A year ago, I wrote a reflection on my first year at Stanford. Back then, I felt I had stopped clinging to the search for a “right answer.”
A year later, I haven’t become more certain. Letting go of the “right answer” doesn’t mean your own answer shows up on its own. I spent much of my second year re-understanding the choices I had made, and rethinking what I actually want to do next.
The most immediate result: I kept rewriting how I introduce myself.
My path isn’t linear. Whenever I talk with someone new, the most common questions are always the same: Why did you go from A to B? Why B to C? Why, then, C to D?
It’s not that I don’t have answers. The opposite: for every turn, I can always find an explanation that sounds like it makes sense. Preparing the intro, I would first predict which causal story would be easiest for others to accept, then fit my past into that version. Taken one by one, every segment holds up; but much of the time, I don’t buy it myself. So telling it always felt slightly off: I kept predicting whether others would find it reasonable, without first asking whether I believed it.
I used to think narrative was just a skill of expression: how to introduce yourself, how to make your path understandable, how to tell a more convincing story in an interview or a conversation. But the further I sorted, the harder it became to separate how I tell my past from how I understand myself. What I was actually stuck on wasn’t any particular sentence. It was: what do these experiences have in common? What do I actually want to do next? And what does that have to do with what came before?
The answers didn’t arrive in any single moment. I just noticed, through repeated sorting, a few things that kept coming back: some questions always pull me in; some work, once finished, I want to keep doing; some choices I can explain perfectly well, yet would not truly want to make again. Being able to make a choice sound reasonable is not the same as actually wanting it.
What happened can’t be changed. But how I understand and tell it shapes how I see myself, and where I go next. Narrative didn’t make my past more linear, and it didn’t decide my next step for me. It just means I no longer have to justify A, B, C, and D separately — and it gives me a little more to judge by when a new direction shows up.
Figuring out narrative took me a long time. Some other things went the opposite way: only after actually starting did I discover that much of the barrier existed only in my imagination.
One interview take-home asked me to fix an unfinished product on GitHub. Until then, I had only used AI through a chat interface. I had never used Cursor or Claude Code, let alone used them to change a real codebase. I had always assumed these tools were hard to learn — that you needed to set aside serious time before you could use them. Before I truly started, the pressure was already heavy.
But the take-home gave me no time to learn the tools first. The product’s automatic settlement logic needed fixing, and the frontend didn’t match the backend data. All I could do was describe the problems, watch how the code was being changed, and keep testing and correcting. Within a day, I had mostly handled both. The long stretch of preparatory learning I had imagined never happened; in practice, learning the tools and solving the problems happened at the same time — and soon I was using the same tools to build a product of my own. Getting started was far easier than I had imagined.
Another time, applying to be a TA, I had also set the bar high in my head. I assumed that, at minimum, you had to have been the professor’s student — and done well in the class — to apply. I hadn’t taken the class. All I could do was study the syllabus ahead of time, write down my observations about the course, and think through what I could add to it. In the end, the professor let me join.
The two things have nothing to do with each other, yet they left me with a very similar, very direct feeling: 99% of work is not rocket science. From outside the door, I seemed to be facing something entirely foreign; once I was inside, it turned into a specific bug, a syllabus, and the question of what I could actually contribute. Hard is still hard. It just isn’t that mysterious anymore.
But if you ask me what actually stayed after two years, what comes to mind isn’t only the things I later learned to do.
Over these two years, I talked with a lot of people.
Looking back at graduation, I may not remember what was said in each conversation. I do remember who listened carefully, who gave me confidence when I doubted myself, who made me feel seen and respected.
Those feelings rarely came from one especially profound line. More often, someone was willing to let me finish a question I hadn’t thought through, took my judgment seriously when I didn’t yet have much experience, or gave me a little trust before I had confidence of my own. Each of these is a small thing. They stayed in memory much longer than I expected.
People may forget what we said and what we accomplished. They rarely forget how it felt to be with us.
So, if you ask me now — what really matters?
Five things come to mind.
What matters is still believing, when facing something unfamiliar, that most things can be learned.
What matters is telling a story I actually buy — one that doesn’t just explain the past, but helps me know what I really want.
What matters is staying open to the unknown. Many barriers only become clear once you walk up to them.
What matters is treasuring the people I meet. The specifics fade; what a relationship felt like stays longer.
What matters is allowing myself to make mistakes — and allowing some doors to never open for me.
These five things don’t tell me any earlier where life is headed. They just mean that when I can’t fully control it, I still know how to take part: confidence in myself, kindness toward others, openness to the unknown, and a lighter grip on outcomes.
I still want to choose well, and I’m still afraid of choosing wrong. I’ve just stopped betting all of my sense of security on the judgment made beforehand.
Two years ago, I thought security came from making the right choice.
Now I’d rather believe this: even if I choose wrong, even if I don’t get what I wanted, even if the future looks nothing like the plan, I am able to understand it, accept it, and keep moving forward.
I don’t know whether these lessons are wisdom or just a byproduct of luck. But maybe that’s the last thing my second year taught me: you can never tell the two apart in advance. You can only choose to believe, and keep walking.