2025 was the year I chased my dreams. I feel self conscious writing this out in public because my skin isn’t as thick as I’d like it to be, and I’m afraid of being perceived; But I also want to take a page out of Timothy “I’m in pursuit of greatness” Chalamet’s book and really put myself out there. This year was fillled with countless bouts of anxiety, self-doubt, stress and moments that felt so overwhelming I didn’t know if I’d be able get through it all. But I worked extremely hard to make sure I did, and the least I can do is to be proud of myself for it.
In 2025, I worked hard:
- I volunteered at a non-profit where I helped build healthcare systems for over 300,000+ refugees in the Thai-Myannmar border
- I helped build & send a real rocket into the sky by becoming a software lead for UCLA’s rocket engineering team
- I tried my hand at being a PM by assisting in taking a national communication platform in Singapore from 0 to 1, but eventually pivoted back to software where I helped build research tooling that enabled our company to automate & run its largest ever research study
- I broke into the world of startups & A.I. agents by cold-emailing my way into working for a cybersecurity startup, where I wrote software that would eventually be used for / by companies like Perplexity & Gumroad
- I won a pitch-competition after building a prototype in < 24 hours with my friends, which ended up landing us our first meal with an investor. We didn’t end up pursing the idea further, but it was cool first nonetheless
- Finally, after a gruelling interview process that involved 5 technical interviews (2 of which were onsite), I landed an internship for the summer in SF! I have this obscure fear that saying something like this out loud somehow increases the chances of jinxing it, so fingers crossed that this irrational fear remains irrational.
- I built projects — I built a platform to easily compile individual birthday wishes into a pretty, group birthday card, which I then used to create cards for my parents, my long distance partner, and eventually my sister’s wedding as well. I also figured out a way to reverse my school’s meal plan API, which allowed my friends and I to “illegally” buy swipes from each other.
- And somehow throughout it all, I still maintained straight As across all my classes
In 2025, I also played hard:
- Underwater, I dived with manta rays & pilot whales in Hawaii, thresher sharks in Philippines, & did my first liveaboard in Raja Ampat, a dream destination of mine. I also snorkeled with seals in Vancouver!
- On land, I did road-trips to Sequioa, Yosemite, King’s Canyon, Vegas & San Diego
- I’ve been a fan of EDM music since I was a kid, and this year I managed to see my dream artists (Alesso, Martin Garrix, Illenium, KSHMR, R3HAB, RL Grime, Seven Lions) across 3 different raves (Insomnia @ Vancouver, Beyond @ LA, Ultra @ Japan)
- I completed by LA bucket list (went to Disneyland, saw Luka & Lebron with the Lakers, and Ohtani with the Dodgers)
- Pacified my inner child by buying myself many toys - bumblebee, batman & deathstroke action figures, spiderverse lego figures
I’ve had a great year, and this is a reflection of it - things I’ve done well, but also things I wished I’d done better.
Maybe it has to be this way
A few quarters back, I wrote a reflection about how I was unsure if I was chasing the right things, making the right sacrifices, living a good life etc. The argument was largely framed in the context of work-life balance, where I feared that working too hard meant that I was living too little. This year I came to the unfortunate conclusion that I don’t think I have a choice - I innately associate suffering & hard work with growth, and at this stage of my life I can’t imagine not growing.
Ironically, this clarity that work had to be a non-negotiable made things less complicated for me: perhaps the resolution to my previous crisis was not that I should avoid hard work, but rather that I should only be working hard on the right things. I’ve realized that the mental peace of working first & playing later has been unparalleled, and I hope to spend the next year focusing on the “why” of the work I do, rather than on “whether” they should be done.
Ruthless prioritization
If the first half of the battle is finding your why, the next half of the battle is enforcing it. At the start of fall quarter, I identified three priorities for myself: friends & family, adventure, and my career, in that order. Anything that didn’t fall under these three buckets had to be discarded. Having a clear list of priorities gave me the confidence to be decisive about controversial decisions I would have second-guessed previously. These priorities manifested themselves in certain ways:
- I had non-negotiable daily calls & weekend movie dates with my long distance partner (high priority) even during recruiting (medium priority) & finals (low priority), which meant that we could finish the Bayverse Transformers movie series, Severance, and more
- I took a roadtrip with my friends (high priority) to Yosemite a day before one of my recruiting interviews (medium priority),
- but skipped a whole midterm + studying for finals (low priority) so that I could prepare for an onsite in SF (medium priority)
- I spent all my time studying for my operating systems class (medium priority), at the expensive of every other class (low priority)
I got more A-’s for my classes than I would’ve liked and missed out on a lot of “good to haves” this year, but that meant that I could protect my “must haves”, and I’m okay with that.
