When reading stories about wild accomplishments, I often wonder how people muster up the strength to attempt such challenging tasks. A good example is Andrew Wiles, who spent over six years proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, which had remained unproven for 358 years before. In order for Wiles to justify dedicating six years of his life to a single math problem, he must’ve been confident enough to believe that he could figure out what millions of mathematicians before him couldn’t, and developed enough resolve to justify to himself that solving this problem is worthwhile.
Before high school, I had never accomplished anything important. I used to read voraciously in elementary school, but stopped in middle school because it was seen as “uncool”. I participated in Math Counts, but the highest rank I ever received was 9th in my county. I built a balsa wood bridge but made it too wide so that only one side was supporting weight at the local bridge building competition. I never did anything that well… and I didn’t care.
The one exception was piano. I loved music and was lucky enough to have a fantastic piano teacher who decided that I had musical promise. Our piano lessons often extended from 8:30 pm to midnight, even though my parents only paid for 45 minute lessons. By high school, I had won nearly all of the local piano competitions and was well known by my peers as a good pianist. My piano teacher believed in me, and as a result, my musical accomplishments led me to develop a bigger ego that gave me enough confidence to attempt more challenging things, and the discipline to hold myself accountable to my ambitions.
My motivations in early high school were fueled by insecurity, a big ego, competitiveness, and upperclassmen that I looked up to. An example of how this influenced how I chose to spend my time was that there was an alumnus from my high school who passed 24 AP exams, and I was determined to beat that record for the sole reason of proving that I was smart. I used external validation to measure whether or not I was doing well, and I wanted to establish myself as a capable and smart person.
Fast forward to sophomore summer, I had numerous piano accolades under my belt which included winning a concerto competition at Eastern Music Festival with one of the most difficult piano concertos ever written. I also received ten 5s and one 4 on eleven AP exams, and I quickly realized that taking a fuckton of AP exams and winning piano competitions didn’t mean that much to me. It was also at this time that I met my best friend, an extremely idealistic fellow piano major, and we would often discuss existential questions like “What do I want to do with my life?” and “What is important to me?”
I remember being touched by Shakespeare’s Macbeth and all the Carpe Diem poems that my senior year English teacher made us read. Specifically, I was touched by the idea of “YOLO”, that I only had one life to live and I should only pursue what I want to do. Therefore, my junior and senior year consisted of me trying all sorts of absurd, random pursuits. Examples of this are that I decided to intern for Senator Bill Nelson’s office to learn more about politics, took up public phone banking for the democratic party, learned Spanish with the goal of becoming fluent, served as the President of Student Government Association, started the “Steinway Project” to raise $150,000 for my high school to purchase new pianos, started a website called thethots.com (now at thethots.mit.edu) to “share independent thots”, and wrote a musical score for a short film.
Each of these random pursuits left a profound impact on how I viewed the world, with a couple themes that stood out in particular. The combination of interning for Senator Bill Nelson’s office, serving as Student Government President, and not being elected as the Piano Department President in my high school (which I had poured my heart into), made me loath bureaucracy and politics in general. Because of these experiences, I came to appreciate authenticity and vowed to live an authentic life, which would most likely require me to be self-employed.
Campaigning for Student Government Association and running thethots.com also made me acutely aware and interested in other people, so that I was constantly analyzing people around me to figure out what kind of a person they were and what motivations they had for their actions. Through raising $150,000 for my high school to purchase new pianos, I also became friends with the donor, a successful retired business woman, who became my mentor and regularly gives me perspective on my life, helping me understand and redefine what success is about.
From my high school experiences, I realized that my most meaningful experiences came from thinking for myself and not being afraid of following the non-standard route. For example, the 22 AP exams that I passed are completely meaningless to me now, even though they took up the bulk of my time in high school. I wish I had broken out of the high school bubble earlier in high school and more directly pursued what I was interested on a deeper level. This perspective makes me skeptical of paths that most people at MIT have come to accept as normal, like the idea that I should get stellar grades, overload on classes, get no sleep, and eventually work at large, prestigious tech firms like Facebook or Google.
Through running thethots.com, I also learned the importance of finding people to work with, and made it a priority early on at MIT to “discover” cool people. I was fortunate enough to have met my current partner, who I respect tremendously, at a freshmen entrepreneurial seminar, and together we’ve worked on countless projects that pushed us to grow at an unprecedented pace, both intellectually and as human beings.
At MIT, my partner and I entered seven hackathons, winning a number of prizes that included Top 10 at HackMIT (2x) and Best Internet of Things Hack, which taught us how to be scrappy and deploy finished projects under limited time and resources. We recently were also accepted into Y Combinator with a self-serve bubble tea machine that we built (lambdatea.com), which we deployed in a friend’s dorm room to great success. Because of Lambda Tea, we recently took a leave of absence from MIT to live in San Francisco and work on our startup full-time.
I think the most important part of growing up is about learning to think for yourself, developing values that you believe in, and forming relationships with people that share these values with whom you can grow. A cool MIT alumnus once advised me, “the whys and the whats are often more important than the hows.” On a more tangible level, this means that for everything you’re doing in the present, stop and ask yourself questions like: “Are the reasons for my actions justifiable? Will what I’m doing now still be meaningful to me in ten years or twenty years? What do I truly care about?”
optional question 14 — accepted, MIT