Graduation!

Consider this a spin on the Christmas Card Letter theme – I am not even sure who all reads this blog, but considering that the audience probably includes people I don't talk to all that regularly, I figured graduation was a good time to let you know what I’ve been up to for the past couple years…

In my college tours during junior year of high school I had told my mother that I wanted to be warm (first and foremost) during my academic career, so we would have to stay south of the Mason-Dixon. Furthermore, I wanted to have what my sister Paige called “the Real College Experience,” that included a sprinkling of sorority life, some big crazy football games, and maybe some cute southern boys thrown in the mix. Furthermore, I wanted to study something “math-y that you could actually find a job with.” It seemed Georgia Tech, with its world class Industrial Engineering program, fit the bill perfectly – and as a bonus prize my inner nerd could even do a little breathing there! So, about this time in 2005 I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new high school graduate; with diploma in hand I was getting geared up to go to Georgia Tech in the fall to begin my education towards becoming an Industrial Engineer.

But some snags came along the way.

That summer I fell head over heels for a boy, Yangda. He was Chinese, going to Harvard, and a Math major. Scratch cute southern boys from the requirements list. When I got to school, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone with him, but I still managed to find things to love about GT. I joined a sorority with some great girls, and really enjoyed my classes. I even found an internship close to my boyfriend for the summer – plus one to Industrial Engineering for being math-y and marketable!

During that year, I also went to my first big college football game - as it turns out, when you can’t flirt with the boys who brought you, you don’t drink much, and you don’t know anything about football this isn’t quite as fun. Scratch big athletic teams from the requirements list.

Summer of my freshman year rolled around and I was off to my internship with General Electric in Boston. Four really big things happened that summer. First, I found out that Boston is secretly a really awesome place (despite being gosh-awful cold most of the year) and that I loved it with all my soul. Second, I realized that while Industrial Engineering requires cool math classes, you don’t get to do much cool math in practice and that my inner nerd was not OK with that. Next, while spending time with my boyfriend and all of his fellow math major buddies, it dawned on me that they all had super-cool, fun, quantitatively challenging jobs that their progress towards math degrees had gotten them. I changed my major to math before the summer had even finished. Finally, Yangda and I had a huge falling out just days before I was to go home. I was so shell shocked that I didn’t tell a soul. We decided to keep dating, but things were not as peachy as I tried to make them seem.

When I got back to school in Georgia, I decided to do research with a professor to make up for lost time in my major. When I went to my teacher, however, he was baffled by my change of major, “Why would you want to study math here?” he said, “We’re awful at it!”

Thus began my decision to transfer schools. My priorities had changed since. I was willing to give up being warm and having my “Real” college life for a place where the inner nerd was truly free, and where I could study math more easily. My relationship was in it’s death throes, but I knew he still would help me with the ropes of adjusting to a more intense academic setting too. After much secrecy (I never told my parents or friends) and some online searching, I decided to apply to MIT. It was in the city I’d fallen in love with, I already knew some people there, and it was great for Math.

When I arrived in Boston for my first day it was a whopping -10 outside, and while I knew people in the city, I knew almost no one at the school. That first day was the only day I thought I might have made a huge mistake. I missed being warm, I missed my friends, and I missed my non-prison-cell sized room. The next day was much better though, when I found WILG. WILG is a living group that was having rush when I arrived on campus, they wanted to meet new people and they wanted to feed me! I have stayed there practically my whole time at school and all of my best friends live there with me, moving out has been tough. I couldn’t join a sorority since mine didn’t have a chapter, but WILG grew to take it’s place – it is, as my mom affectionately calls it, the granola sorority – lot’s of makeup disdaining, vegetarian, hippie types who would never join a sorority intentionally and often still don’t realize that the place they live in is exactly like one. We have rush, house meetings just like chapter, and are a group of women who live in the same house and do all sorts of social things together. The only thing missing is the rules, it’s great!

About 6 months into my arrival at MIT I went with a fellow wilglet (I don’t know when that name got coined, but it stuck) to her boyfriend’s fraternity alum event and met a very cute alum from NYC. Sheldon Chan (yes, really, Sheldon… an Electrical Engineer no less… I do love the nerdy ones) and I hit it off right away. We exchanged numbers, but I figured we wouldn’t be seeing much of each other since he was in a different state.

