. And although facing adversity is what makes you grow, if that adversity also causes you to quit, then it’s all for nothing.
You need to find your why, your reason to continue fighting even when everything starts to hurt. When you do, even the most mundane tasks will begin to have meaning. You’ll be motivated to work harder than you ever thought you could, and despite being more exhausted than ever before, you’ll find that you’ve also never felt more alive.
