What is a compiler engineer, anyway?

I imagine the audience of this post is both “people who want a job in compilers” and “people who are curious about my life”, so for those in the latter category: Wikipedia says that “a compiler is software that translates computer code written in one programming language into another language.” Basically, I’m a software engineer who works on programming languages. I don’t make programming languages—there is an entire theoretical subfield for that, and it is very cool; I implement them, which requires less math.

If you’re in the latter category, most of the technical details in this post will probably be boring and irrelevant to you, so you can skip to the end where I talk more about why I do compilers, what my life is like these days, etc.

(By the way, my debut novel from Simon & Schuster is out on November 11th. It’s a young adult romance set at a hackathon. You can preorder it here.)

Why this post exists

When preparing for compiler interviews, I discovered there was very little information online about how to break into this niche as a new or recent grad. There were plenty of YouTube videos on machine learning/full-stack/a newfangled thing called “AI Engineer”, but nobody was talking about compilers, and maybe somebody less delusional would’ve taken that as a sign to switch subfields, but alas, I happen to be delusional, so instead I fumbled around in the dark for the better part of a year and eventually landed a job.

So maybe this post can help other people who are interested in compilers. Or maybe they will read all of this and decide this is so not worth the effort, which I guess is also a way of helping them.

A little about me

In 2023, I graduated from MIT with a double major in math and computer science. Then I began a fifth-year research-based master’s degree, where I was in a compilers lab group. I dropped out after that fall, but sadly cannot claim any cool “MIT dropout” cred because it was grad school. From June to October 2024, I was a compiler engineer at a startup in New York City. In that role, I worked on extending a preexisting open-source programming language.

I am now a compiler engineer at a large, post-IPO tech company in the San Francisco Bay Area. I work on making programming languages run faster.

Who even hires junior-level compiler engineers?

According to Indeed, there are 116,000 job postings for “software engineer” and only 400 job postings for “compiler engineer”. It’s brutal out here.

Compiler engineering roles are relatively rare due to limited demand (most companies don’t build their own compilers, and once a compiler is built, the work is mostly maintenance and optimization) and high barrier to entry. In the past year, I interviewed for twenty-ish opportunities.

Here are the different types of places that might hire a compiler engineer:

• Startups: In my experience, startups are more amenable to hiring new grads for this position. My first role was at a startup, after all. Startups sometimes post their listings online; I had LinkedIn and Glassdoor alerts for the “compiler” keyword. Getting to unsubscribe from those alerts . . . that was a beautiful moment.

• Larger tech companies: Automotive companies (Tesla, Waymo) have compiler positions, as well as hardware companies (Nvidia). While I do know junior compiler engineers at FAANG companies, they got those jobs by converting an internship into a full-time offer; they applied for “software engineering” and got placed on a compiler-specific team due to their skill set and interests.

• Academia: Well, I was speaking to a professor who was hiring for his lab, and it would’ve been a cool chance to work on high-performance computing, but the opportunity disappeared after federal funding cuts. Oof.

• Quant finance: I did not interview at any of these companies (I wanted to stay in the Bay Area, and these opportunities are predominantly in New York City and Chicago), but some of my classmates ended up at companies like Jane Street or Five Rings due to their interests in high-performance computing and low-level systems.

• Open-source projects: I interviewed at one startup that makes an open-source library, but it wasn’t a good fit for my skills.

Okay, but how do you get these people to look at your resume?

If you are reading this because you’re a recent grad or graduating soon, there are many factors that are likely out of your control now, like your educational institution, your previous internship experience, whether you happen to be related to the CEO of a Fortune 500 tech company, etc.

But referrals help a lot! I ask plenty of people for referrals, even if we aren’t that close. I ask my friends if they know anybody at [insert company name] and if that person can refer me. I try to find a referral for every single job I apply to.

I also tell everyone that I like compilers (I even made my Twitter name “Rona likes compilers”, which got me an interview) because if they later hear about someone hiring for that role, they might think of me.

But of course, I am super-lucky in a lot of ways. I am an American citizen and don’t need visa sponsorship. My school name probably opens doors. I can’t pretend otherwise, that it was all because I hustled so hard and got so many referrals!

Later, I’ll talk more about the brutal job market and how one can stand out without a preexisting network.

What are the interviews like?

During my recruiting process, this is the #1 question I wished somebody online could’ve answered. Instead, this is what I found:

Yeah, the Internet was not very helpful.

So hello, fellow desperate interviewee who stumbled upon this post while searching “what is on a compiler interview” or “what is on a compiler interview reddit” or “is it too late to change careers?”

Here are the types of interview questions I got:

• Leetcode-style data structures and algorithms whiteboarding: I heard that tech recruiting was moving beyond these types of questions, but surprisingly, many still focused on implementing breadth-first search or a priority queue. Unlike typical software engineering interviews, I was expected to solve everything in C++.

• Language design principles: One of the most interesting final-round questions I got was to invent a simple programming language with specific constraints. I had to write a grammar, ensuring that it was unambiguous.

• Programming languages: I never got anything too deep (nothing about formal verification, for example) but was definitely asked “What is your favorite programming language and why” in multiple interviews. Turns out, if you say brainfuck, you will not get the job. Oops.

• Intermediate representation: I had multiple interviews where I was expected to read x86 assembly (or a pseudo version of it) and optimize or translate it into another language. I also had a take-home assignment that was in MLIR.

• Optimization passes: The aforementioned MLIR take-home assignment wanted me to write an optimization pass for algebraic simplification; other interviews asked me to write optimization passes for constant propagation and dead code elimination.

• Compiler fundamentals: I was asked to explain the different parts of a compiler, different compiler optimizations, static vs. dynamic compilers, etc.

• Graph theory: This might’ve been due to my resume (I wrote a graph theory paper in undergrad), but I got some questions about graph-based representations in compilers, like control flow graphs and register allocation.

• Other low-level topics: I was asked about deadlock, race conditions, special-purpose registers, instruction pipelines, memory allocation, binary representation and binary arithmetic, garbage collection, probably other things I’m forgetting right now.

• Behavioral: The main question lobbed was “why do you want to do compilers” (which maybe you’re also wondering after reading this list); I’ll answer that later.

How do I prepare for all that?

I mostly have my MIT education to thank, which is probably an annoying answer for everybody who didn’t go there, but luckily, OCW has these classes available online for free!

The classes that were most helpful:

• Computation Structures, which I also TA’d during my master’s program. Taught me many low-level fundamentals like pipelining, assembly, binary arithmetic.

• Dynamic Computer Language Engineering, which does not seem to be available online, but its static counterpart is here. I took this class before I had taken the introductory programming course at MIT and that was like putting on your shoes before your socks, except if your shoes were also on fire. However, it taught me C++, what a compiler was, how to work with a huge codebase, and that mixing Red Bull and coffee while pulling an all-nighter is not the brightest idea.

• Performance Engineering taught me the lion’s share of the above list and is the main reason I got my current position. Fun coincidence: for one of the jobs I interviewed for, they ended up going with somebody else—turns out the successful candidate was one of my project partners from this class.

• Theory of Computation was not as helpful—it is a math course—but it helped me with that final round where I had to write my own grammar. It’s great for getting you to think about what a programming language needs to achieve on a mathematical level.

I also went through Cornell’s Advanced Compilers course, which was quite fun but perhaps a tad heavy-duty for the purpose of interviewing.

Things I would’ve done differently

• I didn’t have a mentor in this space; I probably should’ve done more LinkedIn outreach to find people who had the jobs I wanted.

• As part of my prep, I read several books, like Engineering a Compiler by Keith D. Cooper and Linda Torczon and the famous Dragon Book (Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools). They were engaging, but they provided high-level overviews that I already knew, so weren’t that helpful for someone who had already taken the classes mentioned above.

• I didn’t write down the interview questions I got, mostly because interviews are like a black hole for me and once they’re over I want to throw away my brain. That’s pretty silly, though. I should’ve recorded the questions I got, so I could go back and review.

• I’m not involved in any open-source projects, but they seem like a fantastic way of learning more about this field and also meeting people with shared interests. I did look into Carbon and Mojo but didn’t end up making contributions.

Okay, so why compilers?

Here is the answer I give when an interviewer asks me so why do you want to work on compilers:

I was initially a math major, and I thought I wanted to do a math PhD. I went to an REU (a summer research program for undergrads) and wrote a paper. But I decided academia isn’t for me—I wanted to do something that felt more immediately impactful, so I added computer science as my second major.

When I started studying computer science, I was really attracted to low-level programming because, like math, it felt like reinventing the whole world from first principles. Here are these axioms. You can use them to build the whole universe. In contrast, I didn’t love the empirical nature of machine learning.

That’s my interview-ready answer. But I think I stumbled upon compilers with some serendipity, too. There was the foundational Computation Structures course, where I spent a lot of time going to office hours because my friends happened to be there, and where I spent a lot of time grinding on the final design project (which required low-level optimization) because my friends and I were good-naturedly competing with each other. There was the fact that, at MIT, this niche had a lot of people whom I liked. After all, you have to be a little masochistic to study compilers when other subfields have way more money and prestige.

About that job market

Look, I know the tech job market is brutal right now. I lurk r/csmajors. Also, I grew up in Oregon, and my friends back home (who attended Oregon State or other public, non-target universities) have applied to hundreds of jobs only to get maybe four interviews.

So how the hell does anybody get a job?

This is general advice for non-compilers people, too: Be resourceful and stand out. Get involved in open-source communities, leverage social media, make use of your university resources if you are still in school (even if that means starting a club that nobody attends, at least that demonstrates you’re trying). Meet people. There are reading groups (my friend Eric runs a systems group in NYC; I used to go all the time when it was held in Cambridge). I was seriously considering starting a compilers YouTube channel even though I’m awkward in front of the camera.

I don’t know if this will get you a job. But it’ll certainly improve your chances.

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Good luck!

Before the startup I worked at in 2024, I didn’t have any industry experience in compilers. My internships were all full-stack web development. I got pretty lucky that my first full-time job took a chance on me, and even though it didn’t work out with them, I’m really grateful.

During my 2025 recruiting cycle, I applied to a compiler position that paid $28/hr (yes, far above California’s minimum wage, but below market rate for a software engineer) but required C++ experience, knowledge of deep-learning, and LLVM fundamentals. And then, after making it to the final round, I didn’t even get that job. It went to a PhD student.

Also, at one point, I made it to the final round for a position in Shanghai, and I was truly considering moving to China even though my Mandarin ability means I would only be able to fluently converse with five-year-olds.

It took a long time—ten months and so many interviews—but I did end up landing a job as a compiler engineer. Now I spend all day thinking about how to make programs run milliseconds faster. It’s awesome.

Also, if you work in compilers, please say hi! My email is rona at mit dot edu.

(I also recently moved to Palo Alto and don’t know many people here, so if you’re in the area, let’s be friends!)

Okay, shameless plug one last time: my debut novel from Simon & Schuster is out November 11th. It’s titled You Had Me at Hello World. You can get it here.

