Before high school, I learned everything from my closest friend then. I did calculus in grade nine because he did it in grade eight. I didn’t realize I was copying him.
Before high school, I learned everything from my closest friend then. I did calculus in grade nine because he did it in grade eight. I didn’t realize I was copying him.
The next year it was Adam. Everything he did was his own idea, and I wanted that enough to try following him into TKS.
Did a COVID’s worth of competitive programming. Thought I got good enough that I didn’t need anyone’s advice, but missed the rest of high school and got bad at talking to people.
I somehow ended up talking to Rain, who picked most of what we talked about: top US universities, whether music or math competitions were harder, a Waterloo goose redrawn as a Chinese dragon with glasses, an application essay about throwing bricks at cops. We still talk.
Started Waterloo. Stayed up until 3am playing League with my first year roommate (QSS rush Karma and splitpushing TF duo in URF). Spent two terms trying to find him and Rain in other people.
Stopped going to classes and barely met anyone in my program. Couldn’t get into CS341 or CS466, so I took CS860, where I met Sepehr and Ramazan.
Moved to Palo Alto to start staying with Interaction, whose entire street-facing wall was glass. People looked through it and came in whether they worked there or not, more of them than I met at Waterloo, Agniv among them.
I walked past Ramazan near a Salt & Straw in Palo Alto. Talked to him, then the office, then dinner, then Yosemite, then the office again. Tells me my ideas are dumb and sits with me for hours anyway. One of the people who starts conversations with me.
My parents missed me.
Hosted a party with friends from Waterloo.
I told Sepehr I’d be staying in Palo Alto and spending most of my time with Interaction. He said he’d add someone to the research team. I’d been gone too long to object, but even if I was listed as a coauthor, I’d feel bad if someone solved the problem while I wasn’t working on it.
Applied to transfer to Stanford to be around Agniv. And MIT, because everyone wants to. This was the first time I’d written about myself at length, and I definitely spent longer than I should have, but in the process, I realized that a lot of motivation for transferring was just because I didn’t know a lot of my program at Waterloo.
Rejected from both.
I told someone something I regret saying. Lost a friend.
A few days later Agniv came to see me and we talked for hours. At some point he started listing things: cooking with a group on a recipe nobody knows, holding a conversation about something you don’t care about, talking someone into feeling excited or motivated or calm, visiting people when they’re down. Then he asked what mine were.
Went to a conference in Utah, where I tried to ask everyone why they were in theory. Most of them just said they loved solving problems, but I got the feeling a lot of people default into a PhD because problems were fun and nothing made them stop.
We solved Sepehr’s problem. Immediately DM’d all my closest friends.
Saying goodbye to Interaction. Hanging with friends in Palo Alto.