Rear-View Mirror

Musical Academics Scholarship Trust I’m about to graduate from college, and yet I feel more trapped than ever. A degree that was supposed to open up opportunities for me ended up trapping me within four walls of 6-figure student loan debt. The only way I will possibly be able to repay that is to join the corporate machine that the degree trained me for, and be a cog in it for the rest of my life.  You may be thinking – didn’t this guy have a choice? He put himself in this situation. That’s true – I did have a choice, and I made my decision to pursue a business degree with the reality that faced me coming out of high school. While I would’ve loved to pursue higher education in music, wanting to make it myself and find a stable income to support my family were two things that had a much lower chance of happening with a music degree.  Pay a quarter of million dollars for a six-figure job straight out of college, or the same price for economic uncertainty.  It was hardly a ch...

As a finance intern in the financial center of the world, I got the exhilarating experience of sitting atop a giant structure of want and worry.  Ensconced in a $400 ergonomic chair, I got the ever-prestigious luxury of staring at a brilliantly-lit screen where nameless fortunes were made and lost every day. It was my job to talk about them, and tell companies how they could get a piece of the massive wealth pie that’s been baking in the American oven for the past 250 years. While by no means was I a failure by any conventional measure, I felt as if I had failed part of myself.  Music and creativity had always been central to my life growing up. I would spend hours at the piano writing songs to never be released, years in the garage drumming to perfect the art for art’s sake. But this was always somehow at odds with where society wanted me to go. I was a high achiever in school, had an insatiable appetite for learning, and was an all-around people-pleaser – all things that wou...

Optimization is a weird concept, and one I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. In your typical math class, you solve problems to optimize for a certain variable, or in a broader lens, try and find the most efficient ways to get problems solved.  In your typical academic year, you try to gear your schedule up to optimize for two of three outcomes – academic success, a vibrant social life, and sleep. In your typical lifespan, it’s a bit more hazy. Some optimize for money, some optimize for power, others for family, and still others for spiritual fulfillment. While general, this doesn’t even begin to cover the wide array of things people end up wanting to prioritize in their lives post-graduation. However – optimization by its nature requires prioritization of one outcome at the expense of one or many others. This is the idea that’s been living rent-free in my head these past few weeks.  It isn’t too deep when you put it in the context of a classroom environment – sure, you pr...