I’ll end with an excerpt from said book, coding-related to match the theme of this post:

Read (Books)

• The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen: Recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, this is a darkly comic book about a half-Vietnamese, half-French dude who comes to America as a refugee after the Fall of Saigon. The kicker? He’s an undercover communist agent. The author writes with striking empathy, never reducing his Vietnamese characters to caricatures, a refreshing feat in a media landscape laser-focused on the American experience of the Vietnam War. I’m usually not a fan of spy capers, political intrigue, or war stories, but The Sympathizer is so well-crafted, I fell wholeheartedly into the narrative anyway. If I had to make a critique, I would say that it is overwritten at times, in that self-indulgent debut-author way where the lingering description or metaphor doesn’t actually fit the character.

• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante: My friend Cher told me it’s her favorite book, so even though I've read The Lying Lives of Adults (also by Ferrante) and didn’t love it, I decided to try the The Neapolitan Quartet. And I’m glad I did—this was an incisive exploration of female friendship. Ferrante writes with remarkable honesty, treating the experience of her protagonist with so much depth and seriousness in a world that often seeks to dismiss the feelings and concerns of young women. The prose is clear and knows that its purpose is only as a conduit for the untranslatable inner life. That being said, like The Lying Lives of Adults, I don’t know if this book will leave a lasting impression. Reddit advises that the full impact comes from all four books read together, so I’ll give the sequel a shot.

• Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn: I read Flynn’s other two books, Gone Girl and Dark Places, back in high school. Gone Girl is still my favorite thriller. But Sharp Objects was mostly a letdown. Unlike Gone Girl, it felt devoid of any interesting observations about gendered expectations or societal hypocrisy or anything else. The actual mystery was unsurprising, and the best part of the book was the characterization of our deeply-traumatized, self-harming, alcoholic narrator. Being trapped in her head felt like an underwater scream. But I will say this: this novel did succeed in the most essential way for a thriller. I couldn’t put it down and tore through it in two days.

• C++ Brain Teasers by Anders Schau Knatten: I’m including this one for shits and giggles. I’ve had a bunch of job interviews recently (as a reminder, I work on compilers) and wanted to brush up on C++. It’s full of tricky questions about what certain code snippets will do when compiled, often hinging on obscure corners of the C++ standard. In the end, it didn’t actually help me improve much. For interview prep, you're way better off just grinding LeetCode.

Read (Not Books):

• My friend Alec sent me this review of Ocean Vuong’s newest novel, The Emperor of Gladness. The gist is that this novel is a big step up from his debut, which is promising, as I couldn’t finish that one. As for the review itself, as I told Alec: it shines most when criticizing Vuong’s “diaspora poet” image, but stumbles when making sweeping prescriptive observations on life or whatever.

• I picked up Franny Choi’s poetry collection at the library, and this poem is the one I keep returning to. I’m not sure why; it’s not the most innovative or well-written in the collection, and there’s an underlying “nature’s revenge against industrialization” vibe that seems silly. I don’t know. Maybe the silliness is what makes the poem fun!

• This reflection by Yiyun Li, on the death of her two sons (both by suicide). She writes with tremendous clarity and respect for her children’s autonomy. It’s a very sad read, obviously, but it’s an honor to bear witness to her experience.

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Watched:

• I was looking forward to The Materialists (A24 flick, directed by Celine Song, and starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, Chris Evans) forever and convinced seven friends to join me in an advanced screening. I must’ve watched the trailer a dozen times. Unfortunately, the movie was a disappointment. Besides the beautiful cinematography, it fell flat. I could say a lot about the movie—its clumsy handling of a potentially-triggering subplot, its lead actress’s wooden affect, its unearned emotional payoff—but the most interesting angle might be the cultural tension that arises from the deep entanglement of dating and money. Although, let’s be honest, is there anything that Jane Austen hasn’t already said?

• The Wedding Banquet really made me wish there was better queer Asian American media with mainstream visibility. Huge fan of the cast, and credit where it’s due—the effort behind the project is clear. I just . . . I watched it and promptly forgot about it. In my opinion, Fire Island, another romantic comedy starring Bowen Yang, is much better.

• I got through all of White Lotus season 3. I was mostly there to see beautiful, sweeping panoramas of Thailand, and on that front, I ate so well. The plot was totally ridiculous, but whatever. Rich people shenanigans are fun.

Listened:

• I’m not a huge music or podcast girlie but I will mention Sabrina Carpenter’s new single, “Manchild”, and the uproar surrounding her upcoming album Man’s Best Friend. Specifically, her cover art:

  

Look, I think her new song is a bop and the accompanying video perfectly captures the vibe I aspire for my own life (messy, free, expansive). I also think the outrage is overblown. Some of y’all need to touch grass. It’s not that deep.

“Okay, but this is going to make young girls think that it’s normal to let men demean you—”

I don’t know. If you’re truly worried about the sexual freedom of girls and women, maybe direct that energy toward protecting our reproductive rights?

Things I’m excited for:

• The library finally loaned me The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei, whom I saw at Green Apple Books during her book tour!

• The trailer for The Summer I Turned Pretty season 3 just dropped. Cue squealing.

It’s been sixteen? seventeen? months since I posted on here, which might indicate that I’ve discovered better coping mechanisms than oversharing on the Internet (unlikely, given my Twitter presence), or might simply mean I kept meaning to write something new on Substack and never got around to it.

I left MIT in January 2024, in the middle of my master’s program. Now, people often ask about the contours of my life: what I’m up to, which city I’m in, or other such details that might be better answered by stalking LinkedIn, but hey, here we are.

Last year, I worked as a compiler engineer—basically, I helped build a programming language—in New York City. (I am searching for something new, so if you or your friend is hiring, please reach out!) These days, I spend a lot of time talking to people, both in person and online. It is probably my favorite activity. I adore my friends, and I find myself constantly delighted and intrigued by those around me. So here are recent scraps I’ve written—excerpts from my letters, texts, emails, unsent emails, Slack messages, random screeches into the void—which might answer the question of what I’m up to:

wanna go to japan?

I’ve been reading a fair bit. I finished The Vegetarian by Han Kang; it’s a horrifying exploration on misogyny in South Korea, told through an allegory of a woman who decides to become vegetarian. After that, I walked over to the library and spent a few hours there. God, I love books so much. Something that scares me about being an adult is how little time is allotted for reading.

Speaking of being an adult, I’ve been catching up with my MIT friends, and it astounds me how many of them seem to have settled into rather mundane lives. I don’t mean mundane in a negative light, necessarily—it is perfectly fine to work at Apple or Microsoft or Doordash or wherever for many years on end, and spend your disposable income on whatever hobby strikes your fancy. It is more than perfectly fine. It is a charmed existence that the vast majority of the world can only dream of achieving. The privilege is not lost on me. But what of all the ambitions we wrote about on our college applications when we were seventeen? Sometimes I think I am the most deluded one for clinging onto some wild notion that I might still accomplish especially interesting things.

Went to a solidcore class yesterday in nyc & my body HURTS, thought of our core40 days 🥲 miss ya

She told me that “once you’re in the workforce, the years sort of blend together.” Isn’t that terrifying?

tbh idk if being angsty in your mid twenties hits the same way… think it’s because once you’re in your twenties you have autonomy and a greater amt of control over your angst, so it’s kinda not cool to be angsty anymore

When we met, I thought you were so cool, because you were the only Actual Adult I knew, with a two-bedroom apartment and real money and fashion sense and social savvy. I admired you so much and in many ways I wanted to be like you when I grew up. But now I want to grow up, and I want to become myself.

can we do 9:30 lol

not sure if i can wake up in time

ok let’s do 9 am fk it

i can drink coffee

did u watch the brutalist? i was thinking about it because the oscars were on last night and anora won best picture; personally, i loved anora a lot, and it’s such a fun watch, but I think the brutalist meant more to me on a personal level and had more emotional resonance. that desire to make art at all costs and transform your persecution or suffering into art

omg you guys look gorgeoussss

Bruh wtf was that interview 💀

I think SF has a problem where my friends are all startup bros and NYC has a problem where ppl are hard to befriend / nail down

If it weren’t for you, I think I wouldn’t have bothered to stay in compilers after college, because my plan had been to get some full-stack software job until you convinced me to strive for what I wanted. In many other universes where I didn’t meet you, I’m writing React components, either as a founder or as an employee. I’m glad I don’t live in any of those universes.

ads on the subway for “the squid game experience” … why would I pay for that when I can just participate in capitalism

Left a book on your desk as a gift; thanks again for letting me stay in your room!

i think poets are trying to find a common language and the language is usually not located in the narrative specifics of a story, like “harry goes to hogwarts and stumbled upon a magical mirror that shows him his dead parents” but an image that evokes, say, grief and yearning

Left the air mattress and bed sheets outside your bedroom door, spare keys on the dining table, thanks again for all your help in hosting me 🥰

but we both know that u dont care that much abt money so theres no point in staying at [financial firm] for that alone

so then the question becomes "are you getting more out of being at [financial firm] every day than doing your own thing"

jk i landed in the east coast and its SOOOOO cold i hate it i change my mind im gonna live in California

Loose notes on my Substack:

• When I first started this thing, I had like fifteen followers. As a joke, I named my Substack “return on net assets”, or RONA. Anyway, I now have several more followers and “return on net assets” is probably confusing and not funny to most people, so I renamed it “the yuppie diaries” because, now that I’ve left MIT, it’s an accurate-ish reflection of my content? Being a twentysomething woman navigating the professional world, juggling Partiful invites and student loans and fitness classes and god why won’t he text me back? (But, like, I’m not like those other yuppies. I’m a cool yuppie!)

• Again, when I first started this thing, I had like fifteen followers, so I didn’t really put much effort into this. Now I have more, and it’s mildly terrifying, so I archived many of my old posts from college.

• On that note, that’s one reason I haven’t posted in the last seventeen months; it’s so much easier to live life than to write about it, and if I was going to reflect on my experiences, the end result had to be insightful and well-written and good enough to justify a Substack post! No more ramblings. But, well, actually trying is so much harder and scarier.

  Thanks for reading the yuppie diaries! Subscribe for free.

There are a few major differences between grad school and undergrad.

I live in an apartment now. Grad housing was a nightmare—the day the portal opened, the website crashed almost immediately and almost every option disappeared. So I don’t live in a grad dorm.

Instead, I live in an apartment with a roommate who works full-time at a Real Job. This is a drastic social shift from my time in undergrad, where I was in an independent living group (sort of like a sorority or fraternity house, but not Greek affiliated). I’m so lucky that my current roommate is a close friend with amazing taste in decor and books, and I’m really happy here. There is simply a big difference between living with one person and living with thirty. Plus, being in an actual apartment means adulting tasks like purchasing my own furniture, paying utilities bills, etc.

