2016 in Recap

Some years are just more eventful than others. 2016 was a year where a hell of a lot happened, both in the world and in my life. My bulletpoint summary of this year is about as full as I could imagine. In order:

• I left my job at Arup in Hong Kong after 4 years
• I took on consultancy work with a HK energy efficiency startup and helped them win a major project
• I flew off to Vietnam and lived the spontaneous backpacking life for 3 months
• Continued through Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Xinjiang, Beijing and finally Shenzhen to Hong Kong
• With a tournament and going away party, said farewell to my friends and family in Hong Kong
• Came back to America and resettled in Boston
• Learned how to use Python by finishing a webscraper project I'd started years before
• Mastered ggplot and R data visualization techniques
• Went to my 10 year high school reunion
• Watched all of Game of Thrones
• Went to my cousin Parissa's wedding
• Underwent LASIK
• Went to Toronto and saw my cousin, having missed his wedding years before, and his wife and baby girl
• Saw my mom retire after an incredible career
• Met local politician and role model Michelle Wu at a fundraiser
• Got hired by GE as a data analyst. Started work 5 years to the day of my start date at Arup
• After growing out facial hair for many months and focusing more on upper body exercises than ever before, dressed up as Cal Drogo for Halloween in NYC
• Became an uncle to a girl named Audrey

However, life is not a series of bulletpoints. Many of my darkest hours occurred interspersed between those highlights. Leaving my job in Hong Kong without anything else lined up was not an easy decision, and it created serious consequences. There were long stretches where I wondered whether I had made terrible mistakes in pursuit of some of these highlights. There were months where my transition to a different country and different industry was rife with disappointment, and I had little salvation on the horizon. For so long, I floundered about in the unknown, with no confidence that I was on the right track. 

I'll start with my decision to leave Arup in Hong Kong. Or maybe I'll start with a Steve Jobs quote, from his much ballyhooed acceptance speech at Stanford. Among his many great quotes was this one:

"I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

That hit me one Monday in early December 2015. The weekend had been a life highlight - a successful hosting of the Asia Oceanic Ultimate Championships, a massive 300 person tournament in which I had a small, but still stressful, role as an organizer and competitor. The tournament was more thrilling than I could have possibly imagined, validating this little hobby that I've pursued for over a decade. Compliments from multinational strangers made it feel like my hard work and passion had paid off.

That next morning I returned to work and nothing had changed. I had a ton of awful boring tasks to complete and hand off to unappreciative coworkers. For years I had balanced my work and ultimate life and dealt with the incongruity between the two, but this morning, I felt like I might be wasting the last day of my life. After two weeks consulting friends and family and receiving a mixture of encouragement and warnings, I submitted my resignation letter. I had only partially convinced myself - I almost withdrew the letter that afternoon and made moves towards an internal transfer to London. But ultimately I quenched my self-doubts and heeded the Cantonese idiom "delay no more," and one month later I thanked my colleagues and handed in my badge.

At that point I didn't have a clear plan - I hadn't 100% committed to returning stateside. All I knew was that I had long held aspirations to travel in bulk during one of those rare life intervals where this is possible. Packing up 4 years of life was hard, but picking up and backpacking was the easiest part of this whole year. Work life had bottled up so many goals and now the open facing road provided every opportunity to let me pursue them. Seeing new places was hugely important to me - it's added so much to my life - but I was equally as excited to pursue a bunch of nerdy projects. Among the possessions I stuffed into my backpack were research papers I printed out with my Arup ScienceDirect account and a book on web app development. 

From 4000m up on the Karakorum Highway

I've got other posts to recap that trip and describe how great it was for me. I didn't set off intending to find myself - I went in with life goals already well-defined - but I ended up learning a lot about myself. Spending that many hours on end alone with your thoughts, with long bus rides to read and write and think, was a pretty fantastic reset button. This travel experience was fairly different from my previous weekends gallivanting around Asia - I spent a lot less time in cities, a lot more time socializing with fellow travelers and locals, and revelling in the freedom from itineraries. The trip significantly influenced many of my beliefs, including those on globalization and ethnic identity, and refined my thoughts on how to travel. 

