You're Asian, you must be smart, right?

Five years ago today I was fresh out of high school. The university I had been accepted to was not particularly thrilled about my grades, and I was probably in the process or had just finished writing them a letter explaining to them my extenuating circumstances, my profound disappointment in myself, and why they should allow me to continue my education at their institution. At this point in time.., I think I was spending most of my time hanging out with friends before we all left for college. We all had high hopes, we were all moving on from our immature, high school lives into our complex and interesting university worlds. We were to become the face of the next generation, the undergrads of class 2006.

The things on my mind involved mostly this entirely new experience of living in the dorms, the relief of being done with the monotony of high school, and a bit of apprehension at the seeming difficulty of the next four years to come.


Three years ago I was halfway done. I was finally moving onto classes specifically relevant to my study. I had no idea what to expect from these classes of course. "Analog Electronics I", "Digital Electronics I", and "Device Physics" doesn't mean much when you've only just barely understood this idea of resistor and capacitor networks, and how to solve using Ohm's law, KVL, current loops and whatnot. I had also put a lot of Philosophy under my belt by this point, and had mostly decided that I was to double major in the two if at all possible. How I was going to manage that and still take Chinese and Japanese was debatable, and ultimately, didn't quite work out how I wanted. Nonetheless, I was an upper division student, and well on my way to graduation

I was working rather regularly at tutoring students in the area, and when I wasn't doing that, I was often occupied by my other hobbies or friends. I think I was even still in Taiwan at this point. No, Japan most likely, and on my way to Taiwan. 7 weeks or so spent in Japan. I spent maybe three nights in a genuine hotel with beds and a shower, two or so nights in smokey computer cafes, just a couple nights in my relatives' restaurant, a couple weeks with my host family, a couple weeks with my travelling companion, a couple more weeks with a friend of a friend on the internet, and finally an interesting week with a girl I met at a concert in West Gate Park.

Taiwan was a bit more tame by comparison, staying an entire three weeks with my uncle and aunt. My cousin took me around to see the colleges of my parents, and just to see the sights in general. I got to see so many relatives I hadn't seen in years, and many that I had never seen before. I only hope I can go back again in the near future.


This time last year I'd graduated and was working in Morgan Hill. I was still working on some radar system for the Royal Norwegian Air Force I think. The work was interesting, even if there wasn't much of it and it didn't challenge me much. Even so, I enjoyed the workplace and the people around me, so it wasn't bad at all.

It was a good time. I learned a lot, I lived a lot, and I thought that my career was falling into place. That I was well on my way to doing interesting things that would take advantage of my primary area of study as well as the other odd subjects I enjoyed.

The internship however wasn't going to last. So I was working my ass off to keep it as long as I could while putting out all the feelers I could to find a new one I would enjoy. I knew I could go to that other company, they'd all but offered me a job before, but I didn't like it then and nothing had changed in the past few months. So I searched and gave myself a buffer time to relax in the meantime.

In the end it wouldn't work out. I had just the one job lead, to a job I was wary about before I even graduated. I'd talked to them before, and I'd worried about it before, but when push came to shove, I needed something to do and something to pay the bills.


So, half a year ago I was in Tucson. Probably one of my lower points in the past few years. It was an entirely new experience. Tucson being an area full of one million people, yet with a distinctly small town feel. I was turning on my AC in the afternoons in February, and the Mexican food was superb.

The job was decidedly mediocre and uninspiring, my neighborhood was run-down, to say the least. I had, by this point, heard gunshots at night, and screaming in the morning was not atypical either. My coworkers were all 15 years older than me, if not more. One was divorced, the other five were married. All but one of the workers had children. And they all knew eachother for longer than I'd been in college, maybe even double that.

Quite probably, it was a more lonely experience than I've really felt in, I don't know how long. I think for a long period of time, the majority of my human interaction consisted of work, buying food from people, and maybe saying hi to someone as I walked in.

It was all to easy to slip into a cycle of keeping myself going just by shutting off my mind. The more I thought about my situation, the more helpless it felt, so I just occupied my time with whatever I could and just lived from day to day. Not that I really realized what was happening at the time, I just felt that everything was so out of my control, that I was so lost and unhappy, that I was stuck somewhere and just couldn't get out.


Well, in any case, here I am now. I'm in mostly the same job, but I'm back on the peninsula. My outlook is a bit better now, I've got things to do, and a goal to aim for. I don't like the job, but my options are to bail out or to make it better. I figure I ought to try the second before I wimp out. The worst thing that can happen is more attention from management, and in the best case, that's a very good thing.

I know for a fact now that I'm horrifically underpaid. Not that that is the biggest issue, but it's adding insult to injury given the other bad points of the job. I've talked with a few co-workers, one that had been there for seven years and one that had been there for maybe seven weeks. Both saw a lot of the same problems I did, and the older one said I was lucky to realize that as soon as I did, as he felt he'd wasted a lot of his life already. And besides that, the turnover rate within the company is already ridiculous.

So, I'm waiting until my yearly evaluation. I want to see what the bosses think of me and my progress thus far. Depending on what bonuses they give me, I might even consider staying, though in all honesty there isn't much keeping me at the company, and more money really wouldn't make up for the past 8 months of my life. In the meantime I'm doing the work I need to do, and making waves in the group I work in. Even if the work itself is boring and dull, I can at least make the work environment a little more interesting and friendly.

I'm just not entirely sure what to do with the next segment of my life. Studying abroad sounds interesting, teaching English sounds fun though not conducive to a career, I'd love to work for a hardware startup, some recommend trying to get relocated abroad within my current company, and I'm still strongly considering going back to grad school or trying for law school. I feel a bit of apprehension and excitement for the coming months.
But, for now, I hold the course. I'm putting out my feelers and seeing what kinds of opportunities are at the end of a given path. My goal is to find something worth doing. I want to work on something great, I'd like to have brilliant and interesting coworkers, and it'd be great to live somewhere interesting and different. But above all, I just want to be inspired by what I work on. I don't know if I'll be able to find that just now, but I'm hoping.

I sorta feel though, no matter what, the rest of this year is probably going to be an important time. We'll see what I can make of it.