The decade started in my parents' basement in Toronto, when the world didn't come to an end because of the Y2K bug. After back-to-back co-ops ("internships", for you non-Canadians) in Hamilton and Waterloo, I spent the second half of 2000 on exchange program at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. That was my first experience living more than an hour away from home.
I returned to the University of Waterloo campus in January 2001, for the 3B winter term. That summer, I got my first taste of California, while I was an intern at the Mountain View campus of Microsoft. And eight months after that, I graduated from Waterloo with a degree in Systems Design Engineering. My last three terms at Waterloo were spent living with my close friend Gosia, along with a random mish-mash of other psychotic boys and girls.
At that time, the dot-com bubble had just burst, and many freshly-minted engineers such as myself were having trouble finding work. Graduate school, of course, was the answer. I took a month off to go chill in Barcelona with Adam, and then started on my Master's degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Toronto. My research was on signal processing for speech recognition applications. I graduated 13 months later, and (after a quick trip to Australia where I learned to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef), I moved on to New York City to start my new job as a software consultant on Wall Street. My first night in New York City (ever!) was the Sunday before my first Monday in the office. At parties these days, I can tell my friends about the time I wrote software for the mortgage-backed securities group at Lehman Brothers.
Within just 4 months, I developed a nice, healthy hatred for my job. Infusion was a miserable place to work, run by slave-driving managers. It was a painful reminder to me of just how good I had it as a student. On a snowy Friday evening in November 2003, after an 11pm stint at the office (my boss had the nerve to tell me "oh, it's OK to work late sometimes"), I made the decision to go crawling back to student life, and just nine days later my applications were submitted. That March, I was accepted into the PhD program in Electrical Engineering at Stanford (Caltech and Georgia Tech rejected me), and by June 2004, I was back in California living the student life again.
My first year at Stanford was difficult -- trying to find research funding, living on campus in an engineering grad student dorm, and the torture that was the EE qualifying exam (50% pass rate, fail twice and you get kicked out!). I was lucky enough to land a pair of teaching assistantships in my first two quarters, and pass the quals in my first go. To be fair, I should admit that I only got those TA'ships because of my experiences at U of T and Infusion, and that I passed the quals by only the slimmest of margins. Lessons in humility, to say the least. In any case, after a year of this nonsense, I became quite bitter at the EE department. In protest, I went "across the street" to work under Hector Garcia-Molina in the Computer Science department, and have never looked back since.
In October 2005, I moved off-campus and up to San Francisco, into a 4-bedroom apartment known only as "the Shire" (it was on Hampshire St). The next 2 years living in the Shire were some of my most memorable. Good times, with good friends and great roommates (Tim, Tony, Rory, Julia, Kat, Scott, Anja, Hieu and Abalone). In September 2006, I published my first conference paper as a PhD student, which took me on a trip to Leeds, England, by way of London, the Baltics and Sweden. I spent the summer of 2007 as an intern at Google, doing research on economics and computer security. My work from that summer eventually blossomed into a large portion of my doctoral thesis. In July 2007, I ran my first (and to date, only!) full marathon -- a 26.2-mile course through the hilly streets of San Francisco. It took me just over 5 hours, on an injured knee at that -- probably my proudest accomplishment to date.
That November, just as the word "subprime" was entering the popular lexicon, and on the very same day that I moved out of the Shire, I was offered my current job in Japan. In January 2008, after a month of being homeless spent between Guatemala and Toronto, I moved into an apartment just two blocks away from the Shire, with 3 other Stanford grad students. I eventually accepted the job in Japan, but over the next few months had to delay my start date repeatedly because I hadn't yet finished up my PhD. Then, soon after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, with my job offer in jeopardy, I decided to take a leave of absence from Stanford to start working in Tokyo. After 3 weeks in London waiting for my Japanese work visa, I spent that New Year's Eve in China, having a drink atop the Marriott in Shanghai.
That brings us, roughly, to the present. 2009 has been an up-and-down year, in many ways -- working long hours, my sister's wedding, meeting new people in Tokyo, learning Japanese and slowly grinding through my thesis (you can poke around this blog for more details on the past year). Tokyo is the first place I've ever had my own apartment, without any roommates. Work on my thesis has been moving slowly in the limited free time that I have, and the tentative plan is to defend early next year.
We are living through curious times. 10 years from now, the world will be a very different place, geopolitically and otherwise. To paraphrase what a smart man recently said to me, it is hard enough to understand what is going on around you right now, let alone trying to predict the future.
With all that could go awry in life, take time at the dawn of a new decade to appreciate what has gone right for you. Good night, good luck, and happy new decade!
(Bridge School Benefit concert, October 2007.)
