A fellow club member and friend at Berkeley recently posed a question to me, "do you believe in luck?”
I thought about it for a bit. Honestly, I feel extremely lucky everyday. During my daily stroll through campus, I always BEAM to myself and I think about how lucky I am to be here. This is real, by the way. My friends have asked me if there’s something wrong with me, as they catch me smiling at nothing on campus.
My friend continued to say he did believe in luck, but luck is something that can be created. Keep doing the right things, and good things will happen.
I'm inclined to agree. I often make the analogy: if you flip a coin 1000 times, it is bound to come up heads approximately 500 times, as per the Law of Large Numbers. I tell this to friends who are stressed about any life event. Transferring required a lot of luck I had to generate on my end, but the fact that specifically Berkeley accepted me is an outcome I couldn’t generate or guarantee. I humbly say perhaps it is likely (touch wood) I would have gotten into another university, but the fact that I got into Berkeley specifically is undeniably lucky.
I graduated from Cal around a month ago, and my time there was EPIC! Reflecting upon my two and a half years there, I can confidently say that attending was a no-brainer opportunity. I think no-brainer opportunities happen very few times in one's lifetime, and I think my transfer was the only one I have encountered thus far. My intuition pushed me to attend, and my experiences confirmed my hunch that Berkeley was a no-brainer opportunity. This led to serendipity: I joined a club and made some amazing friends, had the chance to intern for some cool places, and finally, developed engineering skills that I wouldn’t have gained otherwise. I want to illustrate how this no-brainer opportunity led to serendipity: a series of incredibly “lucky” events.
So why was Berkeley so transformative? First, a rigorous curriculum. Second, the ecosystem of student clubs provide practical opportunities analogous to a real job, as many of them do contract work. However, if I had to pick one most important factor as to why Berkeley was so transformative, I would say it’s the quality of the student body—everyone is truly so driven by something. Engineering students at my previous school had primary passions that weren't engineering, but that's okay.
A fiercely competitive student body has its pros and cons. With competition, if you are around average or even slightly below, it pushes you up. After being humbled by discrete mathematics, I realized I was objectively a pretty average student. Once I made it to the upper division courses, this averageness was exacerbated. This taught me how to be competitive, which in my case, meant avoiding direct competition. It was difficult for me to be the top student in my classes (imagine there are 1000 other students). Even so, despite my okay academics, I realized I really thrived socially—I really fit in here. So I focused on meeting interesting people and learning from them. I'm an OK designer, so I design. I like reading, so I read. I've been told I'm a decent writer, so I write. In fact, the reason for this site redesign was to reduce friction when publishing posts. I think—I hope—a unique combination of skills is what allows people to be successful. I don't know what opportunities these skills could open up in the future, but I choose to trust the process. You can only connect the dots looking back, not looking forwards, as Steve Jobs so famously said.
I can confidently say that Berkeley has accelerated my career by 3-4 years. And in terms of the learning I’ve gained, the people I’ve met, and the perspectives of some of my very cool peers: those experiences are invaluable. So hopefully, if or when my next no-brainer opportunity comes along, I’m lucky enough to take the leap of faith.