I’m only taking one class. At MIT, MEngs are capped at twenty-four units a semester, which usually means two courses. In comparison, undergraduates usually take four or five classes. Taking only one class works very well for me—I like focusing on fewer things at any given time, and in undergrad, I found it difficult to context-switch between so many obligations.

I’m a teaching assistant. To get funding, most MEngs have to TA or RA (research assistant), although some self-fund and some have an outside fellowship. In particular, we have the 6-A program, which allows you to intern at a company in exchange for that company funding your degree.

I TA an introductory computer science course. TA obligations vary from class to class, but mine include hosting office hours, leading recitation, writing exams, attending staff meeting, etc. It takes up about twenty hours each week.

I get funding. Many master’s programs are not free, so sometimes there is a misconception about how the MEng funding works, but as stated above, most MEngs are funded. This funding pays for tuition, health insurance, and a stipend (which, in the 2023-2024 school year, is about $4000/month before taxes—the exact numbers are available online). This makes it more financially feasible for students to pursue the degree.

Social life is different. This is also a symptom of growing up, not just being in a master’s program. As many other twentysomethings can probably attest to, adult socializing is much less spontaneous. Since I don’t live in a dorm, I can’t randomly hit up someone on my floor to go get boba. Plus, many of my closest friends from MIT don’t live in Boston/Cambridge anymore, as they’re in graduate school or working elsewhere.

Do I miss the proximity of undergrad? Of course. But I also think being older has provided clarity for my relationships. Like, who do I actually still keep in touch with? If I no longer have the shared context of MIT with somebody, do we still have anything in common? Everything feels more grounded, less capricious.

Sometimes, younger students ask me if they should pursue the MEng, and my answer is: it depends.

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In my year (class of 2023), many students decided to MEng instead of directly going into industry because the tech job market was difficult and they struggled to land a job. Totally understandable. I also know people who decided to MEng because they felt that their undergraduate experience was cut short by COVID-19, and this was a good way to stay on campus an extra year.

I also often hear the sentiment that the MEng is a great way to pursue research if you’re unsure about a PhD, or if you want more experience before applying to a PhD. Note this might not hold true at other schools. As far as I know, while the MIT MEng is comparable to programs at Stanford/Harvard that also allow undergraduate students to receive master’s degrees in computer science, the MEng requires everyone to write a thesis, which usually means working in a lab and gaining real research experience.

For me, I always intended to MEng, because I added computer science as my second major pretty late. (Math was my first major.) To graduate in a timely manner, I had to take four computer science classes every semester for three semesters straight, and I mostly only had space to take required courses, although I did get some flexibility among computer science electives.

I wanted the opportunity to learn more computer science, especially within my specific interests. In particular, I wanted to take Performance Engineering, a notoriously time-intensive course that I wasn’t eligible for, due to pre-reqs, until this fall.

A common critique of the MEng program is that it allows students to “hide out” for an extra year, delaying adult life. I think this is a personal decision that requires self-reflection. Some of my friends have said they didn’t MEng because they knew they would be doing so to avoid adult responsibilities, and that’s totally fair. It isn’t for everyone.

In terms of career prospects, there are certain positions, such as ML Engineer, that are usually not available to people who only hold a bachelor’s degree. However, my personal belief is that simply having a master’s degree on your resume won’t significantly improve your chances of landing these jobs—you’re competing against PhDs, and not all master’s degrees are equal. It’s important to have research or industry experience on top of an advanced degree if you’re targeting a specific role like that.

When I was interning at Microsoft, I asked one of the more senior employees if I should pursue an MEng. He said, “Well, if you started right after undergrad, you would be at a junior rank, and if you took another year for a master’s degree, you would start at one rank higher, but if you had spent that year working at this company, you would’ve gotten promoted to that rank anyway, so it doesn’t make a difference in terms of your position. And you also lost a year’s worth of salary.” He also acknowledged that there are reasons beyond title and compensation to pursue a master’s degree, but the point here was that it wouldn’t help me materially as a software engineer, at least at Microsoft. (Also please note that Microsoft is a huge company and this is simply what one employee said, so it may differ depending on the exact team and role.)

Personally, I’m really happy with my decision to do this. I’ve enjoyed learning more computer science, teaching undergrads, spending another year on campus. It doesn’t feel like an extension of undergrad, but another chapter of my life.

Sometimes I went to recruiting events just to remember why I avoided recruiting events. The latest one, held in early May of this year, was at Abide, a bubble tea shop on the outskirts of campus. The recruiters had tried, they really did—wheeled in old-school arcade games, paid for limitless boba, etched the space in muted gold light. 

A woman in a crisp suit handed me a stack of poker chips. “Use these to place bets.” She gestured at a whiteboard that proclaimed two hundred dollars’ worth of chips could be exchanged for a backpack; a thousand dollars’ worth meant AirPods. I wondered at this approximation of Maslow’s. Who needed self-actualization when one could listen to podcasts wirelessly?

A few minutes later, I was assessing the boba selection—passionfruit green tea, matcha milk tea, something reddish that involved guava—when a recruiter sidled up. Her greeting floated towards me. “Hi there!”

“Hi,” I said, pivoting away from the counter. I wasn't sure what the company did. Hedge fund? What did hedge funds do? To amuse myself, I briefly pictured manicured shrubs made from dollar bills.

“How’s school going?”

Her voice formed the shape of possibility. Opportunity. Another future opened itself to me, sparkly and inviting. Wall Street, maybe, or a consulting firm, something synonymous with prestige, six-figure salaries, very reasonable health insurance. I could walk into a restaurant and order without looking at menu prices.

Behind us, a rinse of noise: groans and a burst of bright, asynchronous beeps. Somebody had just lost a game of Pac-Man. For a fleeting second, it was all I could hear of the room.

"Um, school is good," I said.

After a few more lines of scripted dialogue, the recruiter moved on to other students. I turned back to the boba. At the bottom of each cup, tapioca pearls clotted into indistinguishable blurs of black.

More beeping. Somebody was cueing up a new game. I imagined Pac-Man, endlessly swerving about his maze, collecting point after point after point. Devouring through level upon level towards some inevitable death. Game over.

I handed my poker chips to a friend, grabbed two cups sloshing to the brim with milk tea, and left.

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The summer after my freshman year at MIT, I wrote the following:

“We would commiserate with each other about how high school felt like a farce, like a four-year-long audition, and then we would go on to attend Ivies and top state universities and small liberal arts colleges and we would eventually switch our majors to something safe, like economics or computer science. And we would rebel, sure; we would dance on tabletops and kiss the wrong person and backpack through Europe, but inevitably, the intoxicating allure of the corporate world and all of its comforts would yank us back to the paths drawn for us before we were born. And by age thirty, we would make six-figures annually; we would have a mortgage, two-point-one kids, and a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and we would have grown into the boring-ass adults we swore we’d never be.” 

Perhaps a tad melodramatic, but I felt more lost than ever. It was the same summer I read former Yale professor William Deresiewicz’s sharp rebuke of elite higher education. In The New Republic, he wrote, “I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.”

In retrospect, it’s a cynical take—in college, I’ve had the honor of meeting so many vibrant, curious souls—but to eighteen-year-old me, Deresiewicz offered a terrifying prospect. I didn’t want to be a Wall Street sellout. I wanted to be a writer. But I knew writing poetry was about as useful to greater society as shifting vast, moneyed sums from point A to point B, and at least the latter came with a dental plan. 

I didn’t know what to do, so I chose to do nothing: stumbled into a job offer in Auckland and took a year off to work instead of coming back to MIT for my sophomore year.  The week before I flew off to the Southern Hemisphere, I read Mihir Desai’s op-ed in the Harvard Crimson, in which he dissuades students from pursuing careers in consulting or finance: “The shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not way stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you.”

I envisioned myself as a corporate cog, devoid of fantastical hopes, and didn’t entirely hate the idea, because at least that person knew where she was going.

After New Zealand, I’m irrevocably different in some senses—more prone to fretting about the costs of mundane items like toilet paper, for example. But, for better or worse, I did not change into the sellout Desai warned of. 

I’m nearly twenty-one now, yet I find myself craving the same things I’ve coveted my entire life: jasmine tea, Impressionist art, white chocolate, intense friendship. I suspect I will spend the rest of my life searching for the words to approximate the secret, untranslatable language of my mind, because it is the only way I might reach across impossible distances, the galaxies between people.

I thought I wanted to be a writer, so I signed with a literary agent and published a book. But I found no joy in self-promotion, in networking, in everything surrounding the craft itself. While I still love writing more than pretty much anything else, I don’t want to make it into a career.

I thought I wanted to go into finance, because I enjoyed math; it was what had drawn me to MIT. I found it similar to poetry: both abstracted the world into something more elegant. Both transcended their own language. But I found no fulfillment in exploiting economic loopholes, no matter how beautiful the numbers were.

I’m nearly twenty-one now, yet I’m still confused. All I have is an amalgamation of curiosities and dreams, but I don’t know what to do with that. I want to learn every secret of the universe, and there simply isn’t enough time to do so.

A few weeks ago, I went back to Abide with a graduating senior destined for Big Tech^TM in the fall. We talked about majors. She’d opted for computer science, the most popular department at MIT. After coming back to school, I declared comparative media studies; nobody understood what it was or why it was useful. 

“I took classes in both math and comparative media studies this past semester,” I said. “I know exactly what I learned in my math class—how to compute a probability density function, for example. What I learned in my comparative media studies classes...that’s much more amorphous. I think it’ll take me years to understand what I truly learned. But it’s important to me to be a mindful citizen of the world, to do things with purpose, and I’ll never learn that from doing a math pset.” 

“The real world is a thing,” she pointed out. Vocational skill sets translated into financial stability; excessive, indulgent consumption of literature and sociology papers did not.

Later, I asked her why she’d decided to work at her Silicon Valley company.

“I think at MIT, I gained so many skills but didn’t have the time to figure out what I wanted, so I think I’ll spend a few years gaining exposure,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll stay there forever.”

I slurped at my boba and gazed outside, the glass blotted by raindrops. Massachusetts Avenue was nothing but windows: storefront after glinting storefront, a limitless throat of possibility. Often, I would walk along the same street, music tucked in my ears, footsteps meandering as if I had somewhere to go, but somehow never ending up anywhere at all.

This has seeped into my offline life in odd ways. During the first few weeks of the semester, I was sitting in the Banana Lounge (a common space brimming with free bananas) and working on my laptop when someone came up to me. “Are you Twitter Person?” she inquired. Not a Twitter person, but just Twitter Person, as if that’s a widely-accepted job position.

It wasn’t a title I was ready to accept. “I’m Rona, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said.

She seemed satisfied with that response and left. It wasn’t clear to me why she had approached me, or what she got out of that interaction.

There have been similar moments—recently, I walked into a gathering at Harvard hosted by a venture capitalist, and at least four people recognized me from Twitter. I’m not sure how to feel about all this. It’s immensely useful to have an online space that says, hey, this is who I am, and I’ve gotten to meet some awesome people. When I went viral over the summer and spoke with major news outlets like WSJ and NPR, I thought the attention was net-positive—it drove public dialogue about racial bias in AI—but it also meant fielding thousands of comments about how I was using AI wrong or trying to stir up controversy or something.

