An anxious autumn

It was autumn in Maryland, and the maple trees had turned every street red. My friends were out enjoying the crisp weather and the fall colors. I was at home, job hunting, and getting more anxious by the week. I had been out of school for months. Apart from two months helping in my advisor’s lab, all I had done was apply for jobs. I had sent out hundreds of resumes and asked professors whose classes I had taken to refer me, and everything vanished without a response. The only opportunities I had were a few unpaid internships.

I interned twenty hours a week and spent the rest of my time looking for work. This was 2012, and the US environmental science and engineering job market was still slowly recovering from the financial crisis.

Dr. Yao-Ching Liu

Somewhere along the way I heard that the National Agricultural Library, one of the largest libraries of its kind in the US, was hosting a Saturday lecture series on the environment, materials, and bioenergy. The library’s director, who was also hosting the event, was Dr. Yao-Ching Liu, a first-generation immigrant from Taiwan.

After a full day of talks, I caught him before he left. I asked about the bioenergy policy he had mentioned, introduced myself, and told him about my background and my job search. He listened, and then kindly told me they were about to start a five-year federal bioenergy research project. I could help them organize and research the data. He gave me his card and asked me to contact his assistant to set up a meeting.

Two weeks later I was back at the library, this time in the director’s office. After Dr. Liu walked me through the project in detail, he took me over to the project lead’s desk and told her I would be helping out, and to get my paperwork started. Because I was on OPT at the time, the federal government could not hire me directly, so they had to route my employment through the University of Maryland, which was part of the project.

I thought everything was on track. Then the federal government shut down over a budget fight, and everything stopped. Even after the government reopened, the project’s budget had to be reviewed again, and my official start date drifted further and further away.

Before I was formally hired, I still attended every project meeting and worked unpaid, preparing the data and charts the team needed. Dr. Liu met with me regularly to check on how I was doing. One conversation stuck with me. He told me he could easily find a strong IT person to handle the data or a strong environmental engineer to interpret it. What he hoped was that I would become someone who could do both. If I built up my programming skills, he said, I would be a key person on the project.

Learning to code, and meeting Terry and Kirk

Once I started learning to code, I realized my interest in programming was far stronger than my interest in the environment. Outside of my library internship, my time went to job hunting and learning to code. Four months in, I went to a Monte Jade Science and Technology Association event on the East Coast and spent the evening talking with Chinese-American entrepreneurs. One of them was Terry Hsiao, my future boss. Terry is a serial entrepreneur and a technology advisor to several government agencies. I do not remember exactly what we talked about, but we got along well, and he introduced me to Kirk, the CTO of his company, Hook Mobile. I told Kirk I had only been coding for a few months and asked whether there might be a chance for me to help out.

Kirk invited me to come by Hook Mobile and talk. It felt a little like an interview and a little like something else. There were some coding questions, but not everything was technical. At the end, Kirk mentioned that some of the team played basketball on Fridays at a high school near the office, and I was welcome to join. So that Friday night I showed up at the gym and played ball all evening with a mix of Chinese and American players. Afterwards, as everyone was packing up, Kirk took a drink of water and said to me: You’re free next week, right? Can you start Monday? We’ll bring you on as an intern first and pay you by the hour.

Choosing between two opportunities

Fate is strange sometimes. I had fought so hard for environmental work, sent more than 800 applications, and landed nothing full-time. The federal job I thought I had was delayed for months by budget problems. It was only when an internship forced me to work with data, and I started to code, that I found what I actually liked. And a few months after that, almost by accident, came an internship at a tech startup.

Three months after joining Hook Mobile, Kirk told me they would hire me as a full-time software engineer. The funny part: right around then, the library’s budget finally came through, and they could finally pay me too. The library’s salary was considerably higher than Hook Mobile’s. But I was grateful to Terry and Kirk for hiring me when I had neither the relevant degree nor the experience. I loved the pace and challenge of a startup, and I wanted to commit fully to a career as a software engineer. So at my last meeting with Dr. Liu, I explained my decision and respectfully turned down his offer.

If I had not met Dr. Liu, Terry, and Kirk, I honestly do not know where I would be today. They were the people who helped me when I was at my lowest, who gave me a chance when I had nothing on paper. Because of them, I could regain my footing, find a new direction, and start moving again.

Originally published on my former blog on September 14, 2018. The blog is now offline, and the original text is preserved via the Wayback Machine. Lightly edited for this site.