A few days ago I graduated from Harvey Mudd College. Hooray! Since Harvey Mudd was a significant part of my life (nearly 20%!) At the risk of sounding like a LinkedIn influencer, I thought I should write some of my reflections on this meaningful experience. In order of importance, we have:
This perhaps has more to do with Pomona College than it does with Mudd, but part of being at Mudd is being at a consortium, so I think it still fits. Taking Music Theory I, and later Music Theory II at Pomona changed my life. Imagine yourself, a 3D being, suddenly being thrust into a 4D existence. For me, this is what it felt like to learn music theory. So many of my emotions that were once inexpressible were now able to be communicated to others through song.
When I started out at Mudd, I often worried about what I should do next. Should I become a software engineer? That’s what everyone else is doing and what my parents want me to do. Should I become a professor? That seems like what the professors want me to do. And what happens when you’re at the top? When you reach the top of the corporate ladder, when you get tenure, what next? To me, it seemed that every possible career would eventually reach a plateau that was devoid of meaning.
Then I wrote and produced (and acted in, and music directed… sigh) Reason to Be, my first ever full-length musical. And I loved it. I loved writing lyrics and composing music and making the music look all nice on Musescore and discussing with my dramaturg and rewriting and rewriting and rehearsing with actors and putting on a production. Not only that, other people loved it too. We had a near-full house every night of the show. People leaned forward. They laughed. They cried. They walked out with a tune in their head and a memorable message. And I realized, I’m actually good at this. I could wake up every day and make musical theater for the rest of my life. I now know that whatever happens with whatever other parts of my life, I will always have this. And that gives me a sense of comfort.
Funnily enough, Reason to Be ended up being my reason to be.
Growing up with Asian immigrant parents, I spent most of my life before college doing things for prestige. Piano was not for enjoyment, it was to win awards that will look good on college applications. Math is not for enjoyment, it’s to get ahead in school to be in advanced classes that will look good on college applications. In terms of college applications, I ended up applying to 18 schools. I can’t even remember all of them, but I didn’t even really want to go to half of them. Like many of my Asian American peers, I did the “shotgunning” approach which was to apply to a lot of selective schools in the hopes that at least one will accept you.
So, this was the mindset I entered college with. At the time, I wanted to be a machine learning researcher, because I thought the applications were cool and because I liked statistics. But also, becase I thought people who researched machine learning were smart and I wanted to be smart. I mentioned machine learning research in most of my college essays. Then after actually doing machine learning research, I became extremely put off by how haphazard my experiences had been (for example, one of my employers insisted on deep learning, because it’s popular, even though a much simpler approach would have sufficed). At the same time that I was doing machine learning research, I became deeply involved with the computer science department’s grutoring program (grutor = grader + tutor), even going as far as to design and run the entire grutor training. Around the same time, I also saw a project I worked on my freshman year actually get used in the joint-taught Minds, Brains, and Programs elective course.
My perception is people tend to think of machine learning research as: “wow! you’re so smart!” and education-related research as “anyone can do that.” But there I was sitting in class, watching 20+ people actually use the website I helped build to learn about Braitenberg Vehicles. Meanwhile my machine learning paper was gathering dust somewhere. What I realized is that though my work in education is less “prestigious,” it actually makes a meaningful impact in people’s lives compared to anything I could accomplish in machine learning. One student I grutored told me that she ended up becoming a grutor because of me. I regularly get comments on my YouTube channel thanking me for the clear explanation of a computer science topic.
As I mentioned in the previous point, in the beginning I was very unsure of what I wanted to do for a career. But my experiences as a student, teacher, and researcher at Mudd have taught me: if it’s not theater, it’s teaching! I am now very excited to be starting my PhD in data science in the fall, where I will be researching some combination of human-computer interaction and data science education.