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I suppose the way I think of this is similar to how I think about writing. Once a story is out in the world, it is no longer my own, and it instead exists in conversation with the reader. I don’t see my online presence as me, but as some entity that I have created that is available for public consumption. That sounds so drearily capitalistic, but I don’t necessarily mean consumption in a monetary sense. More like, here is this art piece you can observe, and the art piece is titled 10,000 @ronawang posts.

Why? Why do I spend hours each week on the website formerly known as Twitter? Is it simply the dopamine machine dispensing likes that keeps me hooked? I certainly am susceptible to the sneaky tricks of social media companies, but it isn’t only that. Even if I personally never posted, I would probably scroll through Twitter often. I suppose it’s one of the only places where I can peer into the brains of total strangers. A lot of discourse is hot garbage, but the insights can be so illuminating, too.

At MIT, I’ve found that opinions are somewhat homogeneous—if I had to guess why, I’d say that ambitious, academic overachievers fresh out of high school have overlapping life experiences and arrive at similar conclusions about the world. But on X, people argue and argue and argue. Ad hominem attacks fly from all directions, yes. Political trolls and NFT grifters spew nonsense. But there are plenty of witty observations, philosophical takes, personal updates. I’ve always found people fascinating, and there are few places where I can find out what they’re truly thinking.

I don’t know if I want to be chronically online forever. I’ve considered quitting Twitter—it takes up time and energy, and I want to focus on grad school, enjoying my twenties. But my revealed preferences show that I have much more fun on Twitter than I do at a club or a bar. Sometimes, I feel uneasy about this—is there something wrong with me? Why don’t I like drinking or partying?—but I’ve learned to accept myself. If this is what I enjoy doing for fun, then so be it.

Last month, my friends and I saw Mitski live. I didn't know that many Mitski songs, but I went to her concert anyway because the songs I did know made me certain that everything that happened inside of me had happened inside of someone else before.

At the entrance of the venue, a woman who was checking IDs glanced at me and said, "You're definitely under twenty-one, right?" I laughed her off because I wasn't planning on drinking anyway. She drew an X on the back of my hand with Sharpie.

My friends and I joked about how the opener, a band called The Weather Station, had a vocalist that sounded similar to Mitski. All the merchandise was expensive but I bought a shirt anyway, a $30 mint-green crop top, partially because it was cute enough and partially to remind myself that I was a thousand miles away from the life I used to have.

As the main act was about to begin, we wiggled our way through the crowd and found a spot where, if we held our heads just right, we could see most of the stage. As the first notes of "Love Me More" drifted in, Mitski stepped out, and the audience erupted into frenzied cheering. 

The first Mitski song I ever heard was "Your Best American Girl." Her voice starts slow and smooth, like honey, until it climbs into the frenzied chorus. She sings of heartbreak that creeps up on you: don't wait for me, I can't come, that slow realization of an insurmountable abyss. Lyrics like your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me suggest that the fundamental incompatibility between the two lovers is steeped in racial and cultural differences.

In the music video, Mitski, a half-Japanese woman, waves at a white boy, who waves back until a white girl intrigues him more. Mitski's smile falters. The boy and girl begin making out. Mitski makes out with her own hand. When I watched the music video, I felt embarrassed on her behalf. Why was she so enthralled with this mediocre man? Why wouldn't she want to be with someone who thought she was beautiful, and not just beautiful for an Asian woman?

I was young enough to think that I already knew everything there was to know about myself. I didn't know how easy it is to become what you once scoffed at. I would never be with a boy who makes me feel that way, I thought, not as a promise but as an observation. And this has turned out to be somewhat true in that I have never had a boyfriend who is fully white, but this has also proven untrue in other ways because I have had boyfriends whose families were much wealthier than mine.

I met my first boyfriend through a high school chemistry class. We were both ambitious and eager to prove ourselves. We'd attended the same talented and gifted program when we were younger, but at different times, so our lives had never overlapped before. Attending such a program had given both of us an easy hubris, the sureness that we were destined for somewhere better than our public school in Portland, Oregon. (I cast my arrogance off after I arrived at MIT, like it was a kitschy scarf that had been silly to wear. I don't know if he ever cast off his. We haven't spoken in years. Apologies for spoiling the end of the story so early.)

In mid-September of that school year, he made a Facebook account and we started chatting through the platform. Later on, I would learn that he had made the account just to talk to me, a move that struck me as both flattering and questionable. But mostly flattering; after all, he was the first boy to ever confess his interest in me.

We had a lot in common, I thought. We both wanted to attend MIT. Our class differences were subtle enough that I didn't notice for months. The car he drove was a hand-me-down from his brother, old enough to still have a stick shift. Most days, we took the same school bus home. I didn't pay specific attention to fashion, but his clothing seemed inexpensive and functional.

After we began dating, I visited his house, which had few walls, floor-to-ceiling windows, and remote-controlled blinds. One got the sense that every detail had been meticulously planned.  The renovations, I was told, gave the place a valuation of $4 million. What was it like, I wondered, to have the confidence and the resources to wreck and rebuild your world to align with your dreams?

We spent many evenings there, studying. He was good at chemistry because he actually liked it, and years later, he would go on to pursue a chemical engineering PhD. I have always been drawn to people who are genuinely passionate about what they do, and I found myself growing quite fond of him. When measuring against the intensity and depth of the adult relationships I've had since, I wouldn't describe what we had as love, but there is no denying that I liked him. I liked him a lot.

My boyfriend's family owned a beach house on the Oregon coast. Some weekends, they asked him to go there. "I hate being here," he texted me on one such visit. "Next time you should come with me."

"Haha maybe," I texted back, hoping he wouldn't ask again. (It's only now that I realize what he wrote wasn't a question, but a demand.) And I did get what I wanted: the topic of me visiting the beach house never resurfaced.

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For him, I did a lot that I would normally never do. He was one of the top chess players in the state, so I learned the rules and sat across from him at the board. But after a few rounds, he got bored. "You're not good enough for this to be exciting for me."

So I tried other things. I sat through Inception. I listened to his bizarre theories about the psychological differences between the sexes. I edited his literature essays.

In the winter, we started studying for the chemistry olympiad, which we'd convinced our teacher to host at our high school for the first time. I bought a used copy of Atkins' 3rd edition of Chemical Principles and learned all the subjects our high school chemistry class hadn't covered, like the Schrödinger equation. I sent him links to recommended textbooks, but he didn't purchase any. I downloaded practice tests, but he didn't want to bother with them, so I completed the exams alone.

The day of the contest came and went. When results were posted, we found out I'd received the highest score in the school. He had scored ten points below me on a sixty-question test. I was frustrated. Why didn't he try? I wanted to do math, not chemistry. I had studied for him, and he hadn't even made a respectable effort.

And no, this boy never did any AMC practice questions. He never listened to the K-pop I liked, he didn't read any of my writing. When I won a schoolwide slam poetry contest and moved onto the citywide competition, he didn't attend the performance. 

But I can't truly blame him for not trying; after all, I had never asked him to do any of these things. He was a sixteen-year-old boy and it hadn't occurred to him that his girlfriend had a life of her own that he could participate in. And it hadn’t occurred to his girlfriend that she should expect to be more than a piece in someone else’s jigsaw puzzle.

I was so distracted that year, I didn’t realize that spring had arrived until it was almost over. May in Portland happened in fits and starts, as if it weren’t certain of its inclination to warmth. To me, it was AP exam season; to my boyfriend’s family, it was boating season. 

He asked me to go, and I said I had to study, I had to work, I had to volunteer. I told him he should take our mutual friend instead.

He stared at me. "Why will you never go out on the boat with me?"

I had run out of excuses, and we both knew it.

I fumbled to explain. "It's too bourgeoisie . . . I'm not like that. I don't know how to do things like that." To make matters worse, I wasn't even certain if I was pronouncing bourgeoisie correctly, having only ever seen the word on paper. That was something he made fun of me for, my mispronunciation of words I'd never heard spoken aloud.

Honestly, I barely understood my own hesitation. I knew how to swim. I didn't want to explain to my conservative parents what I was doing with a boyfriend on a boat, but that was a surmountable discomfort.

I imagined myself sitting in a swimsuit, the boat knifing through the Willamette River. The sun spilling itself all over us. The endless water. Closing my eyes whenever I wanted, red summer against my eyelids, knowing I wouldn't drown, not in a place like this. Excess. When I was a child, my family had been on food stamps.

But wasn't that the point of everything? To end up somewhere better than where we had been? Why would I let the past anchor me?

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That June, Imagine Dragons came to Portland. My boyfriend's family had tickets, but his older brother decided not to go, so my boyfriend invited me in his place.

We all knew Imagine Dragons. Their chart-topping single "Radioactive" had made them rock stars, but I had liked them since they landed on the Billboard Hot 100 with "It's Time". These were box seats, seats my family couldn't afford ourselves. Honestly, concert tickets were a luxury we wouldn't indulge in. I wanted to go, I really did. But the concert was the evening before my SAT exam, which I was taking for the second time.

I texted him that I was very sorry, but I couldn't go see Imagine Dragons. He wasn’t happy. He asked, not for the first time, why I cared so much about this exam when I had already received a score in the 99th percentile the first time I took it. To placate him and assuage my own guilt, I suggested he bring a mutual friend instead, the same girl he took on the boat. 

When my mother heard, she shook her head.

"You told him to take her? How can you be so naive? Rona, you don't understand anything about men."

I recalled a story Mom had once told about a family friend. When his future wife met him, she knew this was the man who could get her out of China and into America. In the months leading up to their immigration, she wouldn't let him talk to any other women, not even female friends. She wasn't willing to risk losing her new life for his wandering eyes.

I knew what my mother was implying, but I trusted my boyfriend. Anyway, he had already asked her, and I wasn't about to demand for a change of plans.

He went to the concert with our friend. I took the SAT and got a score high enough to satisfy any college in the country. 

Three months later, we were broken up and he was dating the girl who had said yes to everything I had said no to.

When asked about her motivation for writing "Your Best American Girl", Mitski said: “I wasn’t trying to send a message. I was in love. I loved somebody so much, but I also realized I can never be what would fit into their life.”

I got into MIT early action and my ex-boyfriend was rejected. By the time we received our decisions, the breakup was far enough in the past that this victory didn't grant me any vindictive pleasure. Besides, he didn't need to get into MIT, not the way I did.

When Mitski sang, You're the sun, you've never seen the night, I thought about the ease with which he carried himself, unmarred by any notion of scarcity. When she sang, I guess I couldn't help trying to be your best American girl, I recalled the requests he made for me to fit into his life, how he never tried to understand mine.

The boat was never mine. The concert ticket was never mine. Those were gifts from a boy who could reclaim them and give them to anyone else just as easily.

