A product manager at MongoDB once told me some advice she’d received: “set your goals for the next year, and your goals for the end of your career or next ten years(something long term).” Her own answers to the latter surprised me: they were to write and publish a book, teach a class, and build a business (didn’t have to be a software business).

Well, I’ve always had lots of ideas for what I’d want to do (see: 2018 Quinna). My vision in the future, and stubborn belief in executing that vision, are the core principles I have always relied on. Although there are a lot of non-career-related goals (start a family, travel, etc), I wanted to focus on what my vision for the next year, and towards the end of my career look like.

How do I narrow down the ten year goals? These are ones that I’ve had an inkling of for a while. They are the most discrete units: if you ask ‘why x?’ the answer is simply ‘because.’

In the next year:

  • Become a very strong software engineer & get a full-time job

That’s it. For once, I have one sole (career-related) motivation to work on.

Beyond that, I also want to stay as a software engineer for at least the first three years. After 2 years as a CS student (and, being honest, really 1 - 1.5 serious years) I still feel like I have just barely scratched the surface of this subject. The advice of one of my interviewers recently was to try out different areas because there’s so much area for movement in the field - if you’re on a frontend team and don’t love it, then you can stick it out for a couple months or year and switch to a completely different team, like compilers.

In the next 10-20 years I hope to:

  • Do research at the MIT Media Lab - a place I’ve followed since high school for its interdisciplinary research, various labs doing cutting-edge work at the intersection of technology, people, and the physical world.
  • Found a startup/ join an early-stage startup / lead a startup in some capacity - I’ve had an inkling I’ve wanted to do this for a while, but it was cemented most recently by working at Nuro, and from TEDx (planning, promoting, organizing TEDxUofM felt very much like a startup in some ways, and was the most meaningful activity I did purely out of interest)
  • Give a talk at business school & teach a class/seminar - I used to watch GSB lectures for fun, and I’ve always loved TED Talks. This is something I’d love to do later.