Luck
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of luck and how much bearing it might have on success.
Many successful people attribute their place in life to hard work, grit, or a variety of other factors that a person can directly have influence over. This isn’t that surprising and it’s understandable; people generally don’t want to attribute the good times and successes in their lives to randomness. This is not to say that every successful person just got to where they are on the wings of luck (I still think hard work makes a difference). That said, I think it would be foolish to believe that two people, putting in the exact same amount of work and effort, would arrive at the same endpoint in life: it just doesn’t work that way.
I’m going to take some time in this newsletter to reflect back on my (short) life and really think about just how much of it was due to me being at the right place at the right time.
Prehistory: from birth to high school
I really won the lottery. I wasn’t born into a war-ravaged country, or a small town in the middle of nowhere. I was born in Seoul to a middle-class family. We weren’t wealthy by any means, but we also didn’t struggle too much to make ends meet. If you think about the probability of this happening, I got pretty damn lucky. This meant that I wasn’t struggling to eat when I was a child, or moving from town-to-town to avoid conflict. I had time to be a normal kid and was able to develop in a healthy environment.
My family emigrated out of Korea to live in Canada in the early 2000s. Here’s where I got lucky again: my family had enough resources to make this happen, and my family also decided to make this move and invest in the future education of my siblings and myself.
I was by no means a well-behaved kid when I was in kindergarten or elementary school. My teachers were concerned enough about my behaviour to call a parent-teacher conference (the memory of this is seared deep into my brain). I got lucky in middle school to meet a bunch of teachers who really pushed me to clean up my act. If I hadn’t met those teachers, I really don’t think I would be the person I am today.
High school was pretty uneventful, but by the end of it I got into (arguably) my province’s best university. No doubt a non-zero amount of luck was involved there as well.
Modern Day: undergrad, co-op, and grad school
I went to university with absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do (yup, you could not pick a worse reason to go to to university). I ended up taking a bunch of biology classes, since that was what I enjoyed in high school. Surprisingly, I ended up hating those courses, and quickly looked for something else to do.
Luckily, I had AP credit for university-level English from high school, meaning I had an extra few credits I could use to take whatever courses I wanted. I lucked out by taking a computer science course, and for the dumbest reason (I wanted to know what the hell my friends were making memes about). I ended up enjoying this course so much that I immediately set my eyes on a major in CS.
And I got in. This is where I was definitely at the right place at the right time. My GPA wasn’t low in first year by any means, but CS has become so competitive recently that I’m not sure I would be able to get in if I were a first-year student in 2021. Back in 2015, it wasn’t super difficult to get into CS; I remember one of my friends bemoaning the fact that they were assigned CS after they weren’t able to get into the majors they selected for their first and second choices.
Around this time I also applied to be a TA for the first-year programming course I loved so much. I got rejected the first time, but I was offered the position the second time around. Again, I attribute this to luck: I didn’t really interact much with my TAs or the professor so I imagine they picked me randomly off a list somewhere. This is also where my path to at least thinking about graduate school began.
Fast forward a couple of internships and stints as a TA, I managed to convince a professor in my area of interest to take me on as a directed studies student. I got lucky again because he doesn’t usually take on directed studies students but for some reason had the capacity to do so when I asked.
The fall/winter when I was applying to graduate schools, a professor I was interested in working with from one of the universities I was looking at ended up doing their sabbatical right in our research lab. Looking back, I have absolutely no idea how lucky I got here: having an opportunity to meet in-person with someone I was interested in doing research with is insane.
January 2020: I get into UBC and Waterloo for grad school. Reflecting on this after I was a part of the admissions process this year makes me realize that this was in no small part due to luck too. Advisors have limited capacities, and they often like to select applicants who they believe are lower-risk to accept.
Of course, I’ve left a lot of details about about the things that didn’t work out (maybe that’s a newsletter in the future). That said, enumerating all of these events in my life has made me realize how much I really owe to just being at the right place at the right time. This isn’t a way for me to absolve myself of all responsibilities (you do have to put in the work), but it really makes me wonder. I just got really lucky.