But that SAT score, that MIT acceptance letter, those belonged to me. They are mine even now, remnants of a younger self who didn’t know where she wanted to go but knew she needed more than a boyfriend to get there. 

As Mitski sang, the spotlights cast her in eerie, otherworldly colors: fuchsia, lime-green, indigo, lime-green again. I felt like I was made of guitar strings strummed by her voice; I wasn't sure where I ended and she began. 

I didn’t get to see Imagine Dragons, but here I was, years later and thousands of miles away, seeing Mitski instead, enveloped by friends and strangers and music, my own best American girl.

In the intervening years, I’ve dated several people, but the person who reminded me most of this ex-boyfriend was also someone I spent three years with. Even 

In retrospect, the only thing I regret about that relationship is staying for so long. I was always enough as myself, why didn’t I know that?

But I’ve gone viral for me, which, for the purposes of this post, we’ll define as getting-more-online-attention-than-expected. Since, again, I am but a microscopic amoeba in a vast sea of cat photos and TikTok trends, there really does not need to be much attention levied my way for one of my posts to be considered “viral.”

Most recently, I had a funny interaction on Hinge, which I posted about on Twitter:

Anyway, I didn’t think too much about the post. It was one a.m. After spending a few more minutes scrolling through various apps on my phone, I plugged it into its charger and went to sleep.

The next morning, I woke up to more Twitter notifications than expected. Apparently, a lot of people…were invested in whether or not pi was rational? I’m still not entirely sure what the appeal of this post is.

There were people commenting that actually, pi is rational because it is 22/7, and there were people commenting that those people were wrong, and then there were also some 280-character-long proof attempts. Even an indie rock band that represented Slovenia in Eurovision 2023 chimed in. All that was perfectly fine, and a great use of the bird website.

But unfortunately, there were also a few responses insulting the guy in the screenshot, insinuating he was stupid or poorly educated, which didn’t feel fair. I don’t know too much about him, given that this has been our only interaction thus far, but it felt mean-spirited to attack him when really, he hadn’t done much wrong and was maybe just confused about some math definitions.

I added another Tweet as a follow-up:

Anyway, the insults seemed to stop after that. But still, I reflected on my role in all this. Sure, it was unlikely this guy would ever see this post—I had cropped out his name and photo—but what if he had? What if he had felt hurt by some of the comments?

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This instance is yet another example of a larger trend I’ve noticed on Twitter. It is so easy to grow a following through expressing contempt, or “dunking”, on other people. I see some “big accounts” that have hundreds of thousands of followers—the content that goes the most viral are the posts that mock or shame others. Yes, often the derisiveness feels “deserved”—for example, there’s a female influencer who will quote-retweet men in her comments who are saying misogynistic things undermining her success—but still, it doesn’t feel like the kind of positive interaction that I want to spend my spare emotional energy on, and I wonder about the net benefit of giving some random troll with sub-100 followers a much bigger platform.

You might be wondering, okay, Rona, so why bother with Twitter at all? And I’m not entirely sure of the answer myself. There’s no denying that I’ve meet some wonderful people through it, that I’ve gotten multiple emails from startup founders and venture capitalists wanting to chat after seeing my Tweets, and that it is useful to curate an online, accessible database of who I am and what I believe in.

But I also believe that social media does change you, if you’re not careful. As a teenager, I once wanted to make travel vlogs about my life, and immediately, there was a shift in how I approached the world. My surroundings became filtered through the question of, is this something worth filming? Is this Content? I didn’t want to live my life like that, so I quickly stopped doing vlogs.

A change like that is obvious, because you’re now holding the camera, viewing the world through the lens. Something like a trend towards Tweeting about certain topics—topics that offer a dopamine rush fueled by virtual social approval—is less perceptible.

My Twitter following has grown quite a bit in the last few months—and I can feel the increasing distance between my real life and my online life. None of these people know you, I remind myself. Who do they know? They know a pixelated profile photo, captured at a posed moment where I looked nicer than usual, and some quirky quips that passed through my mind. But then again, who is to say which one is the “real” me? Can I really pretend that all these online interactions won’t have any bearing on my “real” self?

I want a life brimming with love, introspection, creativity, curiosity. My favorite people in the world—my closest friends, my family—don’t have any social media presence. Recently, I’ve started wondering why I spend so much time in spaces where few of my favorite people exist.

Seems like an obvious insight, perhaps, but for a teenager who had spent her entire life in school—in preparation for her life—this felt revelatory. One day, all the “obvious” stepping stones would be gone, and it would be up to me to find my own path forward. What did I come to college for? What do I owe the world? When I look back on my life, what do I want to see?

When I was eighteen, nineteen, and even twenty, these questions felt impossible to answer. I thought maybe I wanted to go to grad school and get a PhD—but truthfully, I only wanted that because it would offer me another few years of obvious stepping stones.

Finals are over, and it’s official: I passed. I’m going to graduate with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science. In a few days, I’ll cross the grass at Killian Court, shake President Kornbluth’s hand, and that will be the end of college.

I can’t say my career path is much more certain than it was a few years ago, but I’m much more comfortable with that uncertainty. That, in itself, is an answer—I’m not sure what will happen next, but I know that I’m resilient and resourceful enough to approach anything.

While MIT gave me so many skills—I couldn’t code before I came to college, nor could I write a math proof—I’m not sure if I would say it quite shaped my future, in that I don’t see my future as a specific career but as something more amorphous. I see it as the people I’ll love and the books I’ll read and the struggles I’ll face, too. The years I spent as an undergrad have irrevocably changed me, and I used to credit it all to MIT, but now I’m unsure. Maybe growing up would’ve happened to me anywhere.

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So, what’s next? I’ve been doing many job interviews, but I’ve also received TAship funding for a master’s program at MIT starting in the fall. There is a lot more within computer science I want to learn, since I added the major quite late and mostly took required classes. I’m also wary of the current job market, which is (as many people will tell you) terrible for new grad software engineers. It isn’t that I’m worried about finding a job, but that I don’t know if I’ll land at a place that will truly help me thrive.

For the summer, I’ll be moving to New Haven, CT and reading many, many books. I want to write; there’s a story idea that has tugged at me for quite some time, but school made it difficult to give space to anything more in-depth than a blog post or a humor piece.

A few days ago, my friends and I were in New Orleans, toasting to the rest of our lives, when one of them said, “All roads lead to software engineering.” Just today, I saw the LinkedIn profile of an artist who had studied English in college—she had recently pivoted to software.

For many years, I was averse to declaring computer science as a major because I didn’t want to be one of those people, and ultimately, I only did so because it would allow me to MEng—complete a computer science master’s program at MIT. And even after adding computer science as a second major, I would always introduce myself as a double-major, with mathematics first (and on my diploma, it is my primary major).

One of my Twitter mutuals once wrote something like, “Software engineering steals so much talent by making it too easy to be comfortable.” That’s paraphrasing, but the idea, to my understanding, is that because the bar for a well-paying tech job is relatively low (compared to the bar for the same salary in other fields), it is really easy to take the path of least resistance and sign away forty hours of your life every week in exchange for a six-figure salary at age twenty-two. But then eventually you will be thirty-two and the last decade of your life was pledged away to an uninteresting, meaningless job that never made you feel fulfilled.

Often, when I talk to people about this struggle, they misunderstand me and say something like, “Well, you can make your bag and then write on the side!” And that is what a lot of creative people do, and major props to them for balancing it all. But that isn’t what I want to do. I don’t want my best hours to be devoted to bullshit and then my real life to happen in the confines of evenings and weekends. I don’t want to spend time on bullshit, period. Don’t get me wrong—I like computer science, I like coding, and I build my own projects for fun. I also like writing, but that doesn’t mean I would enjoy a job writing ad copy for some random product. Similarly, many software jobs feel frivolous or unchallenging, and it can be hard to discern between different entry-level roles.

I guess all of this is to say that it’s up to me what I do with these degrees, and it could be very easy to take the first job offer I get, and that could be an acceptable life, too. Or I could start the MEng in the fall and use it as a year to hide out from the rough job market, put in minimal effort into my thesis, and at the end of the year I would have a master’s degree and it would be fine, or I could pour my soul into researching a topic I’m deeply interested in, and at the end of the year I would have a master’s degree and it would be fine. Basically, regardless of what I do, most outcomes will appear the same on the surface, and what truly matters—the details that make up a life—are the things other people can’t see.

It’s finals season here at MIT, and I just finished up two exams on Friday and have one more on Tuesday, so won’t bother with an in-depth life update, but wanted to share a few things I’ve made recently.

Septogram

https://septogram.rona.wang/

My friend Tiffany introduced me to Octogram, a series of eight-letter word puzzles, so I made Septogram—a series of seven-letter word puzzles. In honor of the late Jack Lance, the creator of Octogram, who passed away about a month prior. His puzzles brought me and my friends a lot of joy.

So You Need Grad School Housing

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/so-you-need-grad-student-housing

My first-ever humor piece is up in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency! I read McSweeney’s all the time and finally decided to submit something for publication. Based on true experiences…

Personal website

https://rona.wang/

I also rebuilt my personal website recently—it’s an interactive web terminal now (thanks to my friend Linda for the inspiration). There are lots of hidden commands, see which ones you can find!

Anyhow, that’s it from me for now. I have a term paper due tomorrow and a math exam on Tuesday, and then it’ll be off to New Orleans with a few friends until Friday, when we’ll be back for Senior Ball. Finally departing from undergrad—feeling bittersweet, but it’s time to close this chapter.

“Detail of the Rice Chest” by Monica Youn

My friend Alec attended the L.A. Times Festival of Books recently and heard Monica Youn read this poem. They were completely blown away—I think their exact words were something like “I didn’t know poetry could do that”. It isn’t quite the same experience, reading it online, but still. An absolutely stunning, incisive portrait of Asian Americanness.

“At the Clinic” by Sally Rooney

I love Normal People, and this short story is a predecessor to the novel, featuring Marianne and Connell. There’s a sentence in this story I keep coming back to. This sketched trajectory of their relationship bore so little resemblance to anything he thought or felt that he just nodded and said: Yeah, exactly. That sense of resignation—not even attempting to cross the abyss—Rooney is sharp for that observation.

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Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88

An extraordinarily dense interview. I didn’t get through all of it, and I don’t think I’ll be able to process everything I did read. She articulates so much of the role writing plays in my own life: Yes, that you travel inside of. I think that’s what poems are supposed to do, and I think it’s what the ancients mean by imitation. When they talk about poetry, they talk about mimesis as the action that the poem has, in reality, on the reader…I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

I found this in my living group’s library and started it on a whim. I’ve often found it difficult to get through historical books—admittedly, old-timey prose can be dry—but this one is absolutely captivating and so relevant even a century later; I guess some things don’t change. Her sentences sparkle, but the most impressive achievement, I think, is in the whip-smart observations on human nature.

