My Berkeley Journey
Lessons in Systems, Asymmetry, and Becoming
My Berkeley Journey
Finishing my undergraduate studies in three years feels like a fever dream; though the time vanished in an instant, the grueling hours spent studying and working felt interminable while I was living them. Despite how quickly it all passed, this period of my life was deeply formative: I grew not only in knowledge, from stochastic gradient descent to urban development, but in self-awareness, worldview, and clarity around the principles that guide how I wish to operate.
Hardship was my greatest teacher. With my new chapter in life at Meta coming soon, I’ve arrived at three core principles I hold as true for myself — a Pareto set of lessons that capture the essence of my undergraduate experience and now shape how I approach my early professional career (though I stress flexibility and adaptability as new experiences and opportunities arise).
1. Focus on Processes over Outcomes
Build your identity through consistent right action you control, and let results emerge as a byproduct rather than the source of motivation.
My best semester wasn’t the one where I chased the highest GPA — it was the one where I fundamentally changed how I defined success, which (unfortunately) was my last semester, oh well.
Instead of trying to game the system for an A, I shifted my identity. I stopped asking, What does this class want from me? and started asking, How well am I executing? I focused on the details of my process: how I studied, how I managed my time, how deeply I understood the material, how well I synthesized ideas across domains, and how effectively I used tools to organize my thinking and work. Grades became a lagging indicator, not the goal. I focused on engaging deeply with the works across each course and giving genuine effort to the assignments, not just relying on AI slop.
Ironically, this detachment from grades led to better results. Not just academically, but professionally.
The same mindset explains how I landed a great internship and eventually converted it into a full-time role. I was aware of the evaluation criteria and performance metrics, but I refused to worship them. As Goodhart’s Law puts it: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” When you optimize directly for the metric, you often undermine the very qualities the metric was meant to capture.
So instead, I measured myself differently: by the quality of my output, the originality of my thinking, my willingness to try ideas independently, my commitment to giving my best effort, and my curiosity to read about novel topics and methods and business outcomes — even when it wasn’t explicitly rewarded. I optimized for being useful, curious, and reliable.
This shift also changed how I think about external factors.
I used to place internships, grades, and outcomes on a pedestal — as things I could fully control if I just worked hard enough. Over time, I realized how much of success is shaped by forces outside my control: hiring pipelines, timing, market conditions, evaluators, and sheer luck/randomness. Richard Hamming’s idea that “luck favors the prepared mind” helped reconcile this. Preparation doesn’t eliminate luck—it increases the surface area for it, and I dedicated myself towards having the prepared mind.
I stopped worrying about whether HR would notice my resume or whether a grading distribution would work in my favor. Those were outside my control. What I could control were my study habits, my hours of deliberate practice, my depth of understanding, and my consistency. By focusing there, on the consistent actions I took, I made myself more “findable” by opportunity.
Side Bar: It would be naive and dishonest to claim this journey was purely self-made. I’ve been fortunate in ways that had nothing to do with merit: growing up in the U.S., having citizenship, an upper-middle-class and educated family that endured many hardships to give me this life, and values that emphasized learning and discipline. Accepting this perspective grounded me. Luck and external factors played a role, but I also learned how to meet it halfway and use my platform for good.
Looking forward, I’m committing to building systems over outcomes, identity over optics, preparation over anxiety, and letting the results follow. I wish to be many things: a creative and enterprising engineer, a fit and energetic man, a father and husband, a lifelong learner, a traveler, and I’m determined to build the systems and processes and habits that will shape these identities.
2. Be Unapologetically Asymmetric
My mom always says
Listen to everyone, but do what your heart says.
I’ve found this to be true throughout college — but not in the ego-driven way it’s interpreted.
Being unapologetically authentic does not mean acting on impulse or assuming my instincts are always correct. That would be a fallacy. I am a master of none — a young student to life, still learning how the world works. Self-trust without humility is just arrogance in disguise. What actually mattered in my experience was knowing when to listen deeply, when to seek counsel from credible people, and when to make a decision for yourself — and then standing by it.
Unapologetic, to me, means clarity in priorities and commitment in execution.
There will always be questions.
Why are you working so hard?
Why aren’t you working enough?
Why did you take this opportunity?
Why didn’t you consider this path?
Existing in environments full of conflicting personalities, ambitions, and values guarantees tons of friction, and I can’t optimize for everyone’s expectations simultaneously. At some point, I had to decide what mattered to me in specific seasons of life — my health, growth, relationships, education — and once that decision is made, I stopped negotiating it with the world.
