coming full circle

learnings from my gap year

this last year, i took a year off school.

it was for a multitude of reasons – i felt like i was not learning in my classes, i was unsatisfied with the people i was surrounding myself with, i was drowning in the course load that felt pointless and irrelevant to my interests, but unsure what my interests even were.

looking back, my year off was pretty crazy... i was sometimes working, sometimes actively avoiding work, and sometimes doing absolutely nothing. but in the midst of doing nothing is when the things most valuable to me emerged: <3 friends, and that i need to spend more time reflecting.

some of the miscellaneous things I did:

• got a large number of student on leave to band together against the current school system

• lived in a bunch of houses i found on twitter before burning out as a digital nomad

• took care of wack logistics and put out so many fires while hosting 3 co-living houses in denver and 1 in sf

• tried my hand at being a cog in the machine before realizing quickly that wasn't what i wanted

• embraced the feeling of being lost and reflected for long periods of time on wifi-less plane rides and long walks

i hadn't realized it in the moment, but it was in those times of distress of choosing between hard decisions, of feeling like everything was falling apart while organizing houses, of feeling like no one would show up to meetups i hosted, of the thrill while booking those last-minute plane tickets, of forming new friendships in different cities, of cold-reaching out to people i wanted to talk to, of fearing saying goodbye to people i loved but maintaining these friendships across the country, that i had grown the most. i found myself looking inward so much more this last year and being aware of my thinking habits, being surprised what i'm capable of, and working through creating community and strengthening close friends.

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a recap of my year

dallas

it started with a hackathon.

in fall of 2021, i went to a hackathon called pinnacle, thanks to it being a free trip i had won from another hackathon. it was amazing. i was meeting all the people whose cool projects i had seen online and now everyone behind them in real life. i was so inspired that people could have a mission in the problem they were solving, and were given a chance to actively think of ways to address it. that weekend, i absorbed it all in, talked to as many people as i could, and tried my best to document everything.

pittsburgh

but then i went back to classes. while facing the reality of midterms, i thought to myself:

why?

why am i spending all of my precious waking hours doing these trivial assignments for a trivial grade when i could be meeting people i wanted to talk to, learning what i wanted, having the freedom to go where i wanted to and be able to explore anything?

the day after coming back i really couldn't get myself to muster the energy to study for my midterms. why was i studying for sql when it meant nothing to me? i decided that was it, if i had stayed i would've not done well anyway. if i take a leave now, my gpa would be frozen in time and i could always come back to it later.

i submitted a leave of absence form and went on leave. the mental barrier was so much higher than i thought.¹

for the next month, i applied to a study abroad program in the uk, summer internships, and looked for a group house to stay at in either sf or nyc.²

i got an internship, in the study abroad program, and moved to nyc to live in the house on the same day. i felt like my life was coming together. my spirits were through the roof and my head was in the clouds. i felt like i had made it. life was great.

new york city

i had a blast living in nyc.

at the house, we spent late nights debating about everything from capitalism, polyamory, relationships, crypto, societal problems, and civilization. i learned so much and loved the community. i wanted more. i wanted to live in more communities like this.

in nyc i also experienced nft nyc, an nft conference and the first of its kind. i didn't really know if there was actually any value behind these jpegs, but i thought some of the nft art was pretty cool. i went to a gallery and saw cool 3d animated art on many tv screens and fell in love... before realizing this was juxtaposed to so much noise, very overvalued melting 2D apes, a little too much obsession with yachts, and a weird blinded passion for something i couldn't wrap my head around.

i didn't really understand what was going on, but the excitement drew me in. people weren't excited at school or at their jobs, so this has to mean something. i figured i'd eventually figure out why and just go with the flow.

during this time, the people i met were convincing me to go to miami for a fine arts event that was turning crypto-themed. i had my exploratory mode turned on, and thought why not? when will i ever think about going to miami in the future? i'm young and don't really have much else to do, so i decided to go.

