“So let me be honest”

My first post on the Medium was supposed to be documentation or writeup of my attempt to work through a machine learning model or the underlying mathematics to kick start my Data Science portfolio on here. It wasn’t as planned.

It has been a tough couple of days. For the first time in a long while, anger got the best of me: I said things I should not have said to the people I should not have hurt. It was 3 AM last night, I was lying on bed wide awake contemplating on my mistakes, wishing things could have turned out differently. I tried to sleep, to let those lingering thoughts flow away but I shut my eyes for the longest possible time and those thoughts were still there.

I wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon. So I turned my laptop on, went to the familiar Netflix tab that I have kept open for almost a year. “The Big Short”, one of my favorite movies of all time popped up. “Maybe if I try watching some footage of the unapologetic, douchey, and self-serving banker, Jared Vennett I could pass some time”, I thought.

But what strikes me most every time isn’t Vennett’s punchlines, it’s Dr. Michael Burry’s email to Scion investors as the movie concludes. Here’s the best part:

“I met my wife on Match.com. My profile said that I’m a medical student with only one eye, an awkward social manner, and 145 thousand dollars in student loans. She wrote back, “You’re just what I’ve been looking for!” She meant honest.

So let me be honest.”

Followed by:

“Making money is not like I thought it would be. This business kills the part of life that is essential. The part that has nothing to do with business. For the past two years, my insides have felt like they’re eating themselves. All the people I respected won’t talk to me anymore except through lawyers. People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results. They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar. And I am not and never have been… “familiar.” So, I’ve come to the sullen realization that I must close down the fund.

Sincerely,

Michael J. Burry, M.D.”

For the longest time, ever since I set foot into business school, I wanted to be a banker. I thought I had what it took: intelligence and complacency. The first was intelligence because that’s what I was trained for since Grade 1: I had private tutors, I attended classes for gifted students, I excelled in science subjects, I competed in Maths competitions. Complacency was there because I aced most high school exams that I only studied for the night before. Complacency was a flaw, I knew that, but I was proud of it anyway. I thought I must have something to actually be complacent. Maybe that’s what would make me a good banker.

Because of that, I made my first year in university a disaster. I skipped classes, I overslept, I studied at the last minute thinking I could pull the same old trick I did in high school and come out with all the A’s. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I soon realized what a horrible assumption I made and tried to turn things around in the following years. That’s right, I didn’t give up on my banking dream, just yet. And it seemed like a successful run, with my point average starting to pick up after the first year with the A’s from all the finance classes that I attended.

But that wasn’t enough to secure me anything I wanted after graduation. With hindsight, I realized I didn’t hustle enough. I was traveling during the summers, I avoided networking events, and I felt unnecessary to reach out to people. I graduated with a tiny professional network and zero connection outside of Vancouver. That was a mistake and it set me on a different path that I considered less glorious than the one I had planned.

That started my two-year timeline working as a credit analyst at two different firms in Vancouver. It was all great experience and taught me lots about commercial lending and real estate, to a point that I almost wanted to make a career out of it. I also met people that are still the best people that have ever come into my life. Along that way though, I still made one or two attempts at investment banking in Toronto but all failed. I continued trying not because I loved investment banking or the stereotype it has built, but because I felt like a failure for not achieving what I set out to do when I first came to Canada. I didn’t realize that might be my blessing for later.

Then, at the near end of my credit analyst experience, I ran into another failure that if I had succeeded, it would have set me into a completely different path from what I am doing now and I would have hated myself for that. My shot at one of the largest real estate investment management firm in the country was at the beginning promising but when it came down to choosing between two candidates, I was rejected because I lacked experience working with big banks. Yes, the banking came back to haunt me again.

Just as I was about to settle and wait for the next promotion at my current firm, I remembered what got me to university in the first place, what defined me when I was young. It was the maths, physics, the logics, and quantitative thinking. I didn’t have to soft skills that investment bankers had, I wasn’t the most outgoing person in the room, I didn’t do well in a crowd, my friend circle was small but meaningful. Perhaps I wasn’t supposed to be a banker at all, and like Dr. Burry’s idea, perhaps I have not and will never be the “familiar” in banking. What if I was born to do more quantitative things.