Trusting your gut
Having your priorities mapped out creates an objective metric to decision making, but this year I made plenty of decisions following my gut that overrode that. I passed up on many objectively good opportunities this year without much in-depth analysis because I simply didn’t think I’d enjoy myself. Its a tricky situation to navigate, especially when it feels as if you’re effectively “self-sabotaging”, but I’ve come to reason that letting your gut have the final say is simply a way of building a trusted working relationship between your ambition and your heart. If you let your heart choose what it wants to work on, it ends up working much better than when you force it to.
The part I’m still figuring out: Self-worth & the CS dick measuring contest
To be honest, I’ve struggled to find a proper footing in the world of CS. There’s a mind virus that I’m sure most students can attest to: first there’s the unsaid social hierarchy / dick measuring competition going on — how cracked is he? what company is this interview for? how much are they paying you? You said he interned at which company? and then there’s also the judgement — if you code with AI you’re NGMI, if you don’t code with AI you’re NGMI, if you’re not building you’re NGMI, if you’re not focusing on the low level stuff you’re NGMI
There’s just so much noise going on, and subscribing to this worldview meant that for most of the year my self-worth fluctuated based on what I had achieved rather than being based on the type of person I knew I was and what I knew I was capable of. Honestly, what actually changed about my abilities as my engineer before and after my internship offer came through?
It feels as if you have to play this game if you want to succeed in this world, but it’s exhausting, burns you out and makes you a person thats hard to hang around. How can I do better?
Running your own race
I’m learning to trust myself more. To stop comparing myself to others and to focus on my own race. I don’t doubt that I can achieve the goals I set out for myself, I might just have to take slightly more time than I would have liked, and that’s okay. The alternative would be to subject myself to a lifetime of self-criticism and endless self-comparison to other people who have had way different backgrounds, experiences, motivations, and contexts than me.
One thing that I particularly enjoyed this year was that I just did the things I wanted to do, rather than the things I felt like I should do. I took a product focused role instead of a software focused one during the summer because I felt that would create the neccessary building block for the problems I might want to solve in the future. I stopped blindly cold-applying to job boards and started writing targted cold emails during recruiting season instead because it forced me to have clarity over why I wanted to be at a company and what value I could bring. I flew to Japan and back over the weekend because I really wanted to see Martin Garrix with my girlfriend, and I responsibly could.
Someone once shared with me this idea that the crowded path was always going to be stressful & competitive. By that logic then the most optimal path has to be your own. Other people serve as inspiration of what can be done, but ultimately everything has to be your choice. Being able to think for myself has been one of the most obvious but beneficial skills I have trained this year, and I suspect that’s what people mean when they say “you can just do things”
Failures
I’ve experienced failure before, but this was the year I’ve failed the most. I was tired of living with this constant fear of rejection, and I realized that if all my goals were only a finite number of failures away from me achieving them, I’d want to fail as fast as possible. And so I did — cold dms were ghosted, applications were rejected, and many crucial opportunities were fumbled. Obviously it sucked, but this idea that I’d only fail a finite number of times kept me going. And so I failed until I didn’t.
I’m going to stitch together a few sentences from an article I read that really represents how I feel about failure:
“If you’re not dead, nothing is over. Most moments that feel bad are not failures, they are just unfinished. Given enough time, they bend into something useful, even if it is not obvious what that will be at first. Real success tends to follow the pattern of “slowly and then all at once” — effort happens in the quiet parts where it feels as if nothing is moving, then suddenly there is a spike”
Believe it or not, when I was really going through it, every night as a ritual I would replay this Under Armour commercial featuring Michael Phelps. The tagline was “it’s what you do in the dark, that puts you in the light”, and I told myself to believe that every single day.
So what now?
I’ve just started my second year of college, and 2025 has resoundingly been one of the best years of my life. It’s a special kind of sweet to be able to chart your own destiny, make your own choices, and live your own life. Responsibly, I might add — I’ve funded every single trip, rave, and dive from the income I’ve made across my various internships.
I’m nowhere near what I want to achieve for myself but I’m most definitely closer. And there’s two things that stand out to me.
1. Privilege: I’m extremely privileged to be where I’m at, from all possible angles I can think of — I was born healthy, to supporting parents & family who taught me how to work hard (as asian parents do), to have friends who push me to be better but catch me when I fall, to have a partner that has my back at all times, to have friendly & helpful collegues that taught me how to grow, learn and have fun, to have recruiters and managers who liked me enough to give me a chance, to just be plain alive with the ability to do it all
2. Ownership: This is my life and I’m sure as hell going to make the best of it. There is going to be friction, there is going to be judgement, there is going to be failure and so there must also be strength. Strength to make your own choices, to be proud of them. Strength to live your life as you intended, instead of what other people expected of you. In 2026 I’m doubling down on the things that made 2025 work, and making sure to deliver my best on the opportunities that I’ve been presented with.
I’m just getting started, I can’t wait for what’s next.