Shamir’s secret sharing

Figured I should share something technical. Recently learned about this secret-sharing algorithm, which exploits the Lagrange interpolation theorem, which you may have learned about in a high school algebra class. I found it very clever! Like with most other cryptography, no idea if I’ll ever get to apply it in the real world, but as an intellectual puzzle, it’s fun.

It’s a story I’ve heard from plenty of people. I needed to be careful, because I was surrounded by people who wanted to see me fail. This dynamic might continue long after college admissions; after another friend received a prestigious graduate fellowship, he said he felt it, too.

I’ve never really known how to deal with others’ envy, and it feels weird to even say that, to suggest that other people might be envious of me—it’s like I’m claiming there’s something about me or what I have that is so spectacular that others might want it, and isn’t that a boastful claim to make? And isn’t it presumptuous of me to assume someone else’s underlying emotions?

So I’ll give an example where the other person openly admitted their envy of me, so I don’t have to speculate about their motivations.

I switched to a math major (from a humanities major) in fall 2019; initially I struggled to adjust, but by late 2020, I had gained more confidence in the area. Some cool opportunities came my way: I was invited to speak at Math Prize for Girls, a competition for top female students in mathematics, which I’d attended in high school. I was accepted into well-regarded international programs. I was admitted into a research program that led me to co-write a graph theory paper with an established mathematician, which was then published in a combinatorics journal and got me an Erdös number of two (which, to be clear, is a vanity metric and not indicative of much, but it’s still a fun fact that can raise some eyebrows).

One of my close friends, a fellow math major and a guy, saw all this happening and asked, point-blank: “Do you think you’re getting all of this because you’re a girl?”

That question went over about as well as you might expect. I was one of four women (out of sixty students) in my research program. If they were trying to show favoritism to girls, they were doing a terrible job at it.

Aside: because he was such a close friend, I did approach this question in good faith and with nuance. After all, I have no idea how these programs admit students, so it’s possible that being from an underrepresented demographic boosted my application. But really, I don’t think the answer matters that much.

Later, he did confess that he’d asked that because he was jealous that I was succeeding, even though he didn’t think I was that good at math. We talked things through and moved on.

This was a relatively mild situation—yes, this guy was upset and said something rude, but he wasn’t actively rooting for my downfall, and he never would’ve done anything malicious to hurt my prospects. But in another universe, maybe he would’ve emailed those programs saying I was bad at math so they should kick me out, although I’m not sure how effective that approach would’ve been. Maybe he would’ve purposefully given me the wrong answers when I asked him for help. Maybe this resentment would’ve manifested in ways that are completely unrelated to math.

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In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure how I should’ve defused the situation or avoided it in the first place. Yes, there’s an argument that I didn’t do anything wrong so there was nothing I should’ve done differently—that’s true, but it isn’t about whether or not I’m morally right. It’s about self-preservation, and things could’ve gotten much worse if this guy had been more malicious.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have texted him about all the good things happening—maybe that had felt like bragging. Or I asked him for too much homework help, so his impression of my math ability was worse than the truth? Once I’d realized he was angry, I could’ve resorted to self-deprecation (you’re right, I don’t deserve this) to placate him.

You might be reading this and thinking, if you have to conjure these defensive tactics, why are you even friends with this guy? But it isn’t about this specific friendship. It’s about how I interact with people in general. I’m not sure how to avoid this flavor of ire. I’m not sure how to preemptively stifle these flares of jealousy before they ignite.

For many years, the only LinkedIn profile I had was a joke.

I made it on a whim for shits and giggles, but there was some underlying discomfort, too, which I was trying to manage through humor.

I hated LinkedIn. I knew how people use it—how they scroll through someone’s profile, casting judgment over all of their achievements (or lack thereof), reducing a person to their resumé. A charade that I’d eventually have little choice but to participate in—so many job applications required a LinkedIn profile.

I didn’t want my accomplishments to be dissected—I didn’t want to do anything that might threaten others’ egos. Hence, jokes! In third grade, my classmates called me the class clown, but they also called me the second-smartest kid in the class (first place went to my math rival). If they were busy laughing, they wouldn’t hate me for how quickly I could complete my times tables. I don’t think eight-year-old Rona had the social awareness to understand jester’s privilege, and there are so many more reasons why I adore humor—truly, it makes the world go round—but even now, I sometimes find myself relying on it as a protective measure.

Not everyone uses that tactic. Some of my friends keep a low-profile, no online presence, never talk about what they’re doing. Others are extremely discerning about who they forge relationships with, and only get close with people who don’t seem prone to envy. I’m still figuring out my own style.

It feels imbalanced to write a post about others’ envy but to not discuss my own, but truthfully, as I got older, I became less preoccupied with comparing myself to other people. The change wasn’t one of moral goodness but self-assurance. I’m happy with my path with all of its twists and turns; I’m happy with who I am. This doesn’t make me better than anyone who might struggle with envy—first, I still have my moments of insecurity, and second, I think it’s a perfectly natural emotion and society would be more harmonious if it were socially acceptable to confess one’s envy.

Maybe that’s why my favorite non-single song from Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour album is “jealousy, jealousy”. It’s admittedly surface-level—she never delves deeper into the root of her resentment—but she’s unafraid to make that angsty adolescent cognitive dissonance so explicit: And I see everyone getting all the things I want/And I'm happy for them, but then again, I'm not.

Messy. But that’s what makes life interesting, no?

It's been a decade, and only brief snippets of that MIT still remain in my memory. Walls papered with activities posters, that's the main image I recall. I suppose some things don't change.

Throughout high school, I would visit MIT several more times for the Harvard-MIT Mathematics Tournament and Math Prize for Girls. It would be easy to editorialize, to imbue these experiences with the overbearing hand of hindsight, to claim that these events were all stepping stones to an inevitable destiny where I would be writing this blog post to you. But that isn't how life works, right? It would be just as simple to tell a story about any other number of colleges, had I decided to attend those instead. 

Here's a secret: MIT wasn't my top choice. My top choice was Stanford, which I was not admitted to. And if I hadn't chosen MIT, I probably would have chosen the University of Pennsylvania, which had recruited me for their creative writing program.

I adore MIT now, and I always say that I'm so glad I came here, that it was absolutely the correct decision. But who knows? Maybe I would be saying that too if I had gone to Stanford, or UPenn, or anywhere else. Truthfully, I started college when I was young and impressionable, and wherever I had attended would've irrevocably changed me. Was MIT perfect for me, or did I become someone who was perfect for MIT? And honestly, does the distinction even matter?

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When I was in my late teens, people would ask, Rona, why did you choose MIT if you're interested in the humanities? I wasn't quite sure of the answer myself, so I would respond with some lifted-from-the-admissions-brochure sentence about how MIT has a stellar humanities program (which, by the way, it does) or a vague gesture at my interests in mathematics. 

But I'm not a teenager anymore, and I don't feel any need to defend myself. If I think back to the decision I made as a high school senior, it seems obvious, and I'm sure I would make the same decision again.

I was the rare person who didn't love Campus Preview Weekend, MIT's famously extravagant and wild weekend for admitted students. I found the schedule demanding and confusing; I didn't know anybody else who had gotten into MIT and struggled to meet other kids. In contrast, UPenn's visiting session felt much more normal and easy to understand. But I suspect, deep down, during that entire stretch of April, I always knew I was going to choose MIT.

Bluntly put, it was the most selective school I was admitted to, and I was a stressed-out seventeen-year-old, so of course that social perception mattered to me. From speaking to UPenn students, it also sounded like UPenn's mathematics and computer science programs were not as strong (please note that I am not commenting on the actual rigor or quality of these departments, this is simply what I heard from the kids there), and while I liked the humanities a lot and knew UPenn's creative writing program was incredible, I had some inkling of the job prospects (or lack thereof) for an English major. And if I was going to study STEM, well, MIT it was.

When I was younger, I didn't know how to confess these reasons, because they seemed so shallow. I wanted to impress people around me and I wanted to get a job? And even now, while I think those are important considerations, I certainly hope I wouldn't carry out the rest of my career in the same manner. I want to work at moonshot start-ups doing exciting stuff, even if they don't look as shiny on my LinkedIn as McKinsey or Google or Jane Street would, and they don't offer the financial stability of an established company.

But even though my reasons for choosing MIT were probably not that deep or thoughtful, they still led me to the right place. It turns out that those reasons were decent signals for what actually matters. Like, I went here because I wanted others to think I was smart for going here, but hey, MIT does admit a lot of really smart, hard-working kids, and thus I'm fortunate to have befriended so many amazing, brilliant people. 

Petey suggests looking at a school's alumni to decide if you want to become "that type of person." During the beginning of my time at MIT, I struggled with this, because I didn't want to become the "stereotypical MIT alum": that is, an engineer without interests in the wider world, working a cushy job at a big company. Of course, the truth is that MIT has so many alumni—each graduating class is over a thousand people—that it isn't easy to generalize, and my perception of an "MIT alum" was rooted in broad, unflattering strokes colored by teen angst. 

It only struck me much later that I may be different, but that means I could be a different type of MIT alum. I could be someone that incoming MIT first-years could look at and say, hey, I could also grow into becoming someone like her. MIT's identity is ever-shifting; while I was only thinking about how it might change me, I failed to consider how I could change MIT, too.

It seems to me that we swath an imaginary future world in pretty words. We want it comfortable, we want it just, we want it innovative, and most of all, we want it beautiful. VC-talk is speckled with grandiose promises: we are building the [insert-product] that will reshape society. We are disrupting the [insert-field] landscape. Everybody agrees that our current world is not good enough, and we need to strive for change, and we aren’t quite sure how that change will ripple outwards into our global systems, but, well—here’s another pretty word! Hopefully it’ll distract you from asking any more difficult questions.

I suppose we are all shackled to the linearity of time, hence this preoccupation with the future: the only chunk of our existence that has not yet been determined for us. I used to cling to regret—I wish I could go back in time and do MIT all over again, knowing everything I know now—until I truly thought about it and realized that repeating years of my life with full knowledge of future outcomes would be incredibly tedious.

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This reverence we give to the future, I don’t think it’s quite deserved. The future is not so different than any other instance of time, except that it has not happened yet, and thus any adjectives may be attached to it. It can be apocalyptic. It can be dazzling. It can be destructive, or it can be beautiful. This attitude reminds me of the conservative attitude towards fetuses. Because it has not demanded anything from us, we can imagine it to be anything we want—how convenient!

I’ve found myself seduced by this easy illusion. I’m not sure what I’ll do after graduation, but I hope it’ll be full of friendship and intellectual exploration. There’s nothing wrong with these platitudes about the future, except that they allow for laziness through vagueness. There is some importance in reflecting upon and understanding which values to prioritize—certainly that is better than wandering in the dark without any well-defined values at all—but values need to be achieved through action. It is good to know where the moon is, but you’ll never get there without building the rocket ship.

I’m probably too young to be giving any definitive advice on how to define the future, so I’ll end this post by discussing the future I imagine for myself and how I want to get there.