miami

while in miami, i went jetskiing and followed a twitter friend around and hopped to different meetups at some large houses. it was a very different lifestyle than mine, but i quickly realized it was not really one i wanted. it felt like chasing a high life, of distracting myself with partying and living in big mansions that symbolized the american dream, but feeling hollow inside for realizing this wasn't the answer to fulfillment.

while going jetskiing, i met some people who started a web3 design studio which i thought was interesting. i had no idea what it meant but i was doing design stuff and it looked like they were making pretty things and i liked pretty things. naive me thought web3 sounded futuristic and they sounded excited. they said they were doing a house in hawaii and asked if i was down.

i wanted to find another house to live in after nyc and hawaii sounded nice. i agreed.

hawaii

the first few days of the house were ok, we were living near the beach, walking to a nearby small town to get groceries. then suddenly a lot more people came to the house, and i saw the vibe of the house flip from being a healthy space to learn and grow with each other to being really alcohol and drug-centric. i slept in a different bed each day as i was moved around as people who came later were picky about their rooms.

i witnessed a nft collection come into inception, where it worked by burning gas fees each time you auction for 1 of 5 nfts released each day and the pool of profits is shared to vote on what to do with it. all the owners of the nfts were called 'degens' and they wanted to do 'crazy things' like buy a times square ad and a yacht.

i listened to a guy talk about theories about the family bloodlines that control the world. he spent late nights watching fantasia and saying it'd be better on drugs. we spent a long time arguing because he thought it didn't make sense that i held a sense of skepticism toward crypto, whereas his opinion was that it'll 'make everyone rich' so everyone should not be skeptical if they wanted to be rich. i never felt more fired up in disagreement.

toward the end of the trip, we got kicked out of the airbnb because the host discovered we were overcapacity for the place that was booked. i frantically searched for another place to stay and found a hotel room with 4 beds. when we got there, i told everyone to be discreet as we were not supposed to have 9 people to one room, but they laughed at me. we almost got kicked out that night and a security guard stood outside our door.

i was so disappointed in this house, and it made me realize how fragile a community is and how important it was for it to be filled and nourished with people that are kind. i realized it wasn't co-living that made up an experience, it was all about the people in it. chasing the high of living with others made me lose sight of what made the other house in nyc work.

mid-january

oxford

i was really frustrated with the situation of the house in hawaii, so was really grateful when i finally left for the uk. at first, it was great. oxford felt like a castle and it felt so surreal to be at a university with so much history behind it.

however, in the uk the thing to do was go out to pubs and drink every night. i felt really out of place there since i didn't enjoy drinking, and didn't really understand the dry humor. i felt like i didn't fit in there.

when miami hack week came around, i wanted to leave the uk. the day before, i created a group chat with a friend of people on leave from school and called it dropoutdao. i thought it was super funny, poking fun at daos for not actually being daos and also just being an excuse to put all my friends i've met in one place.

i threw together a funny looking logo with 'dd' and a smile and slapped it on the profile picture of our telegram group chat.

miami

at miami hack week, we started a twitter and started posting memes about dropoutdao and making fun of universities. i had a lot of fun drawing them, interacting with our followers, bending the twitter algorithm with these hype phrases. our twitter following was exploding, so I decided maybe i could do something with this.

since we had gathered so many people on leave from school, maybe we could try our hand at rebuilding the school system together. much of this was fueled by my hatred of school during the time, and pent-up frustrations of not having friends i wanted to be around. at cmu, i felt trapped in classes and my rigid course requirements, deprived of a social life as i grinded away my life for grades instead of growing and being treated like someone figuring things out. i ran with the idea of making a 'decentralized school' and poured my soul into the project. i was fueled by the idea. when i went back to the uk i was operating in a completely different time zone but became nocturnal to focus on what i was making.

i spent all of my waking hours onboarding new members, telling them how we could make an alternative to school, and hearing stories from all over the world of people's frustrations with student debt, the current education system, and unconventional routes people took and how lonely they felt it in without a community. everyone was so excited and it made me happy feeling that i had done something.

