Ten Years Later, Somehow

This was the same Ryan who got a D in Calculus I. The same Ryan who would skip gym class by taking out yoga mats to the hallway, then somehow end up at Circle K drinking soda and eating Slim Jims with his friends. The same Ryan who almost failed chemistry because League of Legends apparently had a stronger academic pull than stoichiometry.

To be fair, Summoner’s Rift was going through a lot at the time.

But there was one moment from high school that stayed with me.

I had bombed a chemistry test. I do not mean “oh no, I got a B” bombed. I mean the kind of score where the paper feels heavier when it gets handed back to you. My teacher gave me a chance to replace the grade with the final. So for one week, I studied like my life depended on it. Dawn to dusk. Pure panic. The kind of studying where you are not learning because you love knowledge. You are learning because the walls are closing in.

And somehow, I nearly aced the final.

I remember getting the score back and feeling mostly relieved that it was over. My teacher looked at me and said something that stuck with me for years.

“You have so much potential. I never want to see you waste it like this again.”

At the time, I did not receive this as some beautiful movie moment. I was not standing there with swelling orchestral music in the background, suddenly ready to become the main character of education. I mostly thought, “Please do not make me do that again.”

But it stayed with me anyway.

That is the annoying thing about certain sentences. You do not always believe them when you first hear them, but they quietly move into your brain and start rearranging the furniture.

So when I got to college, even though I had no idea what I was doing, some part of me knew I did not want to keep wasting myself.

That did not mean I suddenly became wise. Let us be very clear. I started as an International Relations major because I liked history, did Model United Nations in high school, and had a vague idea that maybe I could go out into the world and do something important. Peace treaties. Diplomacy. Global cooperation. That sort of thing.

Then they asked me what language I wanted to study.

I said, “Anything but Spanish.”

This is not how serious people make life decisions.

But somehow, that sentence became Japanese.

And somehow, Japanese became one of the most meaningful parts of my life.

That is one of the weird things I have learned looking back. Not every important door announces itself as important. Sometimes it looks like a random answer at orientation. Sometimes it looks like a class you took because the requirement was there. Sometimes it looks like a joke, a dare, or a choice you made because you did not know enough to be afraid of it yet.

My first year was not dramatic. I took general education classes, political science, college algebra, and intro Japanese. I started trying in a way I had not consistently tried before. Not because I had suddenly become noble, but because college felt different. Money was on the line. My parents were still supporting me. I had been given a chance, and deep down I knew I had a responsibility to do something with it.

Also, I was no longer in high school, where my elite academic strategy involved “maybe I will care later.”

Japanese was intimidating at first. I remember walking into class and seeing someone in the back wearing cat ear headphones and blasting Hatsune Miku. My immediate thought was, “Aw shit. I do not think I belong here.”

Respect to him, honestly. That level of commitment is rare. But the class was hard. It was not an anime appreciation seminar. It was grammar, vocabulary, memorization, particles, and the slow realization that learning another language is mostly just being humbled in public on a regular basis.

I liked it anyway.

Political Science and International Relations were interesting too. I still love history. I still care about cultures, countries, and the way people interact across borders. But after a while, I started looking more honestly at the future attached to that path. I liked learning about it. I was less convinced I wanted to build my entire career around it.

Then one day, I was at Chipotle with a friend who was complaining about his Computer Science course.

I knew absolutely nothing about programming.

Naturally, I told him it could not be that hard.

A challenge had been issued. Unfortunately, I was the one who issued it to myself.

The next semester, I was sitting in an introduction to programming class, staring at Python, regretting every word I had ever spoken.

I was a humanities kid. I liked history essays, Model UN conferences, languages, and arguments about international institutions. Suddenly I was learning variables, loops, functions, and errors that seemed personally designed to insult me.

And yet, it was fun.

Not easy. Fun.

There is a difference.

Computer Science humbled me badly. I failed exams. I had to retake classes. I have withdrawals on my transcript. There were plenty of moments where I felt embarrassed, behind, and honestly kind of stupid. But for whatever reason, I kept coming back.

That became one of the quiet lessons of undergrad for me.

I did not become myself by being naturally good at everything. I became myself by staying after I found out I was bad at something.

Failure started to feel less like a final verdict and more like an annoying toll booth. Expensive. Inconvenient. Bad for morale. But apparently part of the road.

Japanese gave me somewhere to run when Computer Science was beating me up. Computer Science gave me something difficult enough to respect. Math eventually joined the party too, because apparently I looked at two majors and thought, “This is not yet unreasonable enough.”

Somewhere along the way, the side quests became the main quest.

I continued with Model United Nations for a few years in college. I helped with conferences for high school students, serving as vice chair and rapporteur. It was fun watching students navigate the same strange conference politics I remembered from high school. Alliances forming. People pretending to include each other. Working papers mysteriously appearing without certain names attached. Global cooperation, but with awards.

In other words, a perfect simulation of humanity.

I also studied abroad at Waseda University in Japan after my sophomore year. That summer deserves its own essay someday. For now, I will just say it was one of those choices that expanded my life in a way I still feel today. I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone, and Japan did exactly that. It gave me memories, perspective, friendships, embarrassment, language growth, and the very special experience of realizing that “I studied Japanese for two years” and “I can function smoothly in Japan” are not the same sentence.

By junior and senior year, life had started to feel more settled. I had made good friends. I became a TA for Computer Science. I was still taking Japanese. I was still grinding through CS and math. Things seemed to be moving forward.

Then Covid happened.

For everyone, Covid was disruptive. For me, it arrived right at one of those life transition points where you are supposed to pretend you know what comes next. I was finishing college, but I did not have internship experience like many of my software friends. The world was shutting down. Hiring felt uncertain. Everything felt suspended in air.

