At Illumio, we have a Toastmasters Lite program made for the intern program, and yesterday I was one of the speakers and I talked about my life. It brought back a lot of memories, because in high school, I gave a speech during our Gab Talks (Gabrielino High School's version of Ted Talks) about my life up till that point as well. It was interesting to build up on those times.
This is the video of my Gab Talks speech. I do not have the video for my TM speech yesterday, but I will attach the script that I planned out. And just in case you were reluctant to watch my Gab Talks, let me just tell you the first line: "My life without pingpong is like a broken pencil: pointless." Oh, the mems.
And here is the script of my speech yesterday:
So as you all probably know, my name is Teddy. And actually, at my high school, we had a program that was like Ted Talks, and I gave a speech to around 500 of my classmates about my pingpong experience up to that point. It’s on Facebook and Youtube, so if you’re interested, feel free to message me and I can give you the link. So today, I’m going to focus on my life after high school up till now, which consists of 3 sections: my experience in Europe and meeting Brian, my beginnings at UC Berkeley, and being at Illumio.
At the end of senior year, I got accepted both into UC Berkeley and UCLA for civil engineering. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do in college, but half of my family are civil engineers and the other half are pastors, so I decided to sign up for civil engineering. I also convinced both schools to let me take a gap year to try to make the Olympics. This allowed me to postpone my college decisions for a year while letting me focus on my pingpong aspirations, which was great.
So onto my European adventures! I lived in Austria for six months and in Sweden for around 4 months. The atmosphere in these two places were amazing. I was training with world class players who I’d only seen on Youtube before, and socialize with them like they were normal human beings. I experienced table tennis at a level which you never get to see in the US, where the programs aren’t as great. I also got to visit many countries for tournaments in Europe since there are all close by.
And then came Olympic trials. And I didn’t make it. And the reason is simple: there are better players out there than me. I didn’t have any excuses, because there are none. No excuses. I was devastated. But I still had the option to go back to Sweden for 3 more months to play pingpong. I thought I would just try to enjoy it even though I didn’t have any more goals in table tennis.
It was difficult to play pingpong without the Olympic goals. Sometimes I wanted to just fly back home and just do nothing and hang out with my friends. But I’m glad I didn’t. Because then, one of my teammates’s friend came to visit my teammate. His name was Brian and he was studying at Berkeley, but was studying abroad in Sweden at time. And I met him and we hanged out together and he convinced me to take computer science courses at Berkeley and he’s the reason I got into CS. I still go to him for all of my CS questions and career advice before I do anything. He’s one of my closest friends now.
Sometimes I wonder how life would be different if I didn’t meet Brian. if I went home after I didn’t make Olympics. Or if I made Olympics, maybe I wouldn’t have time to meet Brian because I would be too busy training. Would I be in civil engineering still? Who would I go to for career advice? How different would my life be?
Am I going to say that it was the best thing in my life that I didn’t make Olympics? No. I’m not stupid. But there are these random meetings, like my meeting with Brian, which will change your life in ways you’d never expect or planned to. I planned to take a year off of school to make Olympics, then go to a college I didn’t really care about in a degree I didn’t really have a passion for and get a boring normal job. But I ended up somehow finding my way into computer science and loving it. And I wonder if somehow the universe’s way of getting me into computer science was through playing pingpong professionally in Europe.
Then I came to college. And the first thought I had was: “Wow, I just wasted the last 10 years of my life playing pingpong and that has no relevance at all to this new chapter of my life. None of the hard work I put in even matters anymore. ” I ended up being so wrong.
I joined Cal Table Tennis Club. A lot of my pingpong companions also got into Berkeley so we had a strong team, but the novice training program was pretty terrible. So I created a new training program for beginners. And when people noticed how much better the program was than before and my deep knowledge in this area, everyone in the club wanted my help. I had this elusive skill that all of the CS genius pingpong enthusiasts wanted, and they were more than happy to help me out with my CS related stuff. And they helped me so much. I could never have imagined how much pingpong would jumpstart my computer science career. And I realized that nothing you learn in life is ever useless. Because you never start a completely new chapter of your life or have a completely new clean slate. You are bringing yourself into this chapter. You have your life lessons, the victories, the defeats, and the memories.
And now, here I am at Illumio. I took the internship offer from Illumio because it was the first offer I got, and no other company that I was in the process of interviewing responded in the time period that Illumio gave me. I didn’t really have a choice. But now looking back, how can I imagine summer life not being at Illumio? I’ve become so close with Ananth and Shraddha, I love hearing Yash’s knowledge out of his Google API brain, and seeing Ofek walking around with an amazing smile on her face are just a few things I look forward to everyday.
I think sometimes the universe pushes you in certain directions that you don’t want to be pushed like it did with me with these three moments. Each of these three sections, I felt a little bit hopeless. I was playing pingpong aimlessly, I went into college with this useless pingpong knowledge, and I felt like I didn’t have any choice but to go to Illumio. But sometimes you plan your life, and you have a vision of how you want your life to be, but the universe has a different plan out there for you. A better plan.
We were only given 5-7 minutes to give our speech, so I had to cut down on some parts that I would've liked to expanded on. But I think it was a good very high overview of the last three years.
I have a lot of fun public speaking even though I always feel super nervous beforehand. I think people are also surprised because I'm usually a very quiet person. Public speaking should be fun. How many times in your life do you get to tell everyone your story?