but the hollowness of realizing i had actually built nothing but had gotten people excited caught up to me.

i shook it off. it will come, i'll figure it out later.

oxford

if we could make something better than school, then i wouldn't have to go back, i thought.

my classes at oxford were tearing me down, and one of my professors was roasting my papers for saying 'they were not academic enough' and psychology and hci were 'too subjective' and that i needed to cite more empirical sources. fuck that. i don't even know if i'm going down that heavy research path, why can't my papers just convey the idea in a different form? why do i have to hide my ideas by trying to sound smarter and 'academic' and build up the walls up to make it even harder for someone else to read my writing?

i didn't understand. there's no process for taking a leave from a study abroad, but i just decided to end it early. if i didn't transfer the credits, then they don't even really matter.

i told my dad not to worry about me, i'll just take on some freelance work to keep afloat. many of my friends are already really familiar with freelancing so i asked them for tips on getting started.

february - march

new york city

i went back to new york and kept working on dropoutdao. i helped plan three different houses that were sponsored and worked out the wack logistics. i interfaced with people through 10 minute calendlys. i felt excited that people wanted to talk to me, but it was overwhelming.

denver

i was super stressed before going to eth denver, and hoped and prayed that the logistics of the houses had worked out. i had never done something like this and it felt weird that people had entrusted me of all people to make sure this went right. i didn't feel qualified to do this.

in between driving people around the three airbnbs, creating fliers for the partiful and twitter, managing the finances of the parties, figuring out the food and drinks situation for a 300 person rsvp'd party, and finding a place to do a house in sf with a friend after eth denver, i tried my best to stay sane.

at night, already drained from all of the event planning, i found myself still pressured to go parties. i resisted and failed because i was the designated driver and had to stay it through. i went to a couple and it felt really uncomfortable.

one of the sponsors of eth denver rented out a whole bar and there, amidst the loud music and sleuth of strippers, they begged to give tokens to young people 'changing the world'. to think the future of organizing people was in those drops of alcohol falling down some ponzi leader's mouth didn't sit right with me.

toward the end of eth denver, i came down with a really bad flu, and so did the rest of the house. it affected my ability to swallow, and i laid bed-ridden for a couple days while the house transformed into a hostel, with strangers hovering in and out of the sofas. i couldn't muster the energy to stop them or ask who they were. before leaving the house, i took the pile of unwanted crypto swag people had left and threw them in a pile on the snow next to the overflowing trash can.

april - may

san francisco

when i went back to san francisco, i continued hosting events. one week, i was so tired that i started dreading going to my own events. meanwhile, i also looked for a 2-month lease for a mid-length dropoutdao house. this time i'll do it right, i thought. with what i had learned in hawaii and denver, i thought this was the chance.

to my dismay, it was harder than i thought to find a suitable house to fit 6-7 people in san francisco. once i did find one, i worked with this landlord that managed properties designed for coliving.³ he gave a reasonable price, but i heard through the grapevine that he was notably hard to work with. i decided to work with him anyway because there were no other options. we were promised the first floor of the 14 bedroom and the bottom would be empty, but after signing they lease they started adding people in the bottom floor randomly. the landlord would show up occasionally without telling us, and ignore our requests to fix broken furniture. the landlord also kept charging the wrong amount for the rent at times different than what we had agreed on. at one point, i was debating taking a loan to pay off charges because i was operating on a shoestring budget.

i found people to fill in the spots, but found it super hard to make the house gender balanced. i remember one week where i exclusively talked to females and tried to get them to join to balance it out, but failed because their schedules didn't line up.

the house went better than i thought, but i felt incredibly stressful as the organizer. i felt like i had not been warned that this was what it was like to run a house and was pushed into this role, and didn't feel like i was prepared to handle what i did. i retreated back home to the east bay area every few days to get a makeshift weekend break.

at the same time, i was still working on dropoutdao most of the days. at one point, we threw around the idea of raising money to keep the community afloat so we could compensate ourselves while working on it.

