My College Experience

My first semester at UMass was a bit challenging after my first lockdown (a year I spent in limbo after moving to the USA), but about 6 weeks in I caught up. My ECE classmate Jeff made a funny comment about how he beat me on our first Calculus test, and then I got invigorated and never got a lower score again.

I did in fact see grades as winning or losing. I was smart and studied a lot, but I also very quickly understood all the dynamics of this system, just like I did in high school. I figured out dozens of hacks, to take pass-fail classes and then convert them to grades, to get special permission to take extra credits, to befriend my professors’ assistants to have access to their schedule, to negotiate with advisors to make certain classes count toward more than one degree.

During my step-brother’s graduation, I noticed the program brochure included the profiles of a few “super students” for that class. One was the valedictorian, but there were about ten of them there, out of four thousand graduates. Once again, I had this clarity of vision where I would be among them four years later. I didn’t have a plan, but this idea stuck to the back of my mind.

I was really really good at college. If there was such a thing as making it to the division one team for academics, I was it. I wasn’t just getting As. I was getting the highest numerical score in every piece of homework and test. If I had access to previous years’ solutions, I would use them, but I never cheated on a test. I was the best at getting the highest score. I wasn’t the smartest. Among the two hundred in our class, there were a couple students, Michael and Stephan, who had at least 10 IQ points on me, and who also cared. But I gave them a good fight.

I would also take other known hard courses for sport, and try to beat everyone. There was a biology class required for pre-meds, which had about 400 students and the teacher would post everyone’s grades, sorted descending, on a massive screen. It felt amazing to see my name as #1. On a particularly difficult final in computer architecture, early in the morning, I had what might have been the most in-the-zone moment of my life. The test was scheduled for three hours, but I got the first couple questions very quickly, so I decided to go for speed. I finished the test in about 20 minutes, and I ran to turn it in, as if it was a race, just as Austin, who had overslept, kicked the doors open in his pajamas.

My team always crushed it. I was very good at strategizing, picking the right topic, anticipating key risks, and rehearsing presentations. Often I wasn’t the main contributor. My college-long partner Jeff was the guy that got most projects to the finish line. One time we had a faulty PCB during our senior design project, and Jeff grabbed the oscilloscope and spent all night testing every single connection. He also did most of the soldering. Jeff, Taylor, and I were once stuck having to build a switching voltage regulator, and I got us out of the hole with math. The problem was that we were using a normal diode and we needed a Schottky diode with a different voltage drop-off.

I’m bragging a little, but I’m also keeping it short. I felt like a superstar in college. Receiving mentions and awards and scholarships every semester. My team won the senior design project. And yes, I was on the brochure (and on stage) when I graduated.