That is where unapologetic authenticity lives.
It’s the confidence of acting in alignment with your values. My choices will always be misunderstood, inconvenient, or unpopular by peers and even family, but it is the only honest way forward that I know.
Next, my relationship with asymmetry stems from the popular term: work-life balance.
I was told by my elder friends while in high school that in college, you can only choose two out of the three of academics, social life, and health (canonically is sleep, but health sounds more encompassing of the essence of the tradeoffs to me). During internships, all the elder engineers would dwell on the same term, and while I may not have had much understanding of it at the time, I’ve seen this balance play out in different ways during my college career.
I’ve come to believe that balance is inherently asymmetric. The popular idea of work–life balance implies a constant, even split — but my life didn’t work that way. At any given moment, one priority had to take the lead. I found the key was not to avoid imbalance, but to choose it consciously. Different seasons demanded different weightings: sometimes I leaned into discipline and output, sometimes into relationships and exploration. Over time, meaning and pleasure fed each other in a virtuous cycle — work hard to play hard, and play hard to restore the capacity to work harder and so on.
Balance isn’t found in any single moment, but across time. Different semesters or recruiting cycles required me to tip the scale, but I found that doing so too far or for too long led to mental failures — I lost time with my friends, I felt burnt out, I wasn’t going to the gym as much. But that allowed me to rebound even better once the seasons shifted, and it was only in the midst of so much fun and action that I realized I didn’t have a single ounce of regret.
The fusion of unapologetic authenticity and intentional asymmetry is an integral part of my character: clear priorities, seasonal imbalance, and full commitment without apology is where I found the most explosive growth.
I have a lot of characters to play as I enter new grad life, which arrived far quicker than I expected, but I’m curious and excited to see where the seasons will take me.
3. No More Deferred Living
One thing I discovered late into my undergraduate career — but one that fundamentally reshaped how I understand myself and my upbringing — was how
Busyness and chaos had become a coping mechanism, a distraction from truth, an avoidance of vulnerability.
I drowned myself in work because I had done it my entire life without question. I believed endless productivity and grinding on school projects could shield me from discomfort: from relationships I wasn’t fully present in, from feelings of inadequacy, from questions I didn’t know how to answer. Somewhere along the way, I hadn’t realized that work began to masquerade as virtue. What I thought outwardly looked like discipline was often avoidance. I was postponing joy indefinitely under the illusion that it would arrive once enough had been sacrificed: once I graduated, once I got jacked, once I xxx, and I had so many xxxs. At my worst, I didn’t even know who I was without constant motion, without something to optimize, build, or grind through.
That illusion finally cracked when I was forced into stillness.
I graduated in May 2025, but chose to move my commencement to May 2026 so I could walk with my friends. With my full-time job starting in January 2026, that decision left me with four months of unstructured time after my internship.
On paper, it sounded like freedom. In reality, it was deeply uncomfortable. My parents wanted me to stay home for four months, and saying no and being by myself was one of the hardest decisions I made.
Too much free time made me anxious. Answering the dreaded question — “What are you even doing here?” — from acquaintances made me feel like an unwanted super under-senior. Hearing it from close friends was even harder, because I couldn’t answer it myself.
Before I could explain myself to anyone else, I needed to sit with a few hard questions:
Why did you allow yourself to work so hard if it was only to work harder in the future?
What does calm actually feel like?
How do you experience life when you’re not rushing through it?
That period of reflection led me to Viktor Frankl’s paradox and inverse law. Frankl’s paradox suggests that when people can’t find meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure and superficial pursuits. His inverse law argues the opposite: when people can’t allow themselves pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning, endlessly pursuing hard things, delayed gratification, and sacrifice.
I realized I had been living squarely in the inverse law.
It’s not to say that I wasn’t having fun: I traveled to many places in California, went to Europe for spring break, hung out a lot with friends, tried new foods, joined a frat, and did all the dumb things young kids do.
But I delayed internal pleasure so habitually that even when I was surrounded by friends, traveling, or doing objectively “cool” things, I felt undeserving of enjoyment. Rest felt unearned. Joy felt premature. Once I recognized how hollow and unsustainable that pattern was, I stopped treating life as something to be deferred and started living it more honestly.
Here’s all that I did with my time off
Reading: read fiction and non-fiction books and understood which genres/ideas/philosophies intrigue me or bore me. Went through Andrej Karpathy lecture series and read more research articles on AI systems.