...but at that point we were literally still a group chat that hosts meetups.

how could this be used to raise money? we weren't even an actual dao. we didn't have a business model. we were a meme page on twitter that was trying to pose as a startup.

i felt disconnected from the community as it overflowed with more and more people than we could onboard.

i had a lot of fun working on dropoutdao but i knew deep down i wouldn't feel right raising money for a group chat. i didn't want the people in our community to be our product. it's a group chat for god's sake.

what was our vision? to keep partying mindlessly? it felt empty. i didn't buy it.

i didn't want any stake and left dropoutdao.

los angeles

i left SF and moved to LA to live in arhouse. i had been excited about arhouse since last fall and their twitter page always looked really fun.

at arhouse, i realized that i developed an allergy to the terms 'web3' and 'nfts.' i had an icky feeling from all the grifting in the space. i sold all of the nfts and crypto, so i had no skin in the game.⁴ i found solace in complaining online, in saturating others in my complaints, in retreating as far away as i could. that month, instead of focusing on doing anything of marketable value, i just played around with clay and had a lot of fun.

it was really invigorating seeing those who had gone down a freelance route at arhouse, and hearing everyone's very different stories. it opened my eyes to so many alternate paths than the traditional 9-5 and felt inspired everyday to do things for fun.

at around this time, i saw a role open up for 1517 fund, and they were looking for someone to help with their community work. i felt really aligned to their mission in supporting students doing projects outside school and going down different, riskier routes. it felt like what i wanted to do with dropoutdao, so it naturally was a fit and i started working with them, hosting 1-2 meetups each month in different cities and have a lot of fun with it, bringing together my friends and friends of friends.

end of may - mid july

seattle

after arhouse, i went to seattle to intern as an ar product design intern at a large corporation. i realized a couple days in that i didn't enjoy it. i was working on a long-press interaction to view photos larger, and it felt like i was floating around everyday pretending to be busy. a part of my soul died each time i copy pasted a button, realizing this wasn't what i wanted to keep doing.

sure i was getting paid and fed and housed well, but is this really what i earned from my hard work? i felt like i had lost all of the fun of combating challenges and learning from them by doing such easy tasks.

i spent much of each day complaining and feeling really down. my mental health took a deep dive, and i felt misunderstood by my family and my internship peers. i would spend an hour dragging buttons and the rest of the day recovering of how listless i felt. i was starting to worry that it was actually my fault, that i have a problem leaving things, so i should stay it through. but the longer i lingered, the more i felt like i was lying to myself.

7 weeks in, i decided it was it and left early. it was one of the best decisions i made this summer.

san diego

right after i ended the internship, i went to the 1517 summit in san diego and helped with setting up for the event. there, i witnessed the reunion of those who previously attended the under 20 summits for prospective thiel fellows. hearing their stories of meeting their friends and mentors in these meetups hosted by the thiel foundation in the last decade was incredibly heartwarming, and i realized that it really was the people we check in with and feel close with over the years that give meaning in our lives. these members who had been in the community for 10 years shared stories of how powerful meeting other ambitious young people had meant to them.

berkeley

after the summit, i went to berkeley to attend sparc, which was a summer camp for high school math students. i heard about it a lot through one of my friends and honestly didn't know what to fully expect.

the camp was structured with three optional classes each morning around topics of communication / game theory / relationships, and self-proposed activities in the afternoons like board games, discussions, escape rooms, hiking, etc. the loose structure of the camp made me realize that this is what school could be, as a place that leaves much more room to reflect and learn at one's own pace, and encouraging opportunities to meet and chat with others 1-1 to get to know each other outside the class setting.