So I stayed an extra year.

At first, it was practical. I was already close to a math minor. Since my Japanese degree was a Bachelor of Arts, I needed a minor anyway. Then the thought appeared.

Dangerous sentence.

“Why not just finish the math major?”

This is how many bad but technically achievable decisions begin.

At that point, I was already doing Computer Science and Japanese. I had also been in the Honors College but had not seriously planned to graduate with honors. Suddenly, because apparently I enjoy creating problems for myself, I decided I would do that too.

The final result was three undergraduate degrees: Computer Science, Mathematics, and Japanese Language. I graduated through the Honors College with 208 credits when the university required 120. I also graduated Magma Cum Laude, which I am keeping spelled that way because it sounds funnier and honestly more accurate to the energy of that year.

That last year was brutal.

Upper-division CS. Upper-division math. Honors contracts. Thesis work. Graduate school applications. Job applications as backup. Covid lockdown. Bad sleep. Too many all-nighters. The kind of year where your Google Calendar stops looking like a schedule and starts looking like a cry for help.

I am proud of that year.

I also do not want to do it again.

Both things are true.

That is something I did not understand well when I was younger. I thought being proud of something meant I had to approve of everything it cost me. I do not think that anymore.

I am proud that I worked hard. I am proud that I followed through. I am proud that I turned a very random college path into something real. I am proud that I went from “I have no idea what I want to study” to somehow building an academic life across computer science, math, Japanese, AI, and now optical sciences.

But I can also admit that some parts of that journey were not sustainable. Some parts were powered by curiosity and joy. Some parts were powered by responsibility. Some parts were powered by fear. Some parts were powered by the stubborn belief that if I just endured enough, maybe one day I could look back and say it was all worth it.

After undergrad, I went to USC for a master’s program in Artificial Intelligence. At the time, I wanted to study Natural Language Processing. It felt like the perfect intersection of my interests: Computer Science, Japanese, and Mathematics. I imagined working on language, translation, idioms, and the strange gap between meaning and machines.

Then AI exploded, the world changed, and life continued doing what life does best: refusing to follow the version I had planned in my head.

Now, at 28, I am in a PhD program in Optical Sciences.

If you told 18-year-old me that this is where we would end up, he would have had several questions.

The first would probably be, “What is optical sciences?”

Fair.

The second would probably be, “Wait, are we still doing Japanese?”

Also fair.

The third would probably be, “Do we at least look cool?”

Unfortunately, I cannot help him there.

But I think he would be proud.

Not because everything went according to plan. Nothing went according to plan. There was barely a plan to violate. I think he would be proud because somewhere along the way, the person who did not care started caring. The person who avoided effort started choosing it. The person who thought he was not gifted enough kept entering rooms where he felt out of place and stayed there long enough to grow.

He would be proud that we tried.

He would be proud that we failed and kept going.

He would be proud that we took the random class, learned the language, switched the major, accepted the challenge, went abroad, added the degree, stayed the extra year, applied anyway, moved forward anyway.

But I think he would also be surprised by something.

He would be surprised that becoming impressive does not make you feel finished.

For a long time, I thought accomplishments would eventually settle something inside me. If I got the degrees, learned the skills, became strong, built the résumé, published the work, earned the respect, then maybe I would finally feel like I had arrived somewhere.

But achievement is strange. It answers some questions and leaves others untouched.

Can I work hard? Yes.

Can I survive pressure? Apparently.

Can I become someone my younger self might admire? In some ways, I think so.

But am I at peace? Do I know how to rest without guilt? Do I know how to build a life that feels like mine, not just one that looks admirable from the outside?

Those are harder questions.

I do not have clean answers to them yet.

And honestly, I do not want this essay to end with me pretending I do.

That would feel dishonest. Also very annoying.

What I do know is that the last ten years taught me that life rarely makes sense while it is happening. Most of the important moments in my life did not arrive with dramatic lighting. They looked ordinary. A sentence from a teacher. A random answer at orientation. A language requirement. A conversation at Chipotle. A failed class. A study abroad application. A decision to stay one more year. A friendship I did not know would last. A subject I did not know would matter.

At the time, they just felt like things happening.

Only later did they become the story.

So if I could say something to 18-year-old me, I do not think I would give him some grand speech about success. He would not listen anyway. He would probably be trying to queue up for a game.

I think I would tell him this:

You do not need to know exactly who you are yet.

That part takes time.

Take your curiosity seriously. Take your effort seriously. Take the people who believe in you seriously. Take the strange doors seriously, even when they do not look important yet.

You are going to fail more than you want. You are going to feel behind. You are going to enter rooms where everyone seems smarter, more prepared, more natural, more certain. Stay anyway, if it matters to you.

But also remember this: the goal is not just to become someone impressive.

The goal is to become someone you can live with.

Someone younger you would recognize, not because you became exactly who he imagined, but because you did not abandon the parts of him that mattered. The curiosity. The humor. The stubbornness. The desire to learn. The weird belief that life should be bigger than whatever room you are currently standing in.

Ten years later, I am not exactly who I thought I would be.

I am also not disappointed by that.

The road was stranger than expected. Less efficient too. Very poorly optimized. If this were code, someone should refactor it immediately.

But it is mine.

And maybe that is enough for now.

So, dear 18-year-old me:

You are not cooked.

You are, however, extremely under-seasoned.

Keep going.

Try harder than you think you can.

Laugh at yourself when possible.

Sleep more than I did.

And pay attention. The life you are building may not look like a life yet. It may just look like random classes, dumb decisions, failures, jokes, and detours.

But one day, you might look back and realize that was the whole thing.

That was you becoming yourself.

— Ryan, 28