Travel: partied in Las Vegas, went to the United Kingdom with my best friend and met my uncle after losses to our family, went hiking in the PNW snow and rainforests with another best friend, spent time with various friends in San Diego, went to Hawaii with my club, travelled to Seoul, Busan, and even Jeju island with my best high school friends, and spent so much time in New York City with great friends.
Activity: more intensity with the gym, cooked more interesting meals, pickleball, picked up tennis, played badminton after 4 years, hiking, went out to bars and clubs in Berkeley/San Francisco, experienced new foods and drinks (beli-maxxed).
Here’s what I learned about myself
I’m deeply interested in the intersection of neuroscience and technology — from neural networks as a biological synthesis, to personal knowledge systems inspired by brain function, to reasoning in LLMs as human-inspired methods. The human brain fascinates me in how it retains, applies, and grows knowledge, and attempting to capture that with 0s and 1s (and a pen) feels like a meaningful endeavor.
I love being outdoors and physically challenging myself. It gives me peace and space for self-reflection while complementing my fitness goals.
I strongly dislike grind culture and the idea of performatively being “cracked” at the expense of genuine enjoyment.
Traveling to new places and immersing myself in different cultures is vital to my self-development, and something I intend to always make time for. But I am not the type to relax: I’m hitting 20k steps at the minimum every day.
I’m very type A. It serves me well most of the time, but I need to consciously let loose and be present more often.
I don’t put myself out there nearly as much as I could or should, which limits my social growth. I’ve often let relationships happen to me, and I should further pursue what I want from them.
I love the history of everything — settlements, biology, cultures, religion, wars, technology. Understanding the past feels crucial to making sense of the tumultuous present and future.
I sometimes feel unconfident when who I say I am doesn’t match my actions. I need to better align my habits with the identity I want to embody.
Feeling healthy, energetic, and mentally present is a top priority for me.
I’m content with where I am while acknowledging I’m capable of more. I want to pursue wealth — intellectually, socially, and financially — while still being proud of who I am now and who I’m becoming. Content but never satisfied feels far better than being neither.
I have a low threshold for joy. I find happiness in simple things and don’t rely on big moments to feel fulfilled.
I need to improve my ability to connect and converse with new people, and is a priority goal of mine in 2026.
I love Indian spices, drinks, food, culture, and music, and want them to be a stronger part of my identity.
I’m super competitive with sports, and though I try my best to hide my frustration, it tends to slip.
I love island life: sunsets, sitting by the beach, lying in the sand, basking in the sun, and swimming in the ocean are non-negotiable (maybe that’s why I love San Diego and Santa Cruz so much).
I am more willing to spend on experiences that serve my pleasures, but aim to minimize spending on incessant things outside that.
and more…
For once, I understand myself more — my strengths, my flaws, my desires, and my interests —beyond chasing titles or drowning in busy cope. I no longer measure my worth by constant motion. This semester off was the greatest gift I gave myself, and I don’t regret it. I’ve learned that the things I had been doing all along are what genuinely make me happy; it just took stillness and honesty to let myself feel that fully.
Most of all, I recognize that enjoying hardship and working hard has never been a weakness, but one of my greatest strengths. I choose challenge because I value personal evolution, not because I am avoiding rest or joy. I am comfortable being uncomfortable, and I now hold that as a conscious part of my identity, one that provides both meaning and fulfillment.
I now aim to live by this principle: I don’t delay life for a future milestone or to run from myself. Growth matters to me, but so does being fully present in the life I’m building right now.
Looking Back, Moving Forward
I initially wrote this as a journal. I keep recap journals for every semester, so it felt fitting to write a recap of my entire college experience to understand how I’ve changed throughout the years. Reading my prior recaps transported me to times that feel foreign now, and in that distance, I found proof of growth.
I intend to write more. With my soon-to-start habit of journaling, surfacing my inner thoughts from time to time feels like a meaningful way to keep myself accountable and to push myself toward deeper self-reflection and critical thinking.
To Berkeley — I hate that I love you. You showed me tough love and gave me the opportunity to meet some amazing people. Through the ashes of trauma, be it thinking about it or all-nighters to debug a Rust syntax, I have arisen a better person.
To my family, friends, and mentors: thank you for inspiring me to write this. Seeing my reflection through your eyes gave me clarity and lessons I couldn’t have found alone.