“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” ― Henry Ford

Thanksgiving is a day for gratitude. Between last year and this year, my life went through dramatic changes, good things and bad things arriving together. It was probably the most eventful year of my life, but today I am grateful for everything I have, and I treasure it.

Lost in School

I have always envied friends who knew what they wanted since college (or even since childhood) and worked toward their goals. My own path through school looked smooth on the surface, but honestly, I never really thought it through. If I could go back, I would tell my past self to spend less time on school books and more time exploring the world. Because I never thought it through, I spent my undergraduate years lost: from chemistry to business management, then to environmental studies. Along the way it felt like I was grabbing onto something, but inside I never felt grounded.

From Internships to a Full-Time Offer

If I had found a basic job in the environmental field after my master’s degree, I probably would have had no complaints and would have just kept doing it without thinking. But fate seemed determined to test me more. From an NGO internship to a government internship, a full-time job always seemed one step away yet never within reach. After a few discouraged, unproductive months, things turned around: I got the chance to help out at a startup. It was not a full-time job, just hourly part-time work, but for someone not from an information field, it was a good start.

This summer, everything slowly became clear. My boss was fairly satisfied with me, and the company had started to turn a small profit, so I received a full-time offer. But fate loves playing jokes on me: the government-related job I had been waiting for finally finished all its paperwork and extended an olive branch to me.

A Sweet Dilemma: Government Job or Startup

Of course, this was a sweet dilemma: government vs. startup, environment vs. computer science, bioenergy vs. writing code, a stable organization vs. a company whose daily revenue is unknown, lots of vacation vs. very little, and possibly the most important consideration of all: the government salary was 60% higher than the startup’s!! I asked many people for advice, searched my heart and my future plans every day, and in the end I gave up the high-paying, stable job.

I do not know how my future self will look back on this choice. From chemistry to environmental science, at least the chemistry still carried over. But moving from the environment to computer science is a completely different field; the direction of my life turned 180 degrees. But I am still young, and I want to take risks and challenge myself. I do not want to be 80 years old and regret that in my twenties I never really tried.

Everything Is the Best Arrangement

In the last few months, my life has stabilized a little. I am lucky: since I joined, the company has gone from losing money to having some stable clients and making a small profit. My code often will not work, so I end up working overtime and studying at night and on weekends, but when I build something and the program actually runs, I am happy. I do not earn much and can barely save anything, but at least I have food on the table and clothes on my back.

I have always believed that what happens in life is the best arrangement (there is a story about this that I love). In hard times there is inevitably frustration and doubt, but all of it made me who I am today. I am grateful to all the friends who have appeared in my life and to everything that has happened to me. They gave me a year without regrets!

This post was originally published on my former blog, 「半路出家軟體工程師在矽谷」, on November 28, 2013. The blog is now offline, and the text is preserved via the Wayback Machine. It has been lightly edited for this site.