December 18, 2022
It’s finally set in that high school is coming to a close. The past (almost) four years have been ones of turbulence. High variance in experience, but pretty great nonetheless. It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t change much. From a near-kidnapping experience in LA to seriously considering consciousness research as a career path - I’ve come out of high school with a diploma and a will to dedicate my time to experiencing it all: it may be cliché, but, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
I started my Grade 9 year with a near buzz cut and a good 40 pounds heavier than I am now. I attended a Catholic french-immersion public secondary school and started in September 2019. Attending a Catholic school (not being Catholic) and learning the Hail Mary to recite after O’Canada was fun in itself. I didn’t have my sights set on anything in particular and definitely wasn’t optimizing for college admissions like some of my friend's states-side were. Generally, I was trying to get good grades, save money for college and see what high school had to offer.
On a whim, I joined the wrestling team - the perfect opportunity to try something new. Lacking elegance and technicality, brute-force strength would get me to junior regionals. Wrestlers will know this is no feat, but I look back at my silver medal with satisfaction. Weekly weigh-ins and lifting up your classmates in a fire-man carry are both humbling, humorous and oddly empowering.
COVID hit the second semester of my freshman (Grade 9) year and would be a blessing in disguise in the long run. Scared of bringing the virus home that summer and in desperate need of a job for my own sanity. An application spree would begin in parallel with a digital marketing internship with a bridal company in New York. Unfortunately, age integrity had to get thrown out of the window for this one.
My “employers” were made to believe I was a first-year engineering student, but monitoring KPIs on Google Sheets required just the amount of expertise for the 9th grader I was. So this was fine. A newfound understanding of age being a minor limiting factor in competence was unknowingly life-changing, and for that, I’m grateful, even if it meant construing false narratives about PHYS101 at the local university (eekkkkk).
Note: I do not condone lying about your age/educational experience. However, to be fair, I was only a supposed rising freshman.
I ended up working for a local media org and taking "Civics and Careers" through virtual summer school. A realized error of “doing it all” at the expense of suboptimality was my failure mode - and unfortunately, it would be one I continue to make to this day.
The pandemic, during a time when asynchronous school was a thing would be the most industriously fulfilled that I would ever be: setting my own schedule, booking virtual coffee chats with strangers over the internet, and watching The Big Short too many times to count (my biggest shame, sigh).
The pandemic would also be when I would learnt about effective altruism. I quickly tried to acclimate to the jargon on the forum by speed-reading the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which was a previously frequented site when I preached stoicism as the only philosophical school worth one’s time - I now choose not to introduce myself with my philosophical school of choice, except when humor is the priority. I would give a cringe TEDx Talk for Queen’s University, which was made virtual due to the pandemic and failed at making engineering the career path of choice with an organization I founded and ultimately let go.
What a time when saying I wanted to be an engineer made me a contrarian - at the time, it was once another quirk that made me different from my aspiring physician friends.
Grade 11 had begun, and I had just started working my job at the supermarket. The summer before Grade 11 was interesting: I received startup funding from the city to do consultancy work and booked a client with a uniform distributor, and completed some marketing copy work for a handful of clientele - this is before the mass discovery of CopyAI, of course. This year I would attend a rationality camp called WARP. A key lesson learned was that surrounding yourself with incredible people may feed into an insane case of imposter syndrome, but with the right framing, can fuel you with the belief that what’s possible is likely much larger than you can fathom. It was my first time travelling alone, living alone, attending an EAG, learning information theory, and I can now say candidly - seeing a summation symbol (please gasp now), my 16-year-old self at the time was confidently the least mathematically capable in the cohort, but we’re a tad better now 😉
Passion bleeds. Doing things is cool, but cooler when guided by reason, and sitting on the floor on backjacks reigns supreme.
I’m at the first real inflection point. Adulthood. Excitement. Anticipation, and truthfully some dread. The internalization that careers, life, and journeys are not linear. There’s no blood-shedding on the elements to dictate your life trajectory, akin to the ceremony in the first novel of the Divergent series (8-year-old me was obsessed).
Researchers studying the physics of the universe, realizing its infinitisemal nature probably deal with the dread of recognizing their insignificance or glee in excitement about never-ending possibility: realistically wavering between the extremes. In relation to a drastically less important parallelism - I feel this. There’s comfort in knowing that experience is bounded, and you can only go up or down - rails being the only form of purpose and contribution to society.
Multi-dimensionality means there’s so much to do, but I’m not physically able to do everything - a sad reality - but all the more reason to try and carve out my little niche in the grand scheme of it all.