Reflection of 2020

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Without a doubt, we’ve heard countless times: “2020 has been a wild ride”. I don’t need to tell you that, you lived it. This blog post is a personal reflection of the past year, and frankly, there are no takeaways from this post for the reader, except maybe learning more about me. This post is for me. First, I’ll go through a short, honest reflection of some global events, and then more into my personal life.

World Outlook

Despite the many life-shaking events that happened this year, I came away unscathed. 2020 highlighted how privileged I am. Through a global pandemic that affected 84 million patients and their friends and families, I knew no one that lost their life; Through a polarizing political election, I had never felt like one of the groups largely affected; Through a national reckoning with systemic racism, my race was never at the forefront of the issue; Through one of the greatest crashes in the stock market, I was able to capitalize on the rebound; Through the staggering number of jobless claims, I was blessed with a job I enjoy very much; Through the craziness of toilet paper hoarding, my family was blessed with having the supplies we needed; Through a jarring pivot to a virtual everything, I was blessed with the technology and freedom to pursue my computer science interests; Through the largest wildfire seasons burning through millions of acres of land, displacing billions of animals and people, I carried on living my comfy suburban lifestyle.

***Quick aside here: This completely breaks the flow of the article, but it’s also reflective of how my brain works. I am a strong visual learner, so I love data visualization. Check out this Year in Review: 2020 in 20 Visualizations if you are the same way!***

The uncomfortable truth I struggle with is that to many of these events, I think “this doesn’t really affect me.” This year, I have grappled with the question, “Do I have to care about each of these events equally?” When I say I don’t care too much about the topic of same-sex marriage (for example), I’m sure someone will be enraged, or at the least very impassioned, and convince me to feel a certain way. But I ask myself, do I need to feel as passionately about every topic? Do I, in order to become a “decent human being”, have to feel a burning calling in my soul when I hear about the problems the world faces with women empowerment, systemic racism, world hunger, global climate change, the plight of the LGBTQ+ community, etc.? Or is it okay to just feel strongly about one passionate area and focus on that? Surely no one person can be an equally strong champion for all these causes, right?

Now I know this thinking to each of these events is not ideal, and you may even be wondering “how could you not care about these events?” This is the same question I have been asking myself. How have I become so comfortable in my own bubble to not feel more passionately about these events? How can I listen better to the hardships of many and learn better empathy? Through continually asking myself these questions, I begin to challenge myself to care. No I am not “awakened” yet, but something is stirring.

Personal

Now onto some more personal reflections, or those that don’t tie to global issues. As I move into 2021, I want to set goals for myself. Sounds weird to hear myself say this, but I don’t think I have ever set goals. At the very least, I’ve never written them down in a spot where I can remember to find them, let alone constantly revisit and meditate on them. But 2020 has changed me. As I was setting goals for myself, I realized I can’t move forward without taking a step to look back. I want to reflect on 2020 to see what worked well, what didn’t, and what I want to change. Only when I’ve put some thought onto where I currently stand will I have a clearer picture of what I want to accomplish in 2021.

I’ve categorized my 2021 goals into 7 areas: Relationships, Coding Improvement, Self-development, Career, Health/Fitness, Spiritual, and Financial. It makes sense to reflect on each category for 2020.

Let me start off by clarifying: I did not set any concrete goals for 2020. As the first calendar year after graduating college, I am sure I had some vague mental goals of “doing well at my job”, “continue to nurture my relationships”, “workout”, etc. but definitely nothing concrete, actionable, or that I still remember. Obviously, that is Exhibit A of how NOT to set goals for yourself. Little did I know back then, I would see a lot of personal growth and change in 2020. While I didn’t have written down goals, let’s see how I did in each category. The following sections are loosely listed in order of priority or chronologically.

Self-development

I started 2020 knowing there is a lot to learn now that I’m out of college. At that point, I finally felt like I had time to learn what I genuinely wanted to learn, instead of just learning what the syllabus told me to. For me, graduating was a signal to breathe a fresh air of knowledge and curiosity, freeing me from the long, stifling years of “education”. It’s ironic, but I realized late into my undergrad that Mechanical Engineering may not fulfill all my curiosities, and I began to “learn” textbook knowledge just to get through the degree.

Topics I learned about in 2020

• Retirement planning — I wanted to understand 401k’s, Roth IRA, HSA’s, company benefits, and set a realistic timeline and plan for retirement.
• Investing — My research into retirement planning sparked my interest in stock market investing, where I spent many hours reading Investopedia and checking my Robinhood account for the latest movements in my positions.
• Python — I was looking forward to learning Python and coding, as I saw clear opportunities for data analysis and to automate some boring tasks at work.
• Touch Typing — I realized a need to improve my typing speed and accuracy, so I took an online course for touch-typing.
• Podcasts — I began listening to podcasts like Robinhood Snacks Daily, TED Talks Daily, TED Business, Millennial Money Minutes, and The Journal, among many others that I tried but did not stick with.
• Blogging — I began blogging on Medium, both as a way to improve my communication skills, especially relating to coding projects, but also to document and reflect on my life.

