At around 10:27 am this morning I graduated from UCLA. On the same day I'm writing this at 2:30am in the middle of my flight to Asia, where I'll be spending the next 2.5 weeks.
College is meant to be a place for new adults to figure it out. What "it" is for everyone is vastly different. For some, that means figuring out what they actually enjoy and what to do with the rest of their working lives.
For others, college is a place to find yourself and have the most fun you can. Everyone takes away something different from their higher education experience. The following is my personal reflection on college and the takeaways that I've made in the last 4 years of my life.
My journey through school has been quite unique to say the least. My transcript spans 6 colleges, with each year I'm in school being completely different than the last. The best place to start off is (coincidentally) high school.
I was honestly a pretty mediocre student, and didn't care too much for grades. I maintained a 3.7 GPA and didn't load AP/honors courses like my peers. What I did care about was wrestling.
When I was 5 my dad signed me and my 2 younger brothers up for Jiu-Jitsu, with the hope that if we get bullied in elementary school, we'd be able to defend ourselves.
I competed until middle school going to tournaments and doing live demos/shows at festivals (even in front of the CA's senators one time). My dad then forced me into wrestling.
In the beginning, I hated it, until I started going to tournaments and just winning. I thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of defeating my opponents with just sheer grit and I knew that I was working harder than them in the practice room.
I hate to say it but my dad was right, I wrestled throughout middle and high school traveling across the country to compete and later began recruiting for college teams and sending out highlight reel and weight room stats.
Freshman Year
In 2022 I began my freshman year at SF State where I competed on their NCAA D2 wrestling team. The lifestyle transition from HS to college was shocking but it didn't take me long to become fully self-sufficient.
With my brain and youtube videos, I taught myself basically everything you need to become a functioning adult: how to cook, how to shop, how to do your laundry, and most importantly how to make friends.
My spot on the roster meant I started college with 30 super close friends that I trauma-bonded with after our early morning run/cardio workouts. But I needed to meet other people and make other friends on my own.
Unfortunately I grew up extremely introverted. I was always the shy one, that was never really close friends with the cool people and I couldn't do anything public speaking related without stuttering or shaking while reading the words off of a script.
So I set off to class to make friends, talking to everyone and being as outgoing as I possibly could. I talked to so many different people all with different backgrounds in all my classes and yet it felt like I couldn't relate to any of them.
No matter how hard I tried it seemed like all the "normal" people at that school was just not meant to be my friend.
At the same time I got closer and closer with my teammates (specifically my roommates). We spent most of our days together repeating the same cycle of workout -> eat -> sleep -> eat -> workout -> eat -> sleep.
I love my friends, but I started falling out of love with wrestling. Yeah it was fun, but I always felt like I was supposed to be doing more. Wrestling got me here, but this isn't my stop.
January 19th, 2023 - I wrapped up a morning wrestling practice and was in the trainer room getting some shock therapy for my shoulder which I tweaked earlier in the week. Some of my teammates and I are talking and having a good time, but after about 30 minutes the entire team was called into the practice room.
Our coach tells us horrible news, our close friend and teammate had been lost at sea in a freak accident. I'll never forget that night at the beach, where we watched the helicopter wrap up their search for him when the sun set. I thought really hard about a lot of things that night. How quickly life can change. How lucky I am to exist. How grateful I am for the people around me.
We finished the rest of the season and the year for him, and everyday I thought and wrote about what the purpose of my life was. How foolish was I to waste it wrestling if I didn't love it anymore. So I quit.
At the end of my freshman year, I dropped out of college and told my wrestling coach that I was done. It wasn't an easy decision. Walking away from something I dedicated thousands of hours to, and knowing how much of a privilege that it is for me to be able to compete at this level.
Sophomore Year
I moved back into my parents home and began plotting my next trajectory. What does life have in store for me? Where do my interests truly lie? I knew I didn't get what I wanted out of college yet, so I enrolled in my local community college and began taking classes.
I doubled down on what I already liked, building stuff. I started dating somebody new. I grew up on legos and in HS built gaming PCs, so why not continue coding? I started playing around with an experimental IDE called "Cursor" (yep I was early) and solidified my ideas of how things were actually architected.
I also started a bunch of powerlifting programs (and even squatted 425 at 155).
My 4.0 GPA helped me transfer to UCLA, where I eventually decided would be my home for the next 2 years. My life felt like it was moving in slow motion while I was home. I didn't have much time to just hang, and started feeling like I was behind (even though I'd spend every waking hour working).
The answer was to get away from home where I was comfortable.
In the summer I decided to start posting on X (twitter). I started building things I thought were cool and posting about it. I fell into startups and tech twitter, which becomes more important later on.
Junior Year
Sept - 2024: I packed up my dad's tesla and we began the 7 hour 4 charging stop trek from the bay area to LA. My new apartment had 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, with a full kitchen setup. My roommates were already there when I moved, so I got last choice of bed.
My 2 years at UCLA was the most formative portion of my college experience, partly because I'd never spent more than 1 year in the same place. This portion of the story will be the longest.
I came to UCLA with the goal of experiencing college and finding a job. I spent my first quarter attending all my classes, and aggressively applying to internships. I grew close with a small group, but I struggled to find people who cared about the same stuff I cared about.
UCLA hosts an EAF (or enormous activities fair) in the beginning of the year, where every student organization gets a table in front of Royce Hall and tries to convince you to join them. Initially I thought I resonated with some of them, but they didn't want me back (story of my life).
But what I really wanted was disjoint. I saw people who fit the description scattered across multiple different orgs, who haven't all met each other yet. So I did what any totally illogical person would do, make it my mission to help them meet. Thus VEST was born.
