Leaving the Nest

18 Jan 2018

I finished High School ready to be an accountant. Maybe not Accounting, I was pretty decent at Marketing in my classes. I even got 3rd for a Marketing Competition. I could do marketing, but I really want that stability. What happens if I have a bad month? I want that stability, yes, I’ll do accounting.

That was my thought process going into College. I was ready to get into Shidler, intern at some Hawaii Accounting Firm, and work my way up into a CPA. It was only when I got that internship did it set in. Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? Do I really want to work for a paycheck, living for the weekend. I saw how the accountants worked, and it hit me. I couldn’t do this.

I was at such a loss for what I wanted to do, that I went to my father one day, and told him that I didn’t want to do business anymore. Now keep in mind that to get into Shidler (the business college at Manoa), you needed to do two years of pre-requisites. That was a huge timesink, you couldn’t just decide not to do Shidler. You would waste two years of your life, but more importantly for my family and I, two years of payments. My father worked hard to make sure that I could go for four years without taking out loans, and he made sure that I knew that going in. There is no second shot, “get in, get out”.

So when I went to him and told my dad, “Accounting is making me miserable”, I almost was shaking, I didn’t know how he would react. What he told me changed the way I looked at my future, he said to me to live every day for your future you. Work hard now, because the only reason you’re alive every day is to make sure your future self is happy. I realized then, there was no way I could do accounting, because my future self would hate me. It was then that I decided to do Computer Science. I always wanted to try it, but by the time I realized I might have a passion for this stuff, I was too deep in the rabit hole.

I am now starting to take Computer Science classes. I hope to learn a lot through the course, but I know it’s just the start, and I have a long way to go. By the time I’m done with it, I want to catchup to my classmates, and not look like a fool in my future classes. I know it’s going to take a lot of work, but this isn’t for me, this is for my future self. This is for him.