so this is the rest of your life

i'm about to graduate. now what?

A few years ago, I read somewhere—maybe on a self-help blog, maybe on some r/AskReddit thread, who knows—about a young adult who had graduated from college and realized one day, this is my life. This isn’t me preparing for my life—this is my life.

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.

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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.

with friends at senior ball 2023

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.

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.

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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.

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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.