Strive: A College Student's Revelations During a Global Pandemic

By Colleen Chang

What do you want to do with your life? What are you working towards? What do you Strive for?

In her second year of college, a year into the Covid-19 p

• Language: English
• Publisher: Colleen Chang
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885049788

Book preview

STRIVE

STRIVE

A College Student’s Revelations during a Global Pandemic

Colleen Chang

NEW DEGREE PRESS

Copyright © 2022 Colleen Chang

All rights reserved.

Strive

A College Student’s Revelations during a Global Pandemic

ISBN:

979-8-88504-976-4 Paperback

979-8-88504-977-1 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-978-8 Ebook

CONTENTS

Part 1. How We Got Here

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. The Definition of Success

Chapter 3. Speed and Progress

Part 2. See the Sights

Chapter 4. The Weight of Regret

Chapter 5. The Metric of Happiness

Chapter 6. Plant the Seeds

Chapter 7. Reframe the Challenge

Part 3. Use the Insights

Chapter 8. The Art of Slowing Down

Chapter 9. Work Backward

Chapter 10. Measure Your Life

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Part I

How We Got Here

1

Introduction

I basically withdrew from across the country.

I was baffled to hear Honson say these words; they came across far too nonchalantly for what he was saying. When we first met and Honson introduced himself, he shared a small fragment of his life story that left me in awe. What I didn’t know then was this was only the beginning of what turned out to be an account of an unsuspectingly turbulent journey full of pivotal and extraordinary decisions. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined considering those decisions, let alone making them myself.

Honson was part of Rutgers University’s graduating class of 2020—a cohort he hadn’t expected to be a part of when he first stepped foot onto the campus as a freshman five years ago. His untraditional path, as he likes to call it, began when he chose to take a gap year in a spur-of-the-moment decision.

In the spring of 2018, Honson received an email from his university about an upcoming artificial intelligence conference. It was the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference. He had always had an interest in technology, but he hadn’t pursued it until that moment when a particularly strong intrigue for this conference pushed him to purchase a ticket. Nothing was absurd about deciding to get a ticket for a technology conference except for the fact that it was two thousand dollars out of a broke college student’s pocket spent out of instinct.

I just figured, all right, by paying this, I get to explore as much as I can outside of academics. I flew over [to Silicon Valley] and got to see what was going on out in industry and completely fell in love with computer vision/machine learning and got to see how many applications AI was able to impact.

Going into university, Honson didn’t have any direction for what he wanted to do. He saw college as an opportunity to explore, and for him, that meant trying everything and anything. He took a vast range of courses but found himself struggling to do well in all of them.

The conference was a catalyst. It introduced him to a new realm of possibilities and sparked a shift in how he approached exploration. When he was trying as much as he could in as many fields as possible, he spread himself thin and struggled to juggle these vastly different worlds simultaneously.

Now, having found machine learning, he knew he had finally tapped into a world that truly called out to him. For him, the extensive application of machine learning let him maintain the breadth of knowledge he had pursued while being a narrow enough field to dive in headfirst.

After the conference, Honson found himself with a newfound spark of excitement. With nothing but mediocre school grades waiting for him back at university, he decided to withdraw from his courses in the middle of the semester and remain in California.

This was financially straining, as he was paying both his tuition back at university and living expenses in California. He needed to find a way to support himself and live by the choices he had made.

I was working at this social work company, helping them with leveraging technology in their business, like setting up all that infrastructure for them, and that was what basically helped me pay off [what you could call] my messed-up semester.

After fulfilling his urges to travel with a semester and summer of living entirely on his own terms, Honson was ready to go back to university for the fall.

I got to travel to California a couple of times, got to explore what I want to do, got to code, got to learn, got everything out of my system. I was ready to settle back down and go back to school...and then someone drops out of this internship with BMW.

A friend of his received an offer for a fall internship but decided to renege it at the last minute. With the stars seeming to align, Honson pursued it and found himself at the BMW plant in South Carolina a week before the fall semester, calling in once again to withdraw for what would cumulate in an entire year off from university.

When he finally returned to Rutgers’s New Jersey campus for the spring term, he was in an entirely different state of mind.

I came back with a new light; a new understanding of what it really meant to study and to learn and to grow as a person.

Coursework went from a redundant obstacle that robbed him of time to spend on projects to an opportunity to gain foundational knowledge to do what he wanted outside of school.

Because of that perspective shift, I was able to find a new purpose for going back to school, and I started doing super well again.

Now, Honson works as a technical consultant for an early-stage venture where he leverages his passions for artificial intelligence and machine learning to help other people. He’s able to apply his formal and experiential knowledge to fully immerse himself in the realm of technology.

He seems to be exactly where he’d like to be in his work, yet his endless curiosity drives him to do more. On one of the days I spoke to him, he had just pulled an all-nighter to turn a Raspberry Pi, a small