Something strange caught a hold of me this year, where I realized I actually like learning. Not only did I like it, but — do I dare say it — felt passionate about it! I hadn’t previously experienced the fun in learning where I could completely tailor my learning progression to my interests. As a result, I dived into a learning frenzy for coding.

Coding

This year was coding crazy.

• DA101 — The first step was a Data Analytics 101 course offered at work. This course was phenomenal for showing the potential of using Python in our day-to-day tasks and for teaching us the basic syntax of Python. To learn more, we had to learn it ourselves, which I was happy to.
• I spent countless hours this year after work or on the weekends surfing the internet to learn about coding. I kept digging and digging into topics like Data Visualization, Virtual Environments, Machine Learning, Cloud technologies, SQL (Structured Query Language), etc.
• OMSCS — I decided to pursue an Online Masters in Computer Science at Georgia Tech to formalize my learning. Applied and accepted!
• Side projects — completed 2 side projects; Beginner’s Financial Analysis in Python and Visualizing Theater Scripts Using Simple NLP

Career

• Role Switch — Successfully transitioned from my previous team, the New Process Capabilities (i.e. Breakthrough Technologies) team, to the Foods Applied AI team.
• Worked towards promotion for next year (hopefully March 2021), although it is a bit accelerated in my company.
• Explored learning paths for data science and software engineering
• Along the way, I struggled with the feeling of “being late” to make the career switch. I wrestled with doubts like “oh other people have already had 4–5 years of experience coding (from college), what chance to I have of catching up? I’ll always be a few years behind.” and “why would a FAANG company (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, all regarded as top-tier in the coding space) want to hire me in a few years when they could just hire a new grad?” I sometimes still have doubts, but I’ve decided coding is an invaluable skill to learn anyways, so for now I just want to chase the fun.

Financial

• Began investing not only retirement accounts but also savings. Achieved 27% returns in the past year. Not the best for a year of explosive growth after March, but also not the worst for my first year and the year of COVID impacts.
• Dabbled in options trading but never got good at it. I need to practice with paper money and set/test trading strategies.
• Regret not buying Bitcoin (currently valued over $30,000 but was at around $10,000 when I considered it, and $5000 in March)
• Missed the huge returns from the rebound of large-cap tech companies
• First year Olivia and I together chose to donate to charities we are fond of. I chose to donate to World Wildlife Foundation, National Geographic, North Texas Food Bank, and American Red Cross.

Health/Fitness

• Gave up working out for the second half of the year. It was hard to find motivation working out in the comfort of the home. I still had occasional home workouts, but never found the intensity I had back in college.

Relationships

I struggled a lot with balancing priorities when it came to relationships.

• The most difficult was finding a way to spend time with family, and actually being present when doing it. I felt caught up in work and learning and unfortunately left less time with family
• I was able to spend more time with Olivia due to COVID than I would have without COVID. As everything switched to WFH, we were able to “house bounce” and spend a few weeks at my place in Dallas, a few weeks at hers in Houston, etc.
• I struggle to connect with old friends from college. Now that we have graduated and moved on to new adventures, I found it difficult to keep people in my life. I made efforts to set up Zoom calls, but this is still an area to improve upon.
• I came to realize that I would love to pursue a great work-life balance, but I can achieve that in the timeframe of my life, not day-to-day. This means that it is okay for me now, young and early in my career, to dedicate so much time and energy every day to work/career. It’s okay if I don’t have a perfect balance between work and life now, but over the course of my life, I hope not to get caught up climbing the corporate ladder.

Spiritual

This category easily had the lowest priority. I didn’t contemplate challenging questions like the meaning of life. I didn’t educate myself on different religions. I didn’t pursue God. The most I did was ask friends how their own spiritual journeys were going, what challenges they faced, and how they overcame them. In the back of my mind, I still believe there is more to life than the work grind or just being nice to people. I hope to spend the next year doing more soul searching.

In Summary

That about wraps up the year. To be perfectly honest, I started losing interest in this reflection halfway through writing. I powered through but that didn’t stop me from writing in bullet points. I started feeling impatient and wanted to jump to setting my 2021 goals instead of reflection on 2020. I started doubting if this reflection would be helpful for me in the future. One item I need to improve upon is powering through tasks that don’t have immediate payoff. I know this post, for example, will serve as a baseline to build my 2021 goals and measure my progress a year from now, but I’m impatient. I want everything I do to have immediate payoff, but this impatient desire leads to being short-sighted and weakens my ability to plan ahead.

This, along with many other areas of improvement, will make 2021 a very exciting year!