The paradox of life

I often think about how I ended up here, doing what I do. Looking back, it's kind of paradoxical that the more I disliked certain topics and tried to distance myself from them, the more I found myself being drawn to them and actually enjoying them. 

Back in my first year of college, about a decade ago, I couldn't even string together a simple sentence in English. I detested English, a feeling that was was very common among Korean students who were victims of formal education. I never imagined I'd be using the language daily, let alone professionally. Life-changers came my way in the most unexpected places—like at a math cram school where I worked part-time, and during my military service. Without meeting these people, I doubt I'd have ever considered backpacking through Europe. Those trips, 3 weeks in 2009 and 5 months in 2012, delayed my graduation by two years. But they also made me face my fear of English. Some folks around me thought picking up English after adolescence was a fool's errand. I assumed any formal education wouldn't do me any good. Starting in Fall 2011, right after military service, I tricked myself to living in a hypothetical English-speaking country. I immersed myself by reading many sentences aloud day and night to the point where I seemed like a restless, frantic person. I listened to barely comprehensible podcasts during my commute to and from work and found online penpals to practice expressions I picked up. I was intensively focused on language learning for one year, even though I was exhausted from working at construction sites or washing dishes at restaurants all day to save money for my upcoming backpacking trip. 

When I returned to school in 2013, I was a bit different from how I was in my first year. My perspective has shifted - I wasn't confined to living my entire life in Korea anymore. But I was still clueless how to make things happen. My GPA had been in the bottom 5th percentile before I took 4 years off for military service and a long backpacking trip. I wasn't still sure about my major and had little academic interest. Another life-changer came my way in the 2nd semester after I returned. A new professor joined us. He had received his academic training in the US, and during the first class he advertised openings for undergrad researchers. A few weeks later, I knocked on his office door and expressed my interest in joining the lab. I was upfront about my GPA, admitting it reflected my past laziness, but assured him I wouldn't let him down. I was graciously encouraged to join the lab. He shared his experiences of grad life in the US, and his stories somehow ignited my desire to pursue a similar path. I stayed motivated for the rest of my undergrad years. I caught up on many of the classes I had flunked during my first year and boosted my GPA as much as I could possibly do. 

My grad school life wasn't all fun and games (nor should it be - Suffering is often a prerequisite to graduation), but overall, I enjoyed it thanks to my supportive PhD advisor and a good few of like-minded friends and colleagues. What I find funny is that I never really studied mechanics back in undergrad but it became the focus of my thesis topic on designing new adhesives or other soft materials. Also, I didn't particularly like polymer physics and rheology classes in either undergrad or grad school. But, in my current role in industry, I actively use that knowledge, actually enjoy it, and am trying to make a name for myself in the field. Perhaps, I just didn't like classroom-type learning, where I had to worry about grades and had little sense of the practical applications of the information being taught. Now, I have access to a myriad of real-world polymer science problems, where I can connect to key concepts from textbooks, review them, and propose solutions. Basically, the learning process is now reversed. 

I have a set of goals for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years into the future. Most of them push me far outside my comfort zone and seem unattainable, challenging me to acclimate to strong discomfort. Looking back at the goals I set during my first year in grad school, they seemed unachievable at the time. To my amusement, I eventually achieved almost all of them, even if some came into fruition later than originally planned. Some friends and relatives in Korea still share their amused confusion about how my life has deviated so much from the norm of those in Korea who went to the same middle school, high school, and college. I don't know how I got here either. I've fully enjoyed the traveling of my past decade, including all the ups and downs (though maybe I'm gaslighting myself), and I've ended up somewhere I never really planned to be. What would my future self say about the journey of the next decade in 2035?