three years in nyc
also: what i have learned since my college graduation
hello! apologies for being absent. i was busy moving into my new apartment, but now i am back and will get to do you feel this way too. as usual, please let me know if any of this resonates with you! thanks for reading & subscribing :)
my instagram timeline has recently been filled with happy faces in graduation gowns carrying the prettiest floral ensemble. a delightful scene after a two-year interruption.
exactly three years ago, i was the one smiling in my regalia. grateful for undergrad, excited but a little afraid of my next chapter in new york. i thought i would live in the city for about a year or two max. though a lot of people around me bet i would rush back to california the first chance i got.
i ended up staying in new york because i wanted to start afresh and be bold. i was hurting from a breakup and i wanted to give my teenage dream of working for a big news organization in new york a serious shot. i told myself this was the time to seriously build the life i wanted.
maybe i am just awfully bad at planning and predicting my life but i ended up staying for three years. i got not one, but both of my dream jobs. made the best friends though i started off knowing only three people. i am living my dream life.
but this substack isn’t about my life in new york. it is a reflection of what i have learned since i seriously decided to build a life that i actually wanted for myself. what i have learned since graduating from college.
priors are as important as you let them be
when i first graduated, i was upset because i didn’t graduate with latin honors. though my gpa was decent, i felt like i had failed and my mediocre gpa would impede my career. as i thought i wasn’t smart enough to learn the skills i needed to get the job i wanted.
while a great gpa won’t hurt you, i realized your gpa is just a reflection of you at a point in time, it doesn’t define you. i had to come to terms with the reality that i have graduated and i couldn’t go back in time to change my gpa no matter how much i was overthinking it. i could let it define my entire life, or i could focus on what i can change and do to actually get to where i want to be in life.
success is whatever you want it to be
in undergrad, the most common definition of success was having a high gpa and working in either finance or big tech. if you didn’t fall into this category, then you simply aren’t successful. well, success is what you want it to be. for me, it is to live a life that reflected my personal values and for my career to have dimension. meaning a career that spans my many interests allowing me to be creative and analytical, like being an engineer and running joyfull encounters. define success for yourself and you will be liberated.
timelines are just bad estimations
school functions with timeframes. you will spend four years and you will graduate after finishing your requirements. now you have the rest of your adult life to do whatever you want. admittedly, not having a schedule initially made me anxious. so to assuage anxiety i made my own timeline like a new job in 4 months, XX in my bank account by 25., and so on. but wow it was such an anxiety-provoking way to live.
now my mantra is, that if you are doing the work you need to get you closer to your goal, it doesn’t matter that you are reaching your goals later than you like.
life is better than your predictions
people tend to overestimate how much can happen in a day and underestimate how much can happen in a year. sometimes we are afraid things do not turn out the way we want them to. but most of the time, life has proven to be far more interesting than my predictions. let life surprise you.
