An important factor I think everyone should think about in their life at least once is: What do I want out of life? And I think you should have a concrete answer to this question.
However, as college students, a lot of times we are lost and don’t really know what we want out of life or what we are even doing. And that’s fine. But it’s important to have an idea of where you have been, where you are now, and where you want to be. Otherwise, life will move so quickly and suddenly you may not be in a place you wanted to be.
It’s scary to make plans for your life though. It seems like such a big commitment and makes life real. But plans can always change. Today’s plan doesn’t have to be tomorrow’s plans. Your idea for what you want out of life will be refined as you experience more things. But especially being at Berkeley, I think one of the of the easiest things to happen to you is that you just do what everyone else is doing. You’re taking classes that everyone is taking, you get involved in research just because everyone is working on neural networks, or you want to be an EECS major because EECS is EECS.
What are you optimizing your life for? What matters to you most? I find that it usually revolves around your career, family, friends, and fun. If you’re optimizing for your career, are you taking your courses seriously and building your professional network? If your highest priorities are family or friends, are you spending a lot of time creating real connections with them? And if you want to have fun in college, you better not be in your room the whole time.
And inside each of these categories, you should have some more specific goals. For example, if someone asks you what you want out of life, you can’t just say a great career. Do you want to be a startup, Big 4, or maybe fintech? What do you prioritize in a company? Is it culture, mission, or technology level? Is your goal to be VP of engineering someday or CTO or a distinguished engineer? And let’s say you want to be VP of engineering, do you want your skillset to be optimized for inspiring people, coming up with great ideas and features, or getting engineers to finish their work on time? Maybe that last level is a little bit too far in the future to think of. It’s easy to get lost sometimes in the current goals you are dealing with, that you forget the long term goals. All of us have good focus for short term goals. I know my CS189 homework is due next Monday and I gotta spend a lot of time for that. But it’s harder to have focus for long term goals. And having a clearer view of what you want out of life will make it easier for you to prioritize all of the current problems you are dealing with now.
And after you have some goals and a vision, it’s important to ask yourself why do you want this goal? If in college, you are focusing on getting a 4.0, you should ask yourself, “Why do I want to get a 4.0? Am I trying to go to grad school? Would it be a better use of my time to network instead?” If you are optimizing for family, are you asking yourself, “Why do I want to spend more time with family? Should I spend my time in college making new friends instead?” This is not to say that these goals are bad. I think they are great. But I do think you should analyze the motivations behind your goals because that is often what’s important. Challenge your goals on whether or not they should be your goals and find why you are doing things. If you don’t know why you’re doing things, then why are you doing them? Think about what you want. Don’t waste time on things you don’t want.
Anyways, my point is that most likely (and even more likely if you go to Berkeley), you probably have unlimited areas of interests you want to explore, and limited time to explore these areas. Spend some time thinking about what you want to optimize in your life. And reevaluate every so often since these things often change.
Onwards!