a (gap) year in review

...six months later

Introduction

This is a three-part reflection on the gap year I took after I graduated high school. The three parts are: a chronological timeline with short descriptions of my time in each place I stayed in, a section where I evaluate how well I did at fulfilling my gap year ideals from two and half years ago, and a final section with closing thoughts.

I’ll save most of my reflections for the final section but: this year changed me in so many ways, and I grew so much. I remember moments early on—submitting my request to defer my college enrollment, writing the first post to this blog—when I had no idea what this year would bring. Now, on the other side, I look back and have so much to be grateful for: the friendships I made, the experiences I had, and all of the life I got to live.

It's been a long time since I posted to this blog. At some point my life was changing so much that 1) it became hard to keep up, and 2) I wanted to be more private¹ through all the change. I still wrote, but I posted new writing to a profile on another platform that I never shared. I link to some of this writing in the review below.

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Timeline

Maryland

Most of my friends in the area left for college in mid to late August. I stayed in Maryland until mid October—once they left, I wasn't that social. I kept interning at the lab I was at until the week I left, so I was busy enough during this time. It was nice having more time with family (I wasn't ready to say goodbye) and being able to watch some younger friends compete in fall sports. This was a period of waiting for things to come.

Austin

The weekend before I left for LA, I flew to Austin to watch my younger brother play in a tennis tournament. It was my first time in Austin—I expected it to be flat and dry, which was the image I had of Texas, but it was hilly and breezy and beautiful. I loved watching my brother play, it's always a joy when I get to cheer him on.

LA

This was the best week of the year. I was full of excitement and conviction and LA was just really, really fun with my cousin, who is a remarkable person. In retrospect, this trip happened during a pivotal time in both our lives, and it’s fun to reflect on all that has changed, and all that has stayed the same since then. I wrote about this time here.

Hawaii

After LA, I flew to Hawaii where I stayed with my aunt and uncle for seven weeks. It took me a couple weeks to really relax, but I got there eventually². I needed to rest and was still burnt out from the summer—I worked really hard and spent a lot of energy trying to get one particular project to work that didn't end up working (now that we know better, it would not have worked even if I had tried harder and worked smarter³). I loved spending time with my aunt and uncle. I also started to miss always being surrounded by people my age. I wrote more about this time here.

Bay Area + Palm Springs

I spent the better part of a week in a hacker house in Hillsborough, before bouncing to Berkeley and then SF, where I saw some friends that I was lucky to meet earlier that year. I think this was one of those trips that changed my brain in a million little ways.

The environment in the Hillsborough house was interesting when I was there, and I had fun doing random things like playing indoor soccer with golf balls and trying to throw better football spirals, and having engaging conversations on topics like mimetic desire, the hedonic treadmill, homomorphic encryption, etc. I spent a lot of time in my thoughts here. I also realized how empty it can feel in a mansion on days when there are no events going on, and this trip had me reflecting on what values of tech culture match my own values, and to what extent. A big thanks to the people who gave me places to crash when I was in the area.

I then flew south to Palm Springs, where I was reunited with family and family friends, before we headed back home to Maryland.

I wrote about some of these things here.

Maryland

I was back home in time for New Year's, which I got to celebrate with my high school friends, who were all back from school. After they left, I started to get antsy. It was great being back with family but I also felt like I didn't take a year off to just stay at home. I wrote about this time here. I also started working part-time at the lab I was at in the fall.

New York City

For most of March and April, I lived in Chinatown in Manhattan with someone I met on Twitter, who paused college to work at a startup. I never wrote about NYC⁴: it was busy and eventful and it felt daunting to attempt to put that time into words.

This period was the most {I could fit so many things here} time out of the whole year. It was: stimulating, energizing, difficult, unexpected, nonstop, etc., etc., etc.

I had fun working out of WeWorks (usually 222 or 408 Broadway), going on forty-minute walks to the Hudson past Brookfield Place, hosting people in the jank AirBnB I stayed in (old tenement housing—one main pipe, the shower opened up into the living room), having the randomest moments in elevators, going to random tech and TPOT events, exploring roofs, and experiencing such diverse ways of life.

It wasn’t always easy being in the city without the social padding of school or in-person work, and, out of everywhere I stayed, this was the place where it was hardest for me to land my feet. I missed stability—so much of my life felt transient here, and there were a couple of unexpected events during this time that shook me. While I made unforgettable memories and eventually found my footing here, I was ready to go by the time my stay was up.

In retrospect, many good things from this period that felt temporary have actually lasted to even now, and I’m glad I was able to hold on to them. I am so grateful to many people from this period in my life, and I have a lot to pay forward in college.

Atlanta

I went to Atlanta for the one weekend in-between my stays in New York and Switzerland. I was there for the Taylor Swift concert, which we had six tickets for—I went as part of a group with friends I met at Rabbitholeathon the previous fall. Taylor was incredible; her show is a marathon and it's impressive how she manages to do it so frequently. And it was great to see the friends I was with—they are truly some of the best people I know and they constantly inspire me.