Sometimes, younger students—especially those who want to finish college in less than four years—ask me why I’ve been around MIT for so long. My answer is always because I love learning, and I love taking classes, and I love being in this inspiring, intellectual environment. I’m sticking around next year for a master’s degree. This choice has undeniable opportunity costs—I could earn much more working in industry—but actions reflect values. Seizing the future I actually want—instead of the one that will be inflicted upon me—means being okay with having less money or status than my peers.

Yesterday, my friend told me that he thought I was unusual for an MIT student. You’ve taken gap years, you’ve traveled the world, you write so much. Revealed preferences—perhaps I’ve always liked doing what is interesting in the moment, instead of working towards some aspirational future. Except that isn’t quite correct. In choosing to take a year off to work in New Zealand instead of grinding away on problem sets in college, I chose a future where I would be someone with New-Zealand-gap-year experiences instead of sophomore-year-at-MIT experiences. There is no such thing as delaying life; this is already my life. Is my future meaningfully distinguishable from the choices I have already made, the person I already am? Maybe I don’t need to worry about the future so much—the train will always come.

Recently, I read something by a fiction writer that went something like, it’s so upsetting how people can just enter these trivial prompts and then pass this work off on their own! I’ve spent so much time learning how to write well and then this random guy in his mom’s basement will generate a Pulitzer-Prize novel with a few keystrokes.

As somebody who has spent many years learning about the craft of writing, I certainly understand the frustration—if my goal was to produce well-written sentences, then perhaps the advent of ChatGPT would mean that all my efforts had been wasted. But AI-generated writing doesn’t bother me, and if somebody were to create a story generated by AI “written in Rona’s style” or trained on my publicly available work, I wouldn’t mind—I’d be amused, more than anything else. Of course, this is only my reaction, and certainly other creatives might not feel the same (and a quick glimpse at Twitter would prove that they don’t feel the same).

Artists’ ire is two-pronged. One, artificial intelligence poses a professional threat. I’m privileged in that I never expected to rely on writing as a steady source of income, and if everything goes as planned, by June, I will hold bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science from MIT. I’m uncertain how I would feel if this weren’t the case, so it’s possible that, under the stress of economic insecurity, my opinion would be vastly different, but my current belief on this topic is: AI is absolutely a professional hazard to artists, as it is a hazard to software engineers, data analysts, executive assistants, and a menagerie of other professions. It is a hazard in the same sense ride-sharing was a hazard to taxi drivers and photography was a hazard to painters. All this is to say, technological innovation reshapes our processes and systems, and it inevitably threatens current jobs. This does not mean we shouldn’t move forward.

But even if you can agree with that notion on an intellectual, abstract level, that doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly stressful to see your career prospects shrivel up. One of my friends predicts that AI will lead to widespread unemployment, which will bring about civil unrest—and while I hope this won’t be the case, I can certainly understand the underlying rage that comes with losing a future you worked so hard to achieve.

Two, artificial intelligence is creatively humiliating. It can hurt to see a machine churn out a derivative of your work, to know that a soulless language model trained on snippets of your soul to produce said derivative work.

I have limited knowledge of copyright law and how data is used within these models, so I can’t comment on the legal ramifications here (and I suspect that the government will move to enact new legislature in this direction). I also don’t want to undermine other people’s emotional responses, so I only speak for myself here. I don’t quite see my work as an extension of myself, or as a deep excavation of my inner life, or perhaps the more accurate statement here is that I view the process of writing as distinctly different from the product of writing. Translating the confusing, limitless galaxies within me—that process is intimate, a conversation between the page and me, and that journey won’t disappear simply because a computer can generate pretty paragraphs. The joy of reaching for an apt metaphor, of conjuring a visceral image, of understanding myself more fully—that remains regardless. Once those words are written, once they exist as separate entities beyond myself, they are for the reader. And if the reader is a robot that wants to feed upon my dangling participles only to spit out an imitation, that’s okay too.

I became interested in songwriting after listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour album and realizing how wonderfully she captured the pains of first love, first heartbreak, teenage insecurity. Her songs climbed the Billboard Hot 100 because they resonated with so many people, because they bridged the distance between souls in crisply-produced three-minute bundles.

Her music reminded me of what I’ve tried to do for a long time, with my writing, with my fiction, with this Substack. Life is less lonely when somebody sees you. Feelings become more manageable when they exist somewhere outside of your own body. Identifying something universal within your own specific experiences—that feels like finding a lighthouse among dark churning waves.

In tenth grade, I entered a writing contest for the first time, with a short story I wrote over winter break. It was sarcastic and silly, and I infused it with observations that had plagued me for years, like how I felt trapped between the dichotomy of being a “girly-girl” and a “tomboy”, and how boys got to be multifaceted but girls were labeled one thing or another. It was very, very fun to write. The story ended up winning a national award, and I flew to New York City for the awards ceremony.

While there were many wonderful outcomes that arose from this experience—it was the first external, institutional validation I ever received for my writing, and it helped me later in college admissions—I think the most significant internal development was the sudden insight that I could talk about the stuff that bothered me. Starting from fourth or fifth grade, I felt like I’d been constricted by gender norms, by internalized misogyny, by other people’s expectations of who I was “supposed” to be—but I’d never really discussed my frustrations with anybody. Then I got to make up a story and give my problems to a fictional character.

That was years ago, and my relationship to creative writing has since become more complicated. I’ve been incredibly lucky in many ways—eternal gratitude to those who have believed in me and supported me even when life was rocky—but it was only after the (metaphorical) ink on the contract had dried that I realized being a professional writer is very different from being a hobbyist, from being a kid tapping out fanfiction at midnight. The expectations were stricter, the critics were more vicious, and the stakes were higher.

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I don’t try to take my writing too seriously, which isn’t always easy. But I’ve found that when I become obsessive about crafting a beautiful phrase or vivid image, that’s often a sign of ego—and it’s necessary sometimes, but it can also get in the way of the reasons I began writing in the first place.

What if I want to be terrible and artless? What if I want to draw ridiculous comics featuring characters with unrealistic proportions and sloppy storylines? What if I want to record a pop melody that bashes a thinly-disguised ex and upload it to Soundcloud only to get two likes? I don’t want to commodify everything, and I don’t want to be good at everything. I don’t want to think about the invisible audience hovering behind my shoulder, casting a critical gaze upon anything I produce.

My songs may never be heard by anybody other than myself—I don’t know if I should inflict my singing upon others. I don’t know if I have anything innovative to contribute, and I don’t know if I want people to scrutinize my music. Last week, as I wrote lyrics, the thought floated through me—this is a waste of time since I have no real musical aspirations, I should do something that might actually further my career like my software engineering problem set or my systems design reading or even just reading a novel—but I wanted to capture what I was feeling in that moment before it faded. I wanted to preserve that version of Rona before she was lost to the merciless linearity of time. It felt like a song was the most honest conduit for her, and it didn’t matter if it was terrible.

Chris is starting his PhD in the fall, making him the latest among my exes to pursue a STEM doctorate degree. My two high school boyfriends are both currently in PhD programs (pure math and chemical engineering); when we were teenagers, I obviously hadn’t given any thought to their plans regarding higher education, and had chosen to date them because we had a decent rapport and shared interests.

“Why are you always dating these PhD types? You’re overindexing on intelligence. Why don’t you go for someone like ‘James’,” my brother Kyler once told me. “James is ambitious, accomplished. He’s self-made.”

But I’ve never been romantically drawn to that kind of person—the Forbes 30 Under 30 type, the industry leader, the high achiever. Someone preoccupied with status, who wears success like luxury cologne.

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I didn’t say this to Kyler at the time, but it isn’t intelligence I’m looking for. It’s curiosity.

When I ask Chris how he got into chemistry, he tells me about how, at age six, he really liked this chemistry book—an introductory college textbook—and read it cover-to-cover. In seventh grade, he begged and begged his parents for a lab so he could do his own experiments. He adored the colors and textures. “It felt like magic,” he told me on one of our first dates.

It’s a story that diverges wildly from the backstories of other Olympiad kids I’ve known. My other friends almost always have a story that involves helicopter parents, prep classes starting in second grade, a childhood curated for success. And Chris had all of that, too—he had to play violin, he had to do worksheets in preschool while all the other kids played—but he also had an unrelenting love for chemistry.

Back when Chris and I were dating, his friend called us a “power couple.” It was a well-meaning compliment, but it made us both cringe, because it felt so far removed from reality. It felt like Chris and I were kids who had been obsessive about our interests, and then we’d gotten good enough at those interests to be rewarded with some extrinsic markers of success, but we certainly weren’t trying to appear on magazine covers or increase the number of commas in our bank accounts.

Over-optimized lives—cold showers, early-morning jogs, 500+ connections on LinkedIn—disinterest me. A life built to be seen by others—that’s not what I want.

My friends often say I can’t help but be myself. “You wear your heart on your sleeve,” they say. It’s true, I find it suffocating to cosplay anybody or anything else. I want to spend my time chasing whatever whims I have. I refuse to stifle my obsessions in pursuit of somebody else’s idea of excellence.

And that’s what I find so compelling in other people, too. Reckless curiosity, childlike wonder, a neglected resumé. Intelligence matters, success matters, but perhaps those things arrive later, and perhaps those qualities are not so rare among people I know. But the inner confidence to commit to a passion—that is special.

At MIT, while these people certainly exist in droves—McKinsey information sessions are packed full, pre-professional clubs proliferate like dandelions—I’ve found it reasonably simple to avoid them and befriend people who express intellectual curiosity and genuine passion. To be fair, MIT may have cultivated a different culture than these other institutions, so this might be much easier for me than those at other schools, but here are some of the insights I’ve gleaned from my time in college:

I’m not involved in professional clubs.

My sophomore year here, I joined a business club because I was interested in entrepreneurship and had some vague inclinations towards consulting—I liked the idea of using my entire skill set instead of choosing between STEM and humanities. The meetings were boring, I didn’t particularly click with anybody there, and I realized that if I actually pursued a career in this direction, I would have to continue going to boring meetings surrounded by similar people. Sorry, maybe that’s harsh, and it’s obviously a generalization, but the realization was enough to turn me off from these type of clubs and this entire flavor of career.

I’m still on the mailing lists for various computer science groups because I want the job opportunities (and free food), but I don’t try to get involved with them at any deeper level. While I’m sure these clubs appeal to a large variety of people—it’s possible to want to cultivate your professional prospects while still being genuinely passionate about computer science, after all—they certainly attract careerists, and I’d like to avoid careerists.

Or, as Eric put it, “These organizations do nothing except act as vessels to sell [college] student resumes to company sponsors for thousands of dollars, then disburse that money on free food and branded merchandise for members.”

I take non-required classes.

Last month, I was trying to decide between taking 18.03 (Differential Equations) and 18.032 (also Differential Equations, but with a more mathematical and theoretical flavor). My friend was taking 18.03, while I knew nobody in 18.032. Due to a mandatory recitation for another class, I would have to skip 18.032 recitations, while I could attend 18.03 recitations. And did I really want to grind during senior spring, especially when I was also taking four other classes?

