Grace recently asked Finn and me if we felt the end of 2025. Upon reflection, I realized that the past year felt less like a continuous time period but rather like many fragments of intense work strung together by trips around the world.
After I spent New Years in China and Bangkok with my family, I plunged back into Singapore with a 24 hour hackathon hosted at NUS. My Fulbright research picked up speed, and admist all the chaos I took a detour to Hong Kong and Taiwan with Allen in Feburary.
March and April were mentally turbulent because I started applying for jobs but didn't know what I wanted to do. Should I pursue building technology because I have experience in the field? Or should I pivot to software engineering? Could I do something in between design and technology? The thought of returning to New York, starting my career, and making a professional pivot terrified me. I bawled my eyes out multiple times on the patio of SDE-4.
During the day, I was busy conducting user interviews for the urban digital twin and writing a lot of research paper drafts. At night, I was trying to combat existential crises with learning more about product design and frontend engineering. I took Josh Comeau's React course, and read some highly recommended UI/UX books (I found Refactoring UI to be the most practical). While these are helpful introductions ultimately doing is the best learning. So to practice React and Figma, I remembered the B.Arch alum data I had collected in the summer of 2024, and started visualizing it. This project also helped me discover lots of alums working at the intersection of design and technology, and many were kind to share their wisdom over coffee chats. I found the conversations to be inspiring, so one day, while catching up with my friend Thuan, we decided that we would start a podcast to share these conversations with others who are navigating creative careers. Thus began The Pragmatic Designers.
Around this time, I also started interviewing for different companies. Andrew Staniforth, who I had worked with at Assembly OSM, introduced me to Rebar, an early stage startup improving mechanical takeoffs with AI. I wanted to work at a startup, as the roles are more malleable and I thought doing a bit of everything can help me understand what I wanted, so I reached out and had a great conversation with the founders. After a few rounds of interviews and a take home assignment, I got an offer. I was so happy I didn't negotiate (note: always negotiate) and agreed to work six days a week. I was so excited to enter my grind phase!
May and June flew by. I went outdoor climbing in Krabi, finished my paper, then flew to Istanbul for 3 days. I rode the ferry across the Bosphorus, watched the sunset over the pink-apricot skies, and enjoyed the cute cats that appeared with every turn, then I returned to NYC on a Friday.
On Monday, I showed up at Rebar's office. To be completely honest, my first month was quite rough. The pace was incredibly fast as there were infinite things to do, and although my official title was design engineer, most of my 10+ hour days were spent coding. Sometimes, when I got home near 9pm, I missed being creative and questioned my life choices.
In August, my mom and stepdad came to visit. We went to Acadia National Park, watched the sunrise on Cadillac Mountain and walked along the coast with gentle sea breezes. Fall came to NYC, and Union Square was beautiful. The farmer's market had all my favorite vegetables: squashes and sweet potates and bunches and bunches of kale. I loved walking through on a sunny day, indulging in the smell of fresh apple cider donuts and watching eclectic New Yorkers. I read How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion, which was gifted to me by my Fulbright advisor Clayton. Most of the advice are a bit trite, but the chapter on pain spoke to me: "The right thing to do is never comfortable. How you face pain determines who you are." As I read those words, somehow I felt alright again. I was determined to stick it out.
In the months that followed, everything improved. I got better at knowing when and when not to rely on Cursor, I became better friends with my coworkers, and after a big feature push things also calmed down at work. We had more time to clean the codebase, and to plan and design new features. In November, Rebar started raising for a series A, which was super exciting and put everyone in a jolly mood. I no longer had time to keep up The Pragmatic Designers, but still tried to continue creating by writing my start up diaries and tinkering with personal projects in my evenings. I'm the most proud of contributing to an open-source departure board for PATH trains, and am excited to launch it very soon. I also found out about an unexpected job opportunity, applied, and will be starting a more design-focused role in the new year.
It's been a crazy year, and I've let go of a lot of things. My dreams of becoming an architect, a building technologist, my old expectations of what my life might look like. Yet, I'm also holding onto what truly matters to me: curiosity about the world, creating things, and sharing my knowlege and work with others. In the new year, here are a few things I want to do:
I want to create more consistently in one format. As I am preparing to transfer desaiwang.com from wix to self-hosted, I realized that I have been tiptoing across a bunch of media. First blogs: I wrote 10 in Rome, 5 in Singapore, with topics ranging from daily journals to Fulbright advice to tech blogs. I've also started two podcasts (the first died in infancy with only 2 episodes, and the Pragmatic Designers is in hiatus after 10 episodes). In the new year I want to commit to a media/platform. I've realized that this needs to be something that encourages me to make, (gains > costs), otherwise I will not be able to keep up in the long term. I'm thinking of starting an Instagram account to document my experiments at the intersection of art and technology.
I also want to care for myself, both professionally and personally. Although I love working, I realized that there are many different types of work and they vary a lot in terms of fulfilment. For example, a day spent just coding feels very different compared to a day spent collaboratively brainstorming about a new idea, having a discussion, and then executing the idea in code. I want to focus on growing my creative skills and leveraging them to create impact and move business metrics. Personally, I'm someone who anticipates others' feelings and needs, and often put them before mine. While serving others brings me happiness, I want to be more intentional about caring for myself. In the new year I want to learn to prioritize my own needs: ordering the dishes I want, making a list of places I want to visit and inviting others, being more honest about how I feel... I want to remind myself that it's impossible to work and love others when I'm burnt out, so taking good care of myself is very important!!!
And finally, I want to push myself. Per How to Live, I think I grow the most when I do things that I think I will fail at. For a long time I chose to stay in the AEC industry because I felt comfortable: I was good at what I did and I knew a lot of people in the field. Yet when I ventured into the startup world, and now am about to begin a new role, I realized that most skills are transferable and I can also learn new skills. A lot of times life is a mental game. It's less about being able to do something, but rather believing I can do it and taking actions towards realizing it. I want to use this year to build up my mental muscles and use them to problem solve in tough times.
Year in numbers:
- 4 personal projects: Talia Cotton's text animations, B.Arch Alum Career Vizualization, Physics Simulation, Path Train Departures Widget
- 5 countries: China, Thailand, Taiwan, Turkey, US
- 14 books: my favorite was How to Speak Machine and The Covenant of Water
- 2 courses: Joy of React, Gift Interfaces at SFPC
And something unrelated that I'm super proud of: my monsterra! I purchased it from an old grandpa on 27th street in June, and after repotting it's grown so much in just 6 months! It's been a beacon of hope, and I hope I'm also growing with it!