🌎Sidequesting

Globe hopping, building a remote control car, and interning at a battery consulting company

A lot of my friends have been asking me what the heck I’ve been doing in the past few months. And tbh it’s a fair question lol.

(It’s also been quite a while since I’ve written one of these so uh, sorry).

I’m about to graduate grade 12, and I was kinda bored in class. So, I set up my courses so that I would basically be off school in the second semester. (I had 3 easy, self-paced online classes, but didn’t need to go in person).

This meant that first semester was kind of rough - especially with uni apps. But it was very much worth it, since I basically got a gap semester.

(Would highly recommend, btw).

I was also extremely lucky because a lot of the things I got to do were funded by various sources!

Since February, I’ve:

• went skiing in France with my family. I found one of the Tour de France podiums - omg you have no idea how happy this made me

  

• went to Orlando for a battery conference with my internship. I met a TON of super cool people and even managed to track down the CEO of a company I’d been trying to talk to for almost a year :D

  

• went to Japan (🤯I still think this is insane) for a pitch competition with Localhost (who I later got a grant from). This was literally the most last-minute, random thing ever but man I had fun, Japan is so lovely - and unexpectedly quiet. Me and Ian went swimming in the (freezing) ocean, toured Tokyo, and tried oyster.

  

  

• Then I went to Amsterdam for a hackathon that was part of an application for a summer program run by Entrepreneur First. I worked with one of my good friends and one other person, we made SUCH a good team. We designed a system to harness waste heat from GPUs in data centers. We really wanted to 3d print our prototype (that I spent like 8 HOURS on in CAD 😭) so we walked into this random building and found a makerspace for like 8 year olds; that was sick. Then my teammate knew this other guy who said he’d print the stuff for us, so we rode Lime bikes across the city to go pick it up. 10/10 experience.

  • Ngl this was mostly just because I wanted to go to Europe. I spent a couple days in Amsterdam (I LOVE THE BIKES) and then went to Basel and Zurich for a day each, because Switzerland is the greatest. I also did this week-ish long trip with just a backpack which I’m super proud of loollll. Side note, Zurich is my new favourite city, there’s this spot by a lake and there are these super cute ducks there and I literally sat there for like an hour just watching them. And oh my goodness the public transit was amazing, not that I was any good at using it lol.

    

    

• Next I went to Orange County (near Los Angeles) to visit a good friend. Went surfing for the first time (by this I mean I held on to the surfboard for dear life and was definitely not anywhere near standing up LOL), did an escape room, and a ton of other random stuff.

  • I combined this with a trip to San Francisco to tour Minerva University (went running with the Minerva crew). SF is quite an interesting city, and I (like always) met a ton of interesting people there. I actually met one of my teammates from the Amsterdam hackathon LOLLL.

    

• ran my last track meet ever :’(

• Then literally 2 weeks later I went back to Orange County (lol). I tried surfing again, and this time I managed to actually catch a wave (while lying down on the board rip but still!! Very fun :)). Also went skating and made a Jenga tower, tried the Vision Pro, etc. - very fun, random things. Honestly this was probably one of my favourite weeks as I was completely in the moment.

  

  

• Got my driver’s license in one week LETS GOOO

Next up

In roughly 10 hours from when I’m writing this, I’m flying to Finland. I’m going to a 3 month hacker hotel in Helsinki. I’m very excited for this, but also not quite sure what to expect.

And then mid-June I’m crisscrossing the globe again and going back to San Francisco for Y-Combinator’s AI Startup School event. I’m really looking forward to this because 1) San Francisco and 2) literally ALL of my friends are going to this event/are in SF. So this is gonna be reallllyyyy fun.

Then back to Finland to lock in :)

Besides globe hopping, I’ve also been interning at a battery consulting company, which was honestly a super great experience. My boss is ex-Accenture and I learned a TON from her. 🔋

I’ve also been building a remote-control car from scratch. 🏎️This has been a super fun project, as it’s really complex and there are a bunch of different angles that need to come together. I don’t think my design was the best, but I learned a bunch about breaking down problems, and making creative solutions.

Currently working on a video about this but quick photo:

In these past few months, it was super nice to be able to design my own schedule, and to focus fully on whatever I cared the most about at the moment.

I had to make two really big decisions in the past few weeks, and I’m not quite sure how to explain this, but it was very hard because I was missing so much information. But I don’t think we ever really get all the information. I was talking to a friend about this a couple days ago, how do you know what you are doing right now is the best thing? There will always be something better, I suppose. So how do you decide if what you’re doing currently is the right thing? At what point does trying to find the best take away from the point?

I’ve also been thinking a lot about various relationships with people in my life. Most of my closest friends live in another city (if not another country). And that’s been a bit hard, because in-person has SO many more dimensions than WhatsApp messaging/Zoom calls. Because I’ve been flying so much though, I got to spend time with a ton of them, and that was really really nice. I didn’t realize how happy it made me.

Especially not being at in-person school, I got pretty lonely. I wouldn’t really leave my house except to go biking (I live in the countryside rip) for like a week. And, most of this travel, especially Europe, was solo. I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising how much this impacted me, but it did. This has shifted my priorities a bit.

Anyways, all that to say that if you ever get a chance to do something like this, I’d highly recommend. Taking a bit of time to just exist and see what sorts of things you choose to fill your time with teaches you a lot.

Something else that my friend and I talked about: When you really like doing something, you won’t notice the time passing. Because it doesn’t matter anymore, there is no need to quantify it. So not feeling the need to check the time, or having time fly by, is an amazing proxy for figuring out what you like. Sounds obvious when I write it down, but it wasn’t before lol. Hope that helps at least one person :)

Oh, and I want to say thank you to all of the friends who hosted me on my travels. And to all the people I called/messaged for advice. Love you guys 🫶