Sophomore summer passed, as did Junior fall and as I predicted I hardly ever saw Sheldon. We'd chat from time to time and grab lunch together when I passed through the city to visit my family, but I was busy being enamored with MIT. I really enjoyed learning about all the history behind the Institute. I found a photo of my great-great grandfather in the museum! I learned all about hacking – the school term for climbing on buildings and pulling engineering pranks at night, like putting a fire truck on top of the big dome. The summer in between I spent in Boston practicing and performing in the musical Cabaret with a community theater group. I took some really cool classes, including one called 6.001 which was all about learning how to program.(all the class names are numbers - as are the buildings, and majors, none of which go in any very strong or predictable order. The "6" stands for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) I was hooked! I switched majors from straight math to Mathematics with Computer Science (aka "18C").

As Junior fall wound down I started thinking about what I wanted to do for my first IAP as a student. IAP is a one month winter term, it stands for Independent Activities Period. Students can do all sorts of things, both on and off campus. Some people take super-intense versions of full term classes for credit like Spanish I, others take classes like Charm School or Medieval Jousting for fun, some people just hang out at home and take a break from school, or there's the option of an Externship (which is just a fancy name for a 1 month internship at a company somehow affiliated with MIT).

I decided to get myself an Externship since my experience at GE had been so path altering. I was supposed to be staying with a big group of girls in NYC all the way up until about a week before my arrival. Then our housing fell through. We could not find any other places that would accept such a large number of people living together in one room, so as the least known member of the group I was voted off the island, so to speak.

This turned out to be one of the best things that's happened to me. Sheldon was the only person I knew enough to talk to regularly in the city, but we were by no means close. Like I said before, I chatted with him for a couple minutes about once a month, and had seen him in passing when going home from my Dad’s house upstate, but it was definitely pushing when I called him out of the blue and asked to couch surf for a month with practically no notice. Luckily for me, he’s a nice guy and had an extremely comfortable couch, so I had housing for January. I wasn't there more than a week before I started falling for him, he's charming and smart and I have this thing for Asian boys you see, they're so cute! By the end of the month I was completely head over heels.

Unfortunately, he still was going to be living far away and I didn't know if he was as head over heels for me as I was for him, and on top of it all I was still pretty devestated about losing Yangda (the boy that started my change in schools). When things were good between us, Yangda and I had been like two halves to a whole. It's like that cheesy Jerry MacGuire line, "You complete me." When our relationship fell apart I didn't think I'd ever be able to breathe again, much less find someone else, yet here I was completely smitten with a different guy. It was exciting and intoxicating, but I was absolutely terrified that I would get hurt all over again.

What could have been a disaster ended up working out very well. Since then has been a blur. Going into my Junior spring I was job hunting a lot. I knew I wanted to work in quantitative field (of course), and that I wanted to be in New York. As a result, I was doing a lot of couch crashing since I was in the city all the time. For Junior summer I landed an internship with a really great proprietary trading company called Jane Street Capital. Staying with Sheldon for the summer was even better than just staying for January. We got to do all sorts of fun things (including watching the official World Hot Dog Eating Championship in person at Coney Island, I know you're jealous).

What's more, I realized that I really enjoyed the work I was doing, but that it was a little too much math - mental math that is - Jane Street was amazing but I am just plain no good at calculating numbers quickly in my head. We would do mock trading classes and I would be frustrated and left behind when everyone else was juggling all the numbers in their brains. Give me a computer and a bit of time and I will generally do a decent job, even pen and paper would help, but mental math leaves me feeling sick to my stomach. So Senior year fall came and I was again pushing really hard with interviewing, even more than before since this time I was looking for full time offers. I ended up deciding to work for Coatue, which is a super tiny hedge fund based in NYC. I'll be doing software for them instead of trading, so I will be commuting to the software office in NJ, which means I get to read my Kindle (thanks mom!) every day for about an hour and a half.

Furthermore, after all that couch surfing, I’m officially becoming a paying renter - Sheldon and I just signed the lease on our own apartment last month! NYC here I come…for real this time… I know that if things don't work out with Sheldon that this could really stink, but I'd rather hope for the best and leap because so far leaping has brought me the experiences I've treasured most. And, seriously, he's really cute.

In sum, it really has been a wild four years. There have been a ton of changes and, as you can see, following my heart has brought me all sorts of adventures. Considering my past record, who knows where I will be four years from now, but I'm sure it'll be one heck of a trip!