Most importantly though, the trip recentered my approach to life. I think it was during a glorious week in Penang, after the wilder chunk of my backpacking, a week I intentionally setup to pursue some of my deep-seated goals. I love working on my laptop in coffeeshops and I had always wanted to uproot and plop down in a coffeeshop in some faraway city. Penang was the perfect spot, as I'll explain in another post. That week I was focused - I awoke at 7am to run in the equatorial heat, finished this post, and finally figured out how to plot points in shapefiles. As I sipped Tiger beer in celebration, the loneliness really struck me. This trip had been all about me, myself and I. And when I thought about it, so had my years in Hong Kong. 

When I left Hong Kong, neither my self-indulgences nor my self-improvement would remain behind. The only real imprint I'd leave was those I'd left on people. I hadn't been entirely self-absorbed in my time there, but for one reason or another I hadn't made that many truly great friends. I hadn't realized it then, but there were many subtle changes I could have made to my priorities and interactions with people that would have made a great difference. It took me three months of solo travel to realize that relationships are everything.

The relationships that I had made were instrumental in getting me through the 2nd and 3rd quarters of my year. I came home and thought I'd get a job pretty quickly. I had two interviews already lined up with building energy/data science roles. Neither of those interviews panned out - in one case the recruiter completely ghosted, not returning any emails after we'd already exchanged 10 and agreed to setup a meeting in Boston. The other involved me flying on my own dime to DC, and a bizarre rambling rejection several weeks later that a friend described as "word vomit." I was surprised and disappointed - I had already talked myself into that unique role, but had some relief that I could now focus entirely on tech roles which I preferred. After my time at large corporation, I wanted to try the tech startup world.

Turns out that changing industries was hard. I had the right educational background, but with no experience in the roles I was applying for, I couldn't hit the ground running on any job. I pored through dozens of job descriptions every day and felt overwhelmed by the amount of words I didn't know. Scala, MongolDB, postgreSQL, Docker, the list went on and on. I had just barely learned Python - now I saw that there were so many different interpretations of data scientist, and what I was able to do was not enough. In Hong Kong I rarely had any deep data science discussions with anyone - my ability to use R was an extreme novelty within my firm. In Boston, I couldn't throw a stick without hitting a couple developers, and all those great universities churn hundreds more out every year. These kids were being taught those skills that I was now trying to learn. Additionally, I came in with a further few disadvantages. Many American companies, and startups especially, do not give great respect to international experience.  I found my language skills very rarely valued, or even noted - at best, it was an interesting tidbit that I happened to have spent hundreds of hours on. Even worse, my firm Arup, though well known in many parts of the world, was met with clueless stares by those in the American tech sector. While talking with an older female HR recruiter for GE, in response to my work experience in sustainability, condescendingly poo-pooed my "green living" phase and said that a lot could change after my "first job." When I asked her what she meant by first job, she mispronounced my previous employer's name (Ovid Arp?) and asked whether it was an international or big firm. Not that it should really matter, but Arup has 10,000+ employees headquartered in London. Luckily her opinion wasn't the important one, and other interviewers at this global firm saw the importance of my international experience .

What I had going for me were real projects that I enjoyed. I had good ideas that pushed me to learn all sorts of new technical skills and I loved it. They gave me purpose, and if there's anything you need when you're unemployed, it's purpose. Primarily pursuing around with my theory that city metrics could be found that would cluster together among the continents, I dove down a project that taught me formatting regular expressions, map visualizations, encoding formats, clustering algorithms, dataset merging, database design and creating interactive maps. These were techniques I might have been able to learn in a course or something, but with a project in mind, I got to learn them on my terms (and for free).

Ogawa Coffee, one of the coffeeshops I spent time at

A negative turning point came in mid July. I had been back for almost 3 months already and gotten the lay of the land, knew some startups I wanted to work for, and networked my way into an interview with a startup that I really liked. It seemed like a great fit - they were hiring for an entry level data analyst position, I ticked off just about all the job requirements, the company did great socially impactful global work (including in China), were financially stable and even shared the same name as one of my good friends. I passed their phone screening, then put in a solid 10 hours completing their take-home assignment (recommended 3 hours). I was brought in for back-to-back-to-back interviews and left feeling like this would be an incredible place to start my new career.

