This summer (2019), I did a performance titled “Salsa: The Rhythm of Passion” in front of an 300+ audience at the Chevron Auditorium at International House, Berkeley — a venue where I had sat starry-eyed as a member of the audience only a year ago. I ended with a 30-second speech telling them my ‘Why’. The audience loved it (they really did!).
I did this while interning at Symantec’s San Francisco Office, helping their Data Loss Prevention optimize their cloud resource provisioning operations. I loved my work, was the reigning table tennis champ at work, and made a great set of intern friends.
The semester before, my last at Cal, I had taken 21 units, all while finding time to be in great physical shape, read a book a week, and find time to dance as well. The semester before, I had served as a paid Reader for a machine learning class I had taken earlier. This was while working as a research assistant implementing a graph theory algorithm developed my research supervisor in the C/C++ programming language. People sought me out to seek advice and inspiration. Don’t get me wrong. There were (are) a thousand ways I still need to improve myself, but in my final year at Berkeley, I got a start. Something had changed. But what?
Mindset