It was coincidental at the time that my roommate was applying to graduate school. He loved coding and tried talking me into it before but I was so stubborn. Then he told me about Georgia Tech and the Master in Analytics program that they were offering. The truth is that analytics always had my soft interest back then, partly because it had become such a buzzword in the media. The other reason was when I came across an article of how Germany used Big Data to win the 2014 World Cup. However, I was too fixated on banking in Toronto that I forwent the idea of trying something new that I might actually enjoy. After multiple failures, I finally had to try. I took Python for Data Science course on Dataquest, and I loved it. I loved everything about coding, from logical thinking and algorithms to how I could arrange the puzzles to make something more efficient. I realized that I could get something similar to when I was in high school, when I felt like I was actually good at something and people respected me for that. After all, I was trained to be quantitative starting from when I was a boy. So why not get some hard skills and apply those to solve actual problems?

Therefore, I applied to Georgia Tech, and with a lot of luck, I got in. I resigned from my then-current job to completely focus on learning. After all, why keep doing things that I wasn’t genuinely interested in? I finally let go of finance after more than 6 years to actually start doing what I enjoy and I have not regretted that decision for a second. The first two courses at Georgia Tech were like an intensive boot camp in machine learning. It was long weekly hours of commitment, much more than any kind of effort I ever put in in my undergraduate. But not for any moment did I feel exhausted. The truth is I was extremely engaged in studying those predictive models and their underlying logics as if I saw everything in a new, promising horizon.

Then it was time I looked for a summer job and ironically, I secured a data science internship at the investment banking arm of a major bank… in Toronto. It felt like fate was playing with me as when I finally switched to a different path and no longer wanted Toronto, it gave me exactly that. But for once I knew I deserved this internship. I knew exactly what I was talking about during the back-to-back interviews, I got every single machine learning concepts right when asked.

Then my four-month Toronto life began. I got to work in the best work environment I had ever experienced. For a bank, my office was very unlike a bank. There was no cubicle, it was flexible and open space and focused on collaboration. I got to work with amazing people on ideas that could help transform how the global operation of the bank was run and save millions of dollars in the process with the help of Big Data and machine learning. However, at the end of four months, I felt like something was still missing, that I wasn’t 100% content with what I had done. While it was exciting and eye-opening to see what data analytics could help achieve, all I was doing is to help a bank improve its bottom line.

I then realized I needed to be completely honest with myself about what I want to do with what I’m learning when I got back to Vancouver. I wanted to become a data scientist because I believed I could use science to help drive innovations or create moments like when the German won the 2014 World Cup with my quantitative skills and logical thinking. I didn’t put my skills and passion to the best use as I did in primary school or high school, all for the stubborn pursuit of overrated glory and wealth in banking. I remembered how I always wanted to build things when I was young, how I wanted to become an engineer to create products that could give my parents better lives, how I also wanted to become an architect because I wanted to bring imagination into reality. All had to do with building and creating something new. Maybe when I was a child, I was the most honest to myself. Maybe that’s why the idea of “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel resonated with me a lot when I read his book, and that was the first time I actually finished a book. So that is it, I was honest to myself when I quit my job and switched career, but I wasn’t fully. From now on, I will be and for all I know, I want to help create products and innovations that can advance us as humankind with data science. So here I am.

But this is not everything though. After all, I started this post with how I was sleepless at 3 AM. My discovery of what I want to do didn’t come at no cost. There were a few moments I let my ego and jealousy get the best of me. I said things that hurt people I am supposed to care for and protect. Part of it was because I wasn’t completely honest with myself and let confusion took over. Never again. As I am embarking on this journey, I am still a work in progress, both as a data science student and a human being. I pray that one day I become the data scientist that my 10-year-old self would be proud of, and a more complete human being that I could cross path with and be there for the people I care about again. And I signed out of Netflix, I knew I had work to do.

For now, let’s be honest and start here.