I was devastated when I didn't get that job. They had liked me, but not enough to compensate for my lack of experience. I had nothing else on the horizon, no other interviews in the pipeline. That week, it was so hard for me to move on from that rejection back to studying clustering. It was hopeless looking through job ads posted by marketing companies, e-mailing my resume to anonymous black hole addresses, googling all these biotech terms that I didn't know. I'd been ready to work that very Monday and now I didn't know when I'd work again - it certainly wouldn't be soon. That indefiniteness is rough practically and emotionally  - it disrupts one's abilities to make plans, and one's ability to sleep at night.

During the intervening months, I didn't get many interviews. Half the time I didn't even get a substantive reply. (As an aside, I think the way job seekers and employers use online recruiting has not converged, and hopefully this is a field that will keep getting more efficient.) In those days, I felt very aggrieved and sanctimonious. How could all these companies not recognize my talent?  Did they not know how good a writer I was? Did they not care about my nuanced thoughts on socialist reactive movements to colonialism? Were they aware that I had goals far beyond the scope of their little enterprise software? Each individual rejection or non-response I could accept in stride, but in their collective, I felt like my entire career and life path was being rebuked. 

After identifying a startup in travel that I liked, and finding a friend who knew someone at the company, and again passing through a phone screening and a 10 hour take-home, and getting rejected again, I was in pretty deep despair. In these times, great friends were there to remind me that 6 months was not that long. That I had so much going for me, that in fact these companies did suck, and that it would be much better on the other side. With so much time on my hands and so few people around, I texted all the time. I had time zones down pat and knew how many hours I had in the morning to get responses from people in Asia, then I had my friends in Europe until 5pm or so, and then I'd talk to the west coast until Asia woke up again. You know who you are, but I will still shout you out: Ben Goldsmith, Joan Xu, Jackie Fan, Diana Pang, Kat Tse, Michele Mak, Ria Sunga, Charlotte Poon,Seems Tsang, Hyun Park, Asha Sharma, Lesley Sim, Jen Thomas, Hannah Lincoln, Andrea Phua, Che Bello, Maggie Lonergan, Janice Shon, and my Boston-based friends Henry Fingerhut, Glen Cornell, Alison Shin, Sam Malin and Joe Nasser.  To give people an idea of what these folks dealt with, these are true back to back text mesages I sent to Jackie Fan: 1. "How do I deal with the existential dread today?" 2. "Omg I got the job with GE"

Now busy and employed and settled into a Cambridge apartment twice the size of my Hong Kong apartments, I feel genuinely grateful. I'm lucky that GE moved into Boston this year and in their tumultuous move, they weren't able to interview too many candidates before needing to respond to me.  I'm grateful that I pulled the trigger on this career switch now - in 3 years, the average college graduate would likely be too good. I'm lucky that the major I studied happens to be employable now - this certainly was not a foreseen consequence of my 18 year old self. I'm extremely grateful that my parents let me live with them rent-free and in a city with a thriving tech scene (what if I had been from Buffalo?). Even within the context of my own life, this was a particularly privileged period.

To be fair to myself, I put in a lot of work. I proved to myself that without structure, without guidance, I could still work productively. At GE I recently had to solve a similar geospatial visualization problem that I had tried to solve in March. What had previously taken me a week I now typed out in a matter of minutes. I had gotten in so many data science reps that I had forgotten how complicated some of these problems were that now felt old hat. Like a tennis player whose racket is an extension of his arm, I became attached to my R-running laptop and approached new datasets like returning groundstrokes from different angles.

So it ended up being a good year for me. However I'm not sure what lessons I'd glean from it, or what I'd recommend to my friends. I'd happily extoll the virtues of taking a long solo trip, giving your mind space to clear out and visiting the less accessible parts of the world. I'll go on and on about the importance of living abroad. These experiences are fundamental to forming my worldview and basic personality, and I wish that everyone could share them. However, I do not wish everyone to share the months of rejection and despair. Without the guarantee of a happy ending, that is not a fate I'd wish on just anyone. So take my journey for what it is and draw from it what you will - I won't preach about quitting your job and traveling or whatnot. What I will preach about are the importance of relationships. I sincerely resolve to put friends and family on the top of my priority list. To all the people who assisted me this year - thank you. To all the people whom I wasn't a good enough friend to - I am so sorry.  I regret the happiness that we could have shared, the lessons we could have learned from each other.

To friendships in 2017 and beyond -