Switzerland

I lived and worked on a farm in Switzerland. The farm was in a town called Matt, which is located southeast of Zurich and has a population of ~300. The people in the region speak Swiss German, so whatever German I had picked up on Duolingo was almost useless, and I mostly only communicated with the family I stayed with, who understood English. I wrote about this time here.

By this point in my life, I think I had been out of the system for long enough to feel little attraction to whatever hoop-jump-involved rat races there are, but it was nice to come to understand, viscerally, how I could enjoy living such a simple life. I did manual labor on the farm, and it was quite rewarding to see the results of the work I did each day, and watch the sun set over the mountains each night. I think I naturally gravitate toward the cities, but the time I spent on the farm was incredibly refreshing.

I also ate a lot of bread and cheese here. There was one day where I ate bread and cheese for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Maryland

I flew home in time for my Dad's birthday. It felt so good to be back with family and friends. My high school friends and I went to the gym together almost every day the first few weeks we were back, until everyone gradually became busier.

New York City + Boston

I took a whirlwind trip to New York City and Boston to visit friends one summer weekend. It was a blast. I finally met up with a friend who I'll describe as: a homie; a real one; an absolute dawg. It's fun when I can hang out with people who 1) I can be goofy and completely myself with, and 2) just get it when it comes to certain things that many people in my life are unfamiliar with. I miss them and will hopefully get an opportunity to see them soon.

Maryland

I was fairly busy the rest of the summer after that trip. I worked on projects that challenged me (in particular, one project involved a subquadratic self-attention alternative of the Hazy Research flavor, and I find that sort of work difficult to understand even now).

Delaware

I went to Bethany Beach for a short vacation with my family and family friends at the end of summer. I love that beach and I love the people I was there with; it was a great time.

Maryland

I was home for a full day before leaving for college in Pittsburgh. I saw hometown friends one last time and packed up my stuff.

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On Taking a Gap Year

When I was 17 and applying to college, I was thinking about taking a gap year. There were some application essay prompts that let me write about this, and I wanted to clarify my thinking, so I wrote this essay. I think the tone of it is slightly forced—I felt like I had to come across a certain way in application essays (which, in retrospect, is obviously not true)—but all the content reflects how I felt then.

In the essay, I wrote a list of some things I wanted to do on a hypothetical gap year. Here I think it'll be fun to reflect on the extent to which I did those things.

Surf, hike, and cook with my aunt and uncle who live in Hawaii. (They’re willing to host me for a month or two.)

I did all of these things. I hiked and cooked a lot more than I surfed (as it turned out, I only surfed once).

Learn Chinese by immersion so as to retain it for the rest of my life and (hopefully) become fluent.

This was too ambitious. I did live in Chinatown, so I was immersed in the language, but I wasn't dedicated enough to really improve. I would often buy pastries from Asian bakeries and the ladies who worked there would usually just look at me and start talking in English. One time, near the beginning of my time in NYC, I tried ordering in Chinese and the woman behind the counter was like, whaaat? whaaat? and made an ugly face at me. After that I pretty much defaulted to English.

Improve at singing, dancing, and drawing—recently I’ve been discovering the joy that comes from creation with minimal assistance from anything external.

I got better at singing and a little bit better at dancing. I didn't draw. I don't think I'm very good at any of these things yet, though.

Work out so as to fix muscle imbalances due to years of cross country running.

I did fix my imbalances. It was hard to get into a gym rhythm when I was traveling so much, but what really helped was being home with friends once I got back from Switzerland in the summer. We went to the gym a lot.

Travel: experience culture, volunteer, and stay with locals by using Workaway.

I did this. Workaway was the site I used to find the farm in Switzerland.

Work to pay for my expenditures. (Not sure what this means yet. I think I could make enough money programming, playing/teaching music, or taking pictures, but a part of me really wants to bartend—overseas where I’m legal—so I can make cool drinks while interacting with tons of people.)

I also did this. I made almost all of my money programming (and reading papers and thinking). I made a little money playing guitar. I also taught music⁵ at some points over the year but only to friends and family, and I never charged. I didn't bartend but I made drinks for my aunt and uncle in Hawaii, and I enjoyed having, e.g., wine with fondue in Switzerland, where I could just sit down at a restaurant and order it.

I will say that my parents were kind to not make me pay rent whenever I stayed at home, and that they almost always took care of food at home as well. Same with my aunt and uncle in Hawaii—I didn't have to pay rent and they almost always covered food (which was not cheap, I ate a lot!). My aunt and uncle also bought my flights out and back from Hawaii as a graduation present, which was super kind, although if I had paid for them myself I still would have been net-positive from a financial standpoint (my financial goal going into the year was just to break even, so I'm happy I did better than that).

Read Infinite Jest and Gravity’s Rainbow, Bertrand Russel’s A History of Western Philosophy and Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: books that a brain punctured by due dates and deadlines might not fully appreciate.

I read none of these books. I got ~100 pages through Infinite Jest and less than 50 pages through A History of Western Philosophy. I think I had Twitter Brain for much of the year, unfortunately. I mostly consumed short-form content.

Read as many other books as I can from my ever-growing wishlist.

As I wrote above, I mostly consumed short-form content. I did finish some books; below, I'll list them and what I rated them out of 5.

