6 Things I Learned in my Freshman Year

The past year had been quite an intense year for me. I had to adapt from living in a small island in Indonesia, my beloved Bali, to be living in the city of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, with its skyscrapers and celebrity sightings, its Silicon Beach and its proximity to the Silicon Valley, and its much bigger size and population than Bali. I had to get used to living on my own. I had to understand that I am no longer in a school where there was only 20 kids in the graduating class – at UCLA, there are about 31,000 undergraduate students, each special and hardworking in their own ways.

I had kept myself busy the entire year, and I barely had any time to write for personal reasons (I did had to write a total of 7 papers for my classes during Winter Quarter though). I am starting this blog as a platform for me to polish my hopefully not too lost writing skills, as well as to reflect on the insights and knowledge I’ve gained over this past year, and the things I have yet to learn. Therefore, I think it is appropriate for the first post on this site to be a quick summary of the main things I have learned (outside of my classes) throughout my freshman year. Here we go…

Being competitive is a double-edged sword

I have always been proud of myself for being competitive. Seeing other succeed makes me want to do the same, or even better. My competitive nature had brought me good grades throughout high school, had kept me motivated as individual. Hence, I prized this quality and thought of it as a virtue, not a vice.

Is it, though?

Well, it didn’t take me too long to realize that blind competitiveness is not the best thing to have when you’re competing with some of the best students in the U.S., or even the world. Yes, being competitive might drive you to do more, but you would be under constant stress. After my first quarter, I have come to realize that you simply cannot be the best at every single thing you do. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, in the chaos of the competition and the whirl of “I have to do it better than them” in my head, it’s easy to forget that sometimes people have different goals and prioritize different things. For instance, the calculus class that I took was probably of more importance to the engineers that I took the class with, and they were probably better with math anyway, or else they would not have decided to pursue engineering.

And so, I learned that it is important to pick your battles, realize what is important to you and your goals, and focus your efforts in those areas. It’s good to be competitive and strive for good results, but at the same time, acknowledging this little piece of truth might give you peace of mind, and you might even stress less.

Internships, workshops and clubs are just as important as your classes

I came to this mini-epiphany at the end of my Fall Quarter, when I realized that a quarter has gone past and I have not involved myself in a single organization on campus. In the same quarter, I also did embarrassingly excessive stalking on LinkedIn on many UCLA juniors and seniors who are involved in the professional business clubs on campus. Every single one of these stalking sessions ended up with me beating myself up and thinking that I would never be able to achieve anything that they have done. I was also convinced that I had wasted an entire quarter; while my friends were making connections and friends through their clubs, I was sitting in my room every weekend studying my textbooks.

When Winter Quarter started, I was determined to get myself involved.

I applied to a bunch of clubs and got rejected from a bunch of clubs. In the end, I managed to get into two clubs: an entrepreneurship one and an investing one. Both clubs had taught me things that I would never have discovered on my own, and presented two wholly different worlds in business. The corporate world, and the startup world.

I could probably write an entire post about what I learned specifically from the organizations that I’m in. But this post isn’t that. Generally, what I did learn was getting involved in clubs is so important to educate yourself on what’s out there – things that you would never find on your own. It helps you build connections, and it will surely give you an edge when you apply to jobs post-graduation… hopefully. My goal next year is to join the intensive workshops provided by the big business organization on campus.

When I told my parents about the clubs that I joined, my dad actually scolded me and told me focus more on having fun in college rather than creating an impossible, busy schedule for myself. But college is the one place where you are free to explore as many interests as you want. Also, in a world where university degrees are getting more and more common, a piece of paper isn’t going to get you far… but the experiences you get while you were in university, which could be found through on campus organizations, internships, and workshops, will get you into places.

The distinction between the environment in corporations and startups

This is just a random point that had never occurred to me before I came to UCLA, joined organizations, and read up about this topic. Maybe for some people it’s pretty obvious, I don’t know. But for me, this distinction is interesting.

When thinking about a future career in business, everyone is basically presented with two options. Either you go with the startup route, or you go with the corporate route. The corporate world is represented by big businesses, and startups are the smaller, early business (and now mostly tech, from what I’ve seen so far). The environment and culture that you get from one will be very different from the other.