There were multiple reasons why I decided on 18.032. I dislike black-boxes—a system that functions with opaque inner workings, such as consumer electronic devices. 18.03 had theorems we didn’t prove, and we were expected to use those theorems for rote computations. This was quite irritating to me, because WolframAlpha already exists. (This was also why I didn’t like my introductory machine learning class last fall.) 18.032 traded breadth for depth, which I preferred.

But the atmosphere of 18.032 was just different. 18.03 is in 10-250, one of MIT’s big lecture halls, and has hundreds of students. It’s required in multiple majors, and lots of people are there to check it off the list. My other friend told me “nobody takes 18.03 seriously.” Meanwhile, 18.032 has about twenty people. The kids in the classroom seemed to care much more about math. That made sense, I suppose—they had voluntarily signed up for what was considered a more challenging course.

So I stayed, because I wanted to be around people like that.

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I don’t hide from my passions.

At MIT, even before I got my book deal, many other writers would reach out to me, because they knew I liked writing a lot. I met a lot of my favorite people this way—like Michelle, who asked me to contribute to her science writing magazine, and is now pursuing a physics PhD, or Steven, who got a creative writing master’s degree in England and is now enrolled in an MD-PhD program. To be a creative writer at MIT, there’s a certain amount of going-against-the-grain required—a decision to sacrifice time and effort that could’ve been put towards your “real” career in STEM, to instead write. I was writing because it is something so deeply rooted in me that I couldn’t help but love it, but it became a fantastic way to attract likeminded people.

(As an aside, I think the meeting-cool-writers filter became less effective after I got the book deal, because suddenly there was social status attached to writing, and there were more people with ulterior motives trying to establish some connection with me.)

More generally, I don’t try to hide my interests out of fear of appearing uncool or something. That might sound ridiculous—we aren’t in high school anymore, after all—but even at MIT, people say I’m a nerd for caring so much about learning certain topics outside of class. Last week, my friend Wenjun and I started discussing continental drift because we have a shared interest in ancient Earth, despite being math and computer science majors, and somebody else asked, “Is this for a class or something?” He seemed confused why we wanted to talk about this when none of us were studying geology.

The way I figure it, if I’m open about what I care about, it’ll be a lot easier to meet people who care about the same things as me, and that’s worth looking uncool.

I have to be okay with loneliness.

This one is specifically for women and anyone else who might’ve been a minority within their interests (which I imagine is true for a lot of the STEM women out there). But as I tried pursuing my passions in computer science and mathematics beyond just taking classes, I noticed I was often the only woman there.

This might’ve started as early as middle school, when I joined Science Bowl and was one of two girls there out of about fifteen kids—I was captain of our B-team, and the rest of that team was boys older than me, and the only reason why it felt fine to lead them is probably because I was too young and oblivious to think there was any issue with the gender disparity.

More recently, during my summer math research project, I was the only woman in my group and one of four women (out of sixty-ish people) in the program. Last week, I tried going to a SIPB hackathon (the student club at MIT that makes cool stuff like our course scheduler) because I like building websites and wanted to help out, and I was the only woman there out of twenty-five or thirty people. By the way, all of these observations are made with the caveat that I was the only woman that I knew of, since I may be unaware of other people’s gender identities.

It’s sometimes hard to be the only woman in the room and I would love there to be more gender diversity within my interests. I also don’t blame anyone who can’t handle the isolation and otherness, and thus does not engage deeper with their interests. A lot of my confidence has come with age and being able to not care if guys ignore me, or condescend to me, or hit on me, but this was more difficult when I was younger.

I don’t know if this advice will work for anyone besides myself. There are many other traits and aspects I haven’t mentioned—I would consider myself to be outgoing, which certainly helps with meeting people—and again, I go to MIT. Friends who attend other prestigious institutions have had vastly different experiences, which makes sense, as I’d imagine that people who choose to attend elite schools probably prioritize professional development, economic and social capital, etc., and those priorities often squash one’s natural curiosity.

Overall, my belief is that like attract likes—the best way to find curious people is to be curious yourself. But of course, if you’re reading this blog post, you probably already knew that.

Even as a kid, school never fit right for me. I recall my third-grade teacher told us all to “divide your page in half.” The other students made horizontal or vertical slashes. Feeling rebellious, and wanting to amuse myself with the notion of “half”, I did a zig-zag that still partitioned the page into two equal areas. The teacher, who by this time of the school year was already familiar with my shenanigans, just sighed and said, “Rona, you can do that, but it might make things harder for you later.” (It turned out we had to make a pros and cons list with the two halves.)

I’ve never been very good at school. This feels strange to admit online for several reasons: 1) I go to MIT and presumably had a good enough GPA in high school to be admitted into MIT (as well as some other selective universities); 2) It seems embarrassing to struggle academically; 3) I don’t think this naturally lends itself to some romantic corollary about marching to the beat of my own drum or any other idiom. For every famous college dropout who started a billion-dollar tech company or became a chart-topping rap star, there are hundreds of college dropouts who ended up with financially and emotionally worse outcomes than if they had simply gotten the grades and graduated with degrees.

It’s not a particularly interesting struggle. It’s not a heartbreak immortalized in song lyrics, and it’s not a grief that demands witness through eulogies or obituaries. I don’t really know how to narrativize it, but I imagine many people reading this can understand this experience to some level: a missed deadline or three, frantic apology emails to professors, a mind that feels too much like a sieve.

I saw the above Tweet, which says: if ur self-narrative is that ur unconventional & don’t “fit into” traditional schooling but u lack material achievements, u have to ask urself if u rlly r an academic misfit or if ur avoiding responsibility

I’ve never really characterized my relationship with schooling as “unconventional” nor do I think of myself as an academic misfit, and I do fortunately have some material achievements, but I’ve started wondering if I’ve been squandering my own strengths by trying to pursue paths where my best qualities don’t get a chance to shine. I can Leetcode fine—it feels like a repeat of my competition math days—but I would prefer to build my own coding projects that might actually be useful to someone. I can go to lectures and do my homework and pass my classes, but at a university full of former valedictorians, all I can hope for is to put in my best effort and keep my eyes on my own paper.

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I like building things, I like making my own solutions. This past semester, several friends and I made a meme shirt, which riffed off the MIT logo. We advertised to the greater MIT student body, organized production and pick-up, and sold the shirts.

It was so fun. It made me wonder, if I can make stuff like this happen, why should I sit at a desk and work for somebody else? But I don’t have a superbly high risk tolerance and the start-up world is so saturated and shouldn’t I use my college degree to get one of those well-paying jobs with good work-life balance . . .

Even though I was categorized as Gifted and Talented as a child, I’ve never really identified with the “gifted-kid-to-burnout-pipeline” discourse. Maybe it was because I sensed, even as a kid, that the yardstick for “smart” is irrevocably entangled with yardsticks for “obedient”, “diligent”, “conscientious”, and many other traits that are very important but certainly should not be mistaken for “smart”.

I am very lucky that, in fourth grade, my parents sacrificed their time and carpooled with other families to drive an hour into downtown Portland so I could attend an accelerated school, and probably this decision propelled me into higher-level math classes which eventually spurred me to study for contests that got me into college, but in retrospect, I don’t think the opportunities in that program actually emphasized my particular talents, nor did it address my weaknesses. Accelerated is just that—fast-paced coursework, material usually assigned to those a few years older. But my struggles at my old elementary school didn’t arise because I possessed a thirteen-year-old’s academic skill at age nine. They were more about how I wanted to draw a zig-zag while everybody else drew straight lines.

Maybe this is all cope. Like, maybe I got a B in that one class because I’m just not that smart, not because I’m unique, but also, I don’t think the underlying reasons really matter—my point is that I’m starting to believe that, instead of trying to bust my ass to get an A instead when the rigid expectations of school have never quite made sense to me, it’s more productive to lean into the activities where I can naturally succeed.

When I found his page on December 25th, it had only been created three days prior, and was quite sparse.

The last time I edited a Wikipedia page was when I was eleven years old. I think I edited some governmental history of a foreign country and put my own name down as the prime minister. I sent the link to my friends, like, haha check it out. Then I got banned from Wikipedia for vandalism.

I’m not entirely sure what compelled me to make a Wikipedia account and add more to Gary Wang’s Wikipedia page. It was winter break and I was bored, sure. Yes, I feel some connection to this entire FTX catastrophe as SBF and Gary Wang both attended MIT, my current institution—it has stirred up questions for me about what an MIT education should mean, what responsibilities the privilege of being associated with a prestigious school brings, and what blind spots might be embedded in my studies as a math and computer science double-major. These are really interesting questions to me and I might write more about them in a later post.

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If I were being uncharitable to myself, maybe I would say it was ego—contributing to such a high-profile individual’s Wikipedia page is one of the easiest, high-impact avenues of shaping collective knowledge. Everybody looks at Wikipedia, it has great SEO, yet anybody can edit it (albeit with the risk of getting banned, as my sixth-grade experience demonstrated).

There also probably was some sense of kinship: yes, Wang is the most common surname in the world, but it’s still a surname that I share with Gary. He’s not that much older than me, and he studied computer science and mathematics at MIT too. Of course, these are surface-level similarities and I have no insight into his interior life, and no reason to believe we have anything else in common. Still, I grew up without seeing many tech executives who looked like me. I won’t pretend writing his Wikipedia page was a meaningful instance of anti-racism activism, but Gary Wang’s (likely voluntary) erasure from FTX’s frenzied publicity, despite his significant role within the company, made me want to amplify his presence within the narrative. A fact that might’ve tugged at my subconscious: in 21, a heist film about the MIT Blackjack Team, the protagonist was white, despite being Asian American in real life.

Anyway, I scoured the internet for reliable sources on Gary Wang’s life, and added what I could find. Out of curiosity, I also looked him up in the MIT alumni directory, although I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t count as a Wikipedia source, since it’s only accessible to MIT affiliates.

There wasn’t too much information available on the Internet. My goal wasn’t to smear Gary or to exalt him. I simply wanted to humanize him by providing a brief sketch of his life. SBF and Caroline Ellison received multiple New York Magazine articles detailing their childhoods, so Gary Wang’s Wikipedia page could at least include a few more sentences about who he was outside of FTX. Plus, I wanted to know, who was Gary Wang before his downfall? Could this disaster have been foreseen somehow?

In the past two weeks or so since I filled out his Wikipedia page, it has received more views than I anticipated, given that the FTX crash is no longer front-page news:

As the investigation into FTX progresses, I’m sure more information pertaining to Gary will surface publicly. I don’t know if I’ll continue updating his Wikipedia page—my goal was never to salaciously document every detail about this scandal, and I’ve gleaned enough information already to satisfy my own curiosities. If I were to continue editing Wikipedia, I think those efforts would be better spent elsewhere, as there are so many other stories that should be researched and recorded.