If you were to ask me to perform bubble sort on an array five years ago, then I would’ve ignored you. If you were to ask me to explain what a linked list is, I would’ve told you to stop talking to me. If you were to ask me what the time complexity of Dijkstra’s algorithm is, I surely would’ve kneecapped you.

Why? Because the only thing that I cared about was basketball. It was my dream, for as long as I could remember, to play professional basketball. I didn’t know nor care about 1’s and 0’s — that was for the Smart People and I simply, well I wasn’t one of them. Little did I know, my dream of playing professional basketball would be crushed through no fault but my own… I was kicked off my high school basketball team for making an inappropriate joke about the head varsity coach’s wife and to my luck, they both found out. I was immediately kicked off the team; during our conversation, he told me that I would never be playing basketball for his program again. My solution was to transfer to a different school but I wasn’t accepted anywhere else. That was the end of my childhood fantasy.

With basketball out of the picture, I had to find a different passion. For the next year or so I became the quintessence of a high-school stoner; I didn’t do much. However, I did discover Fallout 4 and began playing it religiously for a while. I did well in school but then again it was just high school, not a whole lot of effort was required. As for my life plan — I didn’t have one. I didn’t need one. I was comfortable with getting high and playing video games — it was an easy life, one I could get used to. Then one day, while sitting in my psychology class learning about schizophrenia; I decided I was going to become a psychiatrist to learn all about cognition, I thought the mind was an interesting enigma and I needed to understand it in its entirety.

I decided to bring this up with my family and hear what they had to say… well, to summarize what happened next: the idea was shot down faster than a Soviet spy plane flying over the White House. Now, with all due respect to psychologists — I think it is a fascinating and necessary profession, but you have to consider that both of my parents are electrical engineers, as well as my stepdad. So the social sciences just didn’t cut it and I was back to the drawing board.

Fast forward a year later. While sitting in my Algebra 3–4 class, a teacher from down the hall came in to talk about an event called “National Hour of Coding.” She showed us a commercial for the event that I would never forget — Chris Bosh was in it. If it wasn’t for him, this memory would’ve been long gone. The moment was serendipitous. I didn’t have anything going on after school that day, so I decided to go to that event. We were programming with Scratch: the most basic programming. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it. I thought it might be something worth looking into, so I did. I got home and looked up the salary for a computer scientist. It was $90,000 a year and in all honesty, this was the reason why I chose to pursue this path.

At this time, my brother was in a fraternity at Arizona State University and with me being the copycat younger brother that I was, I wanted to become a frat guy, too. From junior year of high school onward, I cultivated the persona of a Frat Guy. Then, when college came around, I ended up joining one, too. You guessed it, I joined my brother’s frat. It was your stereotypical frat portrayed in movies like American Pie — rowdy and obnoxious.

Overall, it was a good time and I’m glad I was able to share that with him. However, towards the end of my sophomore year, I began to grow tired of the infinite loop that meant: go to school, go home, get drunk, go to sleep at 3 AM, and repeat. I wasn’t sure of any alternatives, but I was sure I needed to find one. At the time, nearly all of my friends were either members of or associated with my frat so it would be pretty difficult to do anything different. Towards the end of the winter semester, one day, I was sitting in a lecture and not paying attention to a single thing being taught, instead, I was watching videos about psychedelics on YouTube. Then some dude sitting behind me tapped on my shoulder and proceeded to show pictures of his peyote and mescaline cacti, along with his psilocybin mushroom collection. We spoke for a while, shared contact info, then went our separate ways after class to not speak again for some time.

A couple of weeks later I decided to message him to see if he had any shrooms. He did, I went to his place, and let me tell you — he was a psychedelic, Walter White. Shrooms, peyote, mescaline, and DMT. He had it all. I eventually got what I came for and went home. The next week I had planned to take them and when that day came, to tell you the truth, I was nervous. I hadn’t tried any psychedelics yet, but I knew everything there was to know about them. I was so certain I was going to try them, but it didn’t stop me from being nervous.

When I finally got around to it, the experience was nothing short of revolutionary. It made me discover the important things in life. It opened my eyes to the superficial nature of being in Greek Life, it made me realize that I did not want to be that person anymore. I didn’t want to balance being the “cool, frat guy who doesn’t care about anything” with “the nerd that loves to learn.” I decided I was going to be absolute; I was going to drop my frat and fully commit to the way of the nerd. This was a huge turning point in my life — it solidified my identity. I became who I am today from this one decision; it was the butterfly effect in action. I have found new interests and hobbies that I don’t think I would have considered before. For instance, artificial intelligence.

This epiphany had me thinking more about what I wanted to do with my life, I knew I wanted to contribute something to this world before I die. Make a name for myself and have that name written down in history — preferably a Wikipedia page, because to have a Wikipedia page you can’t be just another Joe Shmoe on the side of the street. No, you have to do something notable enough for people to care about you. This, right here, is what began to motivate me; it’s where artificial intelligence and Lincoln, Nebraska come into the picture.

I have a list of three things that I find to be the most interesting in the world. Coming in at number one is psychedelics, but right behind that is artificial intelligence: the idea of creating an intelligent machine simply by feeding a computer with strings of 1’s and 0’s is the most extraordinary concept. Could you imagine trying to explain that to a caveman? Where would you even begin? It’s commonly argued that the AI singularity will be the single, most impactful thing humanity will ever see. I’m not going to go into detail on why that is, since that is not the point of this. The point is to show how one trivial decision I made two years ago changed the course of my life — how it helped me discover a new passion and provided my life with purpose. To quote Jessica from Rick and Morty, “time without a purpose is a prison.” I am freed from that prison.

Now that you’ve been briefed with Spark Notes on my past five years, I moved to Lincoln, Nebraska this summer to research autonomous vehicles at the University of Nebraska. I deeply enjoy the work that I am doing — I never thought that the statement “choose a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” was true until I started working here. I hope that everyone can find their passion and sense of purpose in life — I hope they act on it and experience the same sort of joy I have felt.

Five years ago if you would have said that future me would be working with reinforcement learning on autonomous vehicles in Lincoln, Nebraska — can you guess what I would’ve done? Who cares, I’m here anyways.

The moral of the story is to take shrooms to shed the skin of your old self. Just kidding, I have to keep it PG. The true moral of the story is up to your interpretation…

Seriously, there are a lot of things that I have learned over the past five years but the most important thing: just be yourself, don’t fall victim to the mimetic theory. You shouldn’t let other peoples opinion’s on you stop you from being you, because at the end of the day, who cares what they think. Lastly, it’s good to be a contrarian sometimes.