Turning 21
Last Friday was my twenty-first birthday. Before going home for the weekend, I decided to organize a dim sum lunch with some of my college friends. It was a lot of fun, and I’m glad that people were able to make it despite busy schedules. That said, it did get me thinking about growing up, work, and friendship, especially now that I’m over halfway through my college career.
I love dim sum. It’s even better the more people you have, since you can order a ton of dishes and try them all! At this particular restaurant, I most enjoyed the fried rice and the 糯米雞 (rice and meat wrapped in a lotus leaf and steamed). In general I enjoy 蝦餃 (shrimp dumplings), turnip cake, and 小籠包 (soup dumplings).
Now that I’m home for the weekend, I’ve had some time to reflect on these thoughts, and I decided to write them out as an exercise. I figure if even one person gets something from reading this, it’s worth putting it here instead of in a journal.
Growing Up: I don’t feel meaningfully different today than I did a couple of days ago, even though some number in some database went up by one and I can legally buy beer now.
When I think about myself one year ago, though, I get a little bit of whiplash from how different things are. The people I spend time with, the things I think about, even the way I think are all completely changed without my noticing how. Part of the reason I decided to write this post in the first place was in the hope that it would be instructive for future me to read.
“The days are long, but the years are short.”
(I very much enjoyed this post about that quote from a new mother.)
I am also very grateful for my family. They made a huge effort to make this weekend fun for me (highlights include a delicious Peking duck, an incredible picanha grilled by my brothers, and an amazing magic show in SF followed by tacos), and I enjoyed every minute.
Ever since seeing this graphic, I’ve tried my best to be more appreciative and present with my family. It’s clear that the unconditional love and support I receive from them is by no means the norm, and I am truly grateful for that and for them.
Internships: I think the idea of an internship as a venue to explore different career paths is well and truly dead. At this point, many fields are so saturated, and the competition so fierce, that you basically need to start optimizing for your chosen career path as soon as you matriculate. Sometimes even before.
For students interested in finance, recruiting for summer analyst positions begins in your sophomore year. At this point, many people haven’t even confirmed their choice of major. Still, if you want a job at Goldman, you’d better start cold emailing bankers concurrently with your lower division accounting class.
It’s similar with big tech - you need something no-name your freshman summer so you can get a small company your sophomore summer and then land FAANG your junior year, get the return offer, and coast your senior year (just kidding, everyone recruits for new grad these days too).
Even if you’re not interested in being a software engineer, if you want to work in quant finance, AI research, or anything tech-adjacent, these internships give your resume the magic fairy dust to not get immediately scrapped by ATS or the initial recruiter screen.
This is by no means a novel insight (every CS major I know has been grinding Leetcode for years now), but it’s still sobering to think that if you don’t know exactly what you want to do by the time you set foot on campus, you’re at a big disadvantage. Maybe I should have been mass applying to internships instead of taking the Latin sequence my freshman year?
Meeting people: I’ve been lucky thus far in my college career to make some close friends, including this year’s roommates who, despite only knowing them for a few weeks, I already really like.
However, I think there are a few local optima to be aware of here. Firstly, how many of your friends are simply friends of convenience? Perhaps they lived in the same dorm as you freshman year, or you happened to take the same gen ed and spent the entire time playing Lichess together instead of listening to the lecturer.
To be sure, happy coincidence is one of the universe’s most enjoyable pleasures, but I think it is in everyone’s best interests to consider why they associate with the people they associate with. Is it because you genuinely value their company or what they add to your life? Or did you just happen to fall in with them because it was preferable to being by yourself?
This is important because the difference between a good friend and an acquaintance is vast, and the difference between a best friend and a good friend is equally, if not more vast. So the cost of missing out on making a good or best friend is high, and we should try to avoid this.
I also think that your average student in one of {CS, math, statistics, engineering} has some tendencies that strongly impact the amount and the diversity of people that they meet. If you’re reading this post, perhaps you can identify with one or more of these:
- High screen time, perhaps playing video games or watching TV, anime, YouTube (often solo).
- If they join any clubs, they’re major/career related, and often include mostly people in those majors.
- Distinct lack of interest in activities outside their own comfort zone (partying, sports, drinking).
I think I’ve made some progress in these areas, but I still find that my friends overwhelmingly fall into a few categories (and that other categories are conspicuously absent). Notably, there doesn’t seem to be a very strong correlation between how similar someone is to me and how well I get along with them.
My hometown best friend is a biology major, my best friend at college was a psychology major, and I honestly have a hard time enjoying the company of other CS/math/STEM people outside of the ones I already know. So, I’m likely leaving a lot of value on the table with regard to people I could enjoy meeting.
There probably isn’t an easy solution to this problem. The internet zeitgeist suggests joining social clubs, attending dance classes, and setting up study groups, but this is all quite location-dependent and anyway probably optimizes for meeting a certain set of people (the ones who turn to the internet for social advice, maybe).
It’s not that I consider myself lonely, but I do wish that I had a more diverse set of friends. I feel that currently I am missing out on a lot of different perspectives/ideas/activities that a more varied set of friends could add to my life. I’m still not sure what to do about this.
Whew! That was a lot. Here’s a picture of a Royal Flush I hit in our group poker night last week as a breather.
Figure 1: I take everyone’s money.
These are by no means the only things I’ve been thinking about lately, but this post is already long enough and I don’t want to scare off the readers that made it this far.
If you have any thoughts on any of the above, I’d love to hear from you. I also have an anonymous feedback form, if that appeals to you more.
I’ll end with a few concrete things I’m planning to do in the near future (that are somewhat related to the above):
- Join a professor’s lab (preferably in AI research, my field of interest).
- Start volunteering at a cause I care about (more on this soon).
- Explore a bunch of campus events to meet people different from myself.
- Invite people to stuff! A couple of the people who came to dim sum or poker night were not close friends of mine, but I enjoyed their company anyway.
- The downsides of doing this are pretty low, but the potential benefits are huge! (making a new friend, having an interesting conversation, taking their money in poker)