In a big firm, you will become part of a bigger machine. Everything, I imagine, will be structured systematically. Everything will be organized. Structured training, clear organization of the firm. This also means less flexibility. As an entry level worker or an intern, I imagine myself mostly observing, doing tasks as told, with little room for error. Many students will be willing to take your place.

In a startup, with generally fewer people working in the company, you will have more chances to interact or even converse with the people in higher positions. More possibilities to learn about the passion of the business, its vision and goals. You will be more flexible in your roles, and I’m guessing that your contributions might feel more meaningful to a startup, mainly from its smaller scale and the still-growing nature of the company. However, with this also comes uncertainty – maybe even lack of the structure that you may wish to have in an internship.

Unfortunately, I have not taken any internships and thus haven’t experienced these differences myself. Who knows, maybe I’ll find myself really wrong. All I’ve done is summarizing the general idea that I’ve heard and read many times throughout the year. I am excited to find out for myself.

Technology is taking over the world quicker than I thought

Being so close to the center of all technology advancements – the Silicon Beach and Silicon Valley – I really got a sense of the direction the world is going. I have not felt it in Bali. Not where we were so far away from where things are moving fast.

First of all, I was taken aback at the amount of tech companies that are on the rise. I’ve always known the biggest companies of this day and age are tech companies like Microsoft or Google, but only after this year I realized that the world is literally about to become digitalized. People are working on self-driving cars, virtual realities, and artificial intelligence. Businesses and decision making are going to be driven by data – so, so much data about consumers have been gathered by these giant tech companies. This can either be a good thing or a bad thing, or maybe in between, but one thing I know for sure: this will change the landscape of business practice forever.

Every time I hear the word “startup”, it’s talking about some kind of tech company most of the time. An app or a website. The provision of service through technology. Something scalable and is capable of explosive growth. It’s a very different definition of startups back in Indonesia, where a new, small restaurant in the corner of the street can be called a startup. I don’t know which definition is right – but I cannot deny that tech dominates the startup scene in L.A., and maybe even the world.

What does this mean? For me, this means that I have to catch up. I have always been dismissing technology, and computers seem to hate me. But the world is changing, and I have to be able to grasp the direction it’s going.

You need to put more effort in maintaining friendships in college

Something less career/business related, I guess. The social scene in college! I have always gone to a small school where my class is less than 100 people. We got shoved into the same small room everyday with the same people, and making friends were relatively easy.

In college, when you literally see different faces every day, with lecture halls filled with more than 150 people, things get a little difficult. For me, if I don’t have similar schedules with a friend, it’s incredibly hard to see them at all. This means maintaining friendships are more difficult – you can meet someone that you really like, but never have the same classes as them – and you’ll find that you don’t see the person anymore.

But I don’t think this should be a barrier to making friends. Clubs help a lot, because you see the same people on a weekly basis, and you tend to have similar interests anyway if you’re in the same club. If you’re lucky, you can get awesome roommates that basically become your family in college (shout out to them if they’re reading this!). Also, reaching out to people and explicitly letting them know that you want to catch up with them is pretty effective – you are telling them that you value your relationship with them, and you are willing to make the effort to maintain the friendship that you’ve developed.

Exploring the city and accumulating experiences are important

One of the realizations that came a little bit too late. I thought of this at the very end of the Freshman Year – literally a few weeks before my first year in L.A. was about to end. I realized that I have not seen many places at all. I’ve been so focused on studying, and getting good grades, and doing things for my clubs, that I have dismissed travelling altogether.

But now looking back, I really did wish I’ve done more during my time there. I wanted to see different parts of L.A., not just the ones within walking distance from my dorm room. I want to take lots of pictures. I want to come to more campus events. I want to be able to say that I have done a lot more with my time in L.A. besides being cooped up on campus doing math problems or reading.

I regretted it so much, that I basically went and did things during the last few weeks of school. I went to Venice Beach, visited the Last Bookstore, and hiked to the Secret Swing in Elysian Park. My grades didn’t change. This convinced me – next year, I am determined to travel more.

My roommate told me: You can always retake a class, but you can’t relive an experience. (Still hoping that I will never have to retake a class though).

Bonus: Some photos from my last minute L.A. adventures.