• You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense, Charles Bukowski - (2/5)

• Travels with Charley: In Search of America, John Steinbeck - (3/5)

• After Dark, Haruki Murakami - (4/5)

• On the Road, Jack Kerouac - (1/5)

• The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch - (3/5)

• Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Samin Nosrat - (5/5)

• The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway - (1/5)

• Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke - (3/5)

• All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot - (4/5)

• Devotions, Mary Oliver - (4/5)

• Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro - (3/5)

• Psychopolitics, Byung-Chul Han - (4/5)

• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin - (5/5)⁶

• The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm - (3/5)

• Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky - (5/5)

Watch classic movies I haven’t gotten around to seeing yet. (e.g. I still haven’t seen The Breakfast Club.)

I kind of did this. I finally saw The Breakfast Club. I rewatched Mean Girls and 21 Jump Street, which are, in my opinion, classics. But I mostly saw newer movies: Glass Onion, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Oppenheimer, etc.

Build a personal website to host a blog; write about my experiences.

I built a personal website. I didn't host my blog there but I made this blog and wrote about my experiences here.

Study theology so as to more thoroughly examine the foundations of my faith.

I don't like how I wrote this: essentially, I wanted to understand God better. I read ~200 pages of Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem but didn't like it enough to continue. I wish I tried another theology book after that but I never did.

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Closing Thoughts

This third section is the reason why this post is here so long after my gap year ended. I had written almost everything else over half a year ago, but I couldn't figure out how to close. I realize now that it would have been premature to have published reflections immediately, and that this extra time has given me a better sense for how the year shaped me.

This was the most volatile year of my life. It was both fun and challenging upending my life every two months or so, establishing new routines, discovering new worlds, and learning to live in so many different ways. I experienced, in the words of a friend, whatever unraveling and expansion that comes with being in the Real World for the first time. I shared unforgettable experiences with old and new friends, persevered through moments of doubt and uncertainty, and emerged with an independence and confidence that I think will last for the rest of my life.

Looking back at the the essay I wrote as a senior in high school, I’m happy that, through all this change, I was able to turn a lot of the ideas I had long ago into reality. I also think it’s cool to see how the things I wanted back then are so similar to the things I want now. In fact, I would say that my goals have hardly changed in the past two and a half years, the main difference being that now, as a result of conviction, they are even simpler.

In the past month, I wound up in a couple of situations where I was prompted to share my goals with people, and both times I came up with lists that went something like:

• I want to live life by faith

• I want to do good work and contribute to the betterment of humanity

• I want to be good to the people around me

• I want to work out somewhat regularly and be healthy

• I want to take time to appreciate and enjoy the many wonderful aspects of life

There is nothing complicated here. In other times I think I had yearned for more, but now I’m content with just trying to do the next right thing, in living out this sort of chop wood carry water, chop wood carry water, if you're lucky you get to do it for a long time type vibe⁷.

On a similar note, the exploration I got to do during this year solidified my taste, and I’ve realized that most of the problems I care about are only approachable in the long term. There are no shortcuts. In the moments that make up life, there is no way forward except for putting one foot in front of the other⁸.

As I wrote in the introduction, I grew a lot this year—but I have so much room to grow. I learned so many things over the course of the year, but I still have so much more to learn. This is the closing section in a closing post, but, in so many ways, I feel like I am only at the beginning. And, in a sense, maybe we all are: this moment is the beginning of the rest of your life.

With these things said, I think the only appropriate way to end is with gratitude. So:

To my family, thank you for your love and support.

To my friends⁹, whom it would take thousands of pages to properly acknowledge, thank you for inspiring me, bearing with me, and being a part of my life.

And to the reader, wherever you are in space and time, thank you for being here¹⁰.

I hope life treats you wonderfully, as always.

1. I still appreciate privacy, and there are so many stories from this year that I did not share. If you know me, feel free to ask, I’d be happy to yap.

2. There was one especially relaxing day in which I stayed at the beach from sunrise to sunset. I had my camera with me and took photographs, which I ended up using in a digital art project inspired by Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series. You can find that project here.

3. We were attempting to do something that ran up against fundamental limitations of the model paradigm we were working with, i.e. success was theoretically impossible, which I only learned after the fact. I still had fun and learned a lot.

4. Although I did end up writing an explainer post on NeRFs, which I worked on while in the city. You can find that here. I’m opinionated but I think it’s a great introduction.

5. I am able to teach ~one or two people on a semi-regular basis as of now, so if you are interested in learning guitar, feel free to shoot me a message. I teach for free, always.

6. This is a wonderful book on a friendship that spans multiple decades and cities. The book charts the lives of two game developers; I ended up creating an interpretation of one of those games on the web, which you can find here.

7. With heavy reference to this wonderful post on repetition :)

8. I’m once again referencing a line in this poem.

9. To borrow a line from Aadil, if we haven’t talked in a while, don’t hesitate to reach out—I still think about you too.

10. And thank you for bearing with whatever annoying coming-of-age teenage tendencies I might have exhibited over this year, in-person, in this blog, or otherwise. I grew a lot and I think I am less annoying now, lol. (With reference to this post I liked.)