The definition of success varies among people. However, there seems to be one thing I have observed from other people that whether you can make it toward success or not, it’s reflected on how you have thrived through tough and uncertain situations, on how you dare to think no matter how much chaos is out there, on how good you are to deal with life to live truly with what you want.
I am now living in a crisis: career & growing up crisis and coronavirus crisis. I am more afraid of the former one but I don’t like the second one very much either. It happened that I made my choice to go for programming and I absolutely love it, I am getting more capable of it too. I love coding not only because of the logic while learning it but also because of the impact I can make from it, I want to build a good product from tech. Despite the fact that I am very passionate about it and willing to go for it, I have a student loan to carry and a decision to make whether I will stay to leave the U.S. I never like making decision and I always wish to have someone else do it for me, which is very irresponsible and unrealistic of course. Another key factor that I can’t decide is the uncertainty. I filed H1B visa but I don’t know whether I will be selected, not to mention, the world is falling into uncertainty too due to corona virus.
I always appreciate my younger years when I was free, wild and young. I did not have to care much about my family, I did not have to be aware of the fact that I am a woman, I did not have to worry too much about life, how wonderful. I had the most amazing opportunities to just go ahead for any challenge and moments to cheer them up too. The more I am growing up, the more fear I have, which scares me a lot. I am afraid of what happens to my beloved, I am less willing to deal with life, but the energy inside me never got light off. I know I still want to try more, to do more and now a new thing is to make bigger impacts. I did make impacts before from things I did, to people I met but now the impact should be bigger. My family always keep a hope that I will get to stay and have a good life in the U.S but gosh, I wish they could listen my inner voice or maybe I could communicate it to them. I am getting clearer that I can make a bigger impact somewhere else, not in the U.S, and why not somewhere closest to me, my home country. I never thought or imagined of getting into engineering path but the deeper I am in, the more I feel I belong to it. While engineering and technology has made a huge impact in the future, my home country is left behind it. At the same time, recently, a striking part from an article caught my attention: “A 2008 survey of nearly 900 developers on Stack Overflow revealed that: if your interest in programming did not start between the ages of 8 and 18, your chances of being motivated enough to become a developer are low”. That made me think a lot about why I am still hanging here to help kids in this ‘already developed’ country but not right away coming there to help kids over there to get an earlier exposure. My younger sister and brother may not have a privilege like me to get a good education in the U.S but they deserve to get a good education and whether they can get it or not, pretty much in my hands right now. Never in my life I care about money unless I owe someone because money comes and goes to me. So being in the situation of working to pay back feels like a trap to me, even I know it’s worth it. Working with kids always evokes my curiosity and my creativity and I always want to keep my inner child part forever. Going back to Vietnam might be tough, I have to adapt and start again, but I will have freedom and have lots of opportunities to make an impact. Continue staying in the U.S means I may not be able to actually do what I want to do now and I may have to do things I don’t want to do. At the same time, the impact I can make is smaller and the opportunity to make bigger impact is getting further to me. Both do not wipe out my concern of paying my student loan as well as paying back to people who have helped me, but I am sure if I can make bigger impact I have already paid them. Can I just delay paying for longer? How hard! I wonder if I should be aggressively fighting for what I want right now?
Regardless, for whatever challenges I have been through, for whatever tough moments I have experienced, the journey in the U.S has cultivated a desire of making impact in me and I am truly grateful for it, this is meaningful and worth it. Thanks Babson, thanks Lambda, thanks my friends and my family, I am growing up!
