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written roughly one year ago. what is different? what is the same?
Blogger Gretchen Rubin lists “the route you took to get here” as one of the seven topics to avoid if you don’t want to risk being a bore. But I believe that life is all about taking risks! So prepared to be bored…
I’m in Edison, NJ, in a hotel room, packing my things; I’m leaving tomorrow. I think I made vague references to this in previous posts, but I’ve been here for a month. I’d never stayed in a hotel room for a month before, and I’m not sure I will again, so this is a unique experience already!
I’ve been in Edison doing a one-month software externship for hedge fund Coatue Management. During my month here, I and three other MIT students worked to develop software to help the company organize, display, and data-mine its massive database of stock information and internal notes. I won’t get into details, but I have to say that this experience has been nothing short of amazing. The people in the office were incredibly friendly and helpful, our project was managed expertly so that we were able to build a fully-functional prototype in twenty days, and we all learned a ton…about the software lifecycle, about client/server programming, about the specific technologies (SQL, C#, .NET), and even a bit about life.
What do I mean by this last part? Well, I just got back from eating dinner with Sai, who, as the systems usability expert of the group, was one of the guiding forces behind the design of the project. We had a great conversation about the paths people take in their careers, and how finding a job that matches one’s values and goals is worth any sort of risk. For Sai, the opportunity of entrepreneurship—the possibility of making something that people will really use—is of great value, and he won’t work somewhere where he feels like he is not contributing to the world. The story of how he discovered this about himself is amazing to me. Sai built websites in college, after teaching himself HTML by looking at a webpage’s page source and fooling around with the HTML tags he found, and after making a killing on building websites for area churches, he spent the proceeds funding several web-based startups. Although none of them really panned out in the end, the experience he gained from taking on these unknown ventures have taught him a lot about what it takes to be an entrepreneur and a lot about himself. Now he’s successful, because he took risks and in the process discovered what he wanted in life.
Hearing his story made me reconsider things. I’ve always figured I would work hard in my classes and learn as much as possible, and then go out into the world and work for a company for a while—maybe even a long, long, while—before finally making a move on my own. But Sai was already doing things on his own as a sophomore in college, exactly at the point in his life that I’m at right now. He took risks and tried things that he thought would work and got to see the results, good or bad. For me, although I always say I like trying new things and taking on new challenges, I’ve been pretty gunshy about taking those chances.
So I’m going to try this, I think. I want to launch a website—I have an idea in mind; come talk to me if you’d like to hear it—and take some risks. There will be some time to think about it on the train ride up, before I plunge into another term of fun at MIT. It’ll be good to be back—I really miss my Phi Delt brothers—but I have mixed feelings since I will definitely miss my new friends in Edison.