sparc gave me a lot of room to focus on looking inward and feeling okay with being lost. it felt really meditative, and talking to high school students reinvigorated a fire of curiosity in me that i was previously fanning to keep alive. i realized that i was just as lost as them, and being lost is okay. i realized that somewhere along the way of going through the college application process, choosing a major, and feeling forced in determining a path too early, i had forgotten what it was like to explore and settled for the easiest path in front of me.

i realized i was willing to take on the challenge of discovering the actual path that i enjoy, and not one i'm just okay with.

los angeles

after sparc, i moved back to arhouse. i spent all of my time reflecting. i talked to the others in arhouse about how they found their paths and learned about their stories. sometimes i was scared i spent too much time in my mind. i wrote nonstop. i went on hikes every other day. i caught up with friends.

miami

for a couple days, i went to a retreat in miami. prior to the retreat, i was feeling really hesitant about going back to school.

but at the retreat, i met someone who changed my opinion. he made me realize that school is an experience you cannot experience again at a later point in life. i realized that a part of me felt too good to go back to school and i needed to let go of that ego. a part of me felt like going back to school meant giving up.

but in reality, school is a place to explore, and it's one of the best places to explore. it's one of the few places that it's fully accepted to be lost, and it was up to me to seize this time to learn.

pittsburgh

on the first day of class, i felt super weird about coming back. i spent an hour setting up my computer for my databases class and was reminded how useless i felt in classes. the next day, i swapped out my classes and felt better. school's not perfect, and it's not perfect post-grand either. and that's ok, i just need to hold onto the parts i find valuable and piece together the resources that are here and it's up to me to choose what to do with it.

one of my classes is a drawing class with a professor that has been here since 1974. i love his class, hearing him talk and share his life stories and advice while the class sketches together. he's spent everyday drawing since he’s graduated college, including one day when he was under anesthetic in the hospital, and his hand autonomously drew without looking as he was under the drug.

i asked him what the most popular major at cmu was when he first started teaching and he told me it was in fine arts, because personal computing didn't become a thing until years into his teaching. it's crazy to me how much things can change in the same environment, and how much i could change my thinking while still remaining the same person.

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closing thoughts

yessir

seeing the grifter sides of crypto and startup dropout life and wading through to the other side of reason has been an experience. though at many times i felt frustrated and helpless on my leave, i've gained a sense of confidence and resilience that i would've never learned in classes. i'm grateful to have experienced what post-grad life is like for a year, built up a friend group across the world, learned to quickly plan travel, and to have cultivated the confidence to make events happen. i'm super grateful to still be able to come back and explore in school, and more intentionally this time.

i find myself craving and chasing the high of crazy experiences because i faced them so many times on my leave, and i think that's why going back to school feels so odd. i've changed so much, but my surroundings had stayed so much the same. i think it'll take some time to realize that it's okay, i don't need to feel weird about feeling weird. i shouldn't feel superior for having different experiences, or look down on people for going along a straightforward path. i sometimes wish i could've just stuck to something and been happy, but i know that i’ll keep trying to find what it is that gets me excited even if it takes me much longer than sticking with what i'm okay with.

for everyone that has supported me along my gap year and journey (you know who you are):

jasmine, kevin (several kevins), ben, matt, michelle, eric, oliver, jason, sebastien, matthew, mitchell, adil, andy, sicong, chris, jerry, aaron, jeff, david, austin, sean, anthony, avery, susan, meijie, ikjong, liam, vera, jack, mary, danielle, aidan, lucas, emily, yaacov, samarth, daniel, maggie, timmy, michael, amy, arjun, robert, john, charles

thank you for listening to me, helping me through the low points, picking me up and lifting me up higher each time i reached out no matter how crazy i sounded each time. let’s catchup sometime :)

1. i even got a refund for the month i did take classes

2. i had heard about these group houses from twitter, and thought it would be interesting to live with some people off the beaten path and learn their stories

3. these houses had many separate bedrooms

4. to my luck, this was also right before luna and ust crashed hard, and it was honestly pretty satisfying seeing the ponzi fall and saying ‘i saw this coming’