My work life at Mudd is best summarized by this rap I wrote in the fall of my senior year, called “8 to 11 Grind” (that’s 8 AM to 11 PM):
8 to 11 grind
Got too many things on my mind
Try to solve for the answer to this bind
But I cry ‘cause the answer’s undefined
I’m fairly certain I’ll pass
Though I barely make it to class
It’s unfair how the world turns so fast
Don’t know where or when I last touched grass
8 to 11 grind
Got too many things on my mind
There’s never time for me to unwind
‘Cause I fear that I’ll get left behind
In McGregor all day long
Writing a proof or writing a song
Deep inside I know this might be wrong
But still I decide to play along
8 to 11 grind
Got too many things on my mind
A grind by a purposeful design
But the purpose to this I cannot find
One crack and the dam wall breaks
And I stack up the damn mistakes
Take flack for the times I flake
But this act somehow I cannot shake
8 to 11 grind
Got too many things on my mind
This rap is the only peace I find
On my 8 to 11 grind
Check out those parallel rhymes in the third verse! Lyric technique aside, this rap is a pretty accurate representation of how I spent the majority of my time at Mudd: 15 hour work days. Of course I didn’t really work 15 hours, I had some breaks like lunch and dinner. Though when I was working like 30 hours/week on my musical, I skipped meals pretty regularly.
At the risk of sounding like I’m bragging, I’ll say that I think I had a very accomplished undergraduate career, at least on paper. I got good grades, published two papers, wrote and produced a musical, founded two clubs, and was class president. To accomplish this I worked from 8 AM-11 PM and also over breaks. I remember doing research over break my junior year: the entire building was empty except three people. Me, and two professors. As I’m writing this now, I am on my first break since last summer, because I worked over winter break and spring break as well.
I somehow managed this my first three years, but when things really ramped up with my musical my senior year, I began to experience severe health problems. I had extreme stress-induced insomnia that would keep me up until 4-5 AM, causing me to skip class and miss meetings and spend entire days in bed. Being this sleep deprived made me too tired to eat which made me even more exhausted, so I was stuck in this ruthless cycle of having no energy becuase I didn’t sleep and also didn’t eat because I was too tired from not sleeping. I spent most of my last two weeks as a senior flaking on all of my responsibilities and skipping all of my classes so I could lie in bed and do nothing and still be tired.
So, I need to NOT do that again or else I’m pretty sure I’ll die at the ripe old age of 26. In grad school, I’m looking forward to being, or at least attempting to be, a B student.
Assuming that I had control over my bedtime (as in not experiencing insomnia), I realized that there is almost nothing that is worth purposefully delaying my bedtime for. I think some people will say, “sometimes that late-night conversation with a friend is worth it.” As someone who has had many deep late-night conversations, I can confidentally say that none of them were worth it no matter how meaningful they were. At least for me, my body wakes up at the same time regardless of when I go to sleep, and delaying my sleep by even an hour can ruin the entirety of the next day for me. The tough thing about this is that it’s really easy to succumb to peer pressure to stay up. But I need to remember: it is not worth it.
Some exceptions: ~once every two months I went to see a show in LA and had to sleep later. That was worth it. Also, delaying my sleep for the Magic Castle was totally worth it.
At Mudd, people will often say “I don’t have time” or “I’m too busy.” I used to be one of these people. But then I started to think: we all have the same 24 hours in the day, so it’s not the case that anyone has more or less time than the other. It’s all about how the time is allocated. Maybe someone allocates their schedule so that they have four classes each day. This person does not have any less time than the person who skipped class to watch TV. It seems simple, but knowing that we all have the same hours in each day made me realize that: 1. I am free to do whatever I want at any given moment (while accepting the consequences) and 2. If someone says they don’t have time or are too busy, they probably just think whatever you want them to do is not important. Otherwise, they would make time (or a third option is that they have poor time management skills).
I was one of those people who did everything at Mudd and left little time to myself. After dying a firey and painful death while burning out til my last dregs of energy last semester, I have been reborn as a phoenix who will now say NO to things, even if they seem fun, so I can make time for the things that are important to me.