In our first quarters I worked hard to find all the builders/startup people at UCLA, going on countless coffee chats and lunches to convince them to join me. My recruiting abilities worked (mostly) and we started our first quarter with 40 of the smartest/highest agency people I could find.
While searching for them, I tried a lot of different things. LinkedIn DMs, posters around the engineering buildings, and a branded website for UCLA students to monitor the wildfires going on at the time. I had < 40k people using it and a cease and desist from UCLA, but in return started to find my niche.
It was around this time I decided my goal in life is to work really hard on things I care about and just do the coolest things I can. Simple enough.
Around a fateful twitter DM led to me visiting Browserbase in person, and eventually a job there. I'll never forget the people who took chances on me.
Instead of going to cabo or vegas, I spent my junior year spring break at the hottest new destination: San Francisco. I spent the week onboarding and figuring out what I can possibly do to move the needle and help out.
At the all hands my second week (granted every standup was all hands since the team was so small), our Series B fundraising was internally announced.
I went back to school for my junior year spring quarter, but continued working from my college dorm. I'd attend standup instead of lecture, and spend most of my work day at my desk clicking away.
When I didn't want to work, I'd live the normal college life. Going out with my friends, running the club I started, spending time on the campus I attended.
The most difficult part about this was balancing work with exam season. I realized quickly that I work a lot better in really hard sprints, so when midterms and finals came I locked myself in a room for a few days and learned the entire quarter of content rather than learning over time with my classmates.
At this point, the only thing that mattered was that my score was above the median and I passed all my courses.
My 2025 summer was in SF, living in the city once again. This time I was closer to all the tech companies, spending half the summer living in Lone Mountain subletting some rich person's condo and half in SoMa (which was honestly great).
Internships are a weird part of college. You spend a few months pretending that you're a full time employee of some company, and sometimes they trust you with important work. When you're 1 of 20 employees at a company, you're sure to be spending your time on only important things.
I was doing the same sort of work that I was doing during the school year, just completely full time 9-7pm every day. My daily schedule was wake up, bus to work, work until ~7pm, go to the gym until 9:30, go home, and repeat.
Growing up close to SF, I'd already done most of the interesting things that you could do around the city, which meant most of my weekends were either more work or hanging out with my roommates.
I also did the KP engineering fellowship during the summer, which mostly means I occasionally got to go on random side-quests like nice dinners, kayaking, poker, and a hackathon.
One of the best memories I had during the summer was going to Maui... but it was for work. My family had planned a trip to the big island, but coincidentally the week after Browserbase planned their 2025 offsite in Maui, so I flew from island to island and got paid to vacation. It's not often that your college internship takes you to a tropical destination.
Senior Year
My senior year started off with a short visit to NYC, then I was swiftly thrust back into the daily groove of coursework. I tried my best to go to lectures, but maybe attended 20 lectures on the year (some napkin math 3 lectures per week, 3 courses per quarter, 10 weeks per quarter, 3 quarters puts the average lectures per year at 270).
I'd definitely say I had senioritis. At this point in college, my grades didn't matter at all and as long as I passed I was extremely happy. I worked out a deal with Browserbase to continue working FT while finishing up my coursework, and held up my end of the deal by (you guessed it) working instead of going to class.
My average day consisted of waking up, cramming my meetings in before 1pm, going to the gym, then working and living the non-academic parts of my college life. Towards the end of it all, I tried to do as much of my work from the UCLA campus to get the best of both worlds. It was always weird living the double life, but extremely rewarding.
The flight from LAX to SFO was around an hour from takeoff to landing, and I took it about once a month during the year to go back to work. While great for racking up credit card points, it was a lot of work to go between the 2 cities. There was always the trade off of missing whatever was going on at school to come back to SF but for the most part, was worth it.
Ultimately, I'm very happy with how I completed my last year of school. I prioritized spending time with people over everything (so many conversations over so many meals), meeting as many unique people as I could at school, and investing in relationships in and outside of my career.
I'll never forget all the donut chats with VEST members, random group dinners with friends, and the late night talks. I got closer to a wider breadth of friends and met people who wanted completely different things than me, who also chose very different paths to get there (a LOT of pre-med students).
I'll always be grateful for los angeles and how it taught me to care a LOT about the little details and how to make people feel strongly about things.
So what did college actually teach me?
This is already an extremely summarized view of my college experience. And if I had to distill it even more to a few words of wisdom they'd be these.
People are the most important thing in your lifetime. Everything else distills down to your relationships with other people, and if you can't make that the foundation then you won't ever be able to do anything else right.
Your career? People. Your family life? People. Fun and travel? Sure technically you can do this solo, but you'll be interacting with people the whole trip.
Learn how to build genuine relationships with people, and they'll almost always pay off when you expect nothing in return.
Your time on earth is finite, you should spend your time extremely wisely. And don't take life so seriously, we're on a floating rock in the middle of space after all.
Do a few things really well, not everything mediocre. Prioritizing is more important than doing everything.
I'm only really competing with the people who think that they can win.
Linear Algebra is literally everything (every single higher level math course I did somehow had linear algebra as a core piece of it).
Be extremely grateful for everything, and never take even the smallest interaction for granted.
Do I regret it?
I don't regret going to school at all. Although it cost a pretty penny for 4 years of my life, it was more worth it than I could ever imagine.
There are some individual things that I regret not doing though, if you're a student reading this you should:
- join more random social clubs
- spend more time outdoors
- join something to get you out of your comfort zone (like a dance team)
- go to your school's sports games
- make more friends in class
- talk to more strangers
- take more time to just think and reflect
- go out more with friends
- go to cafes and libraries to study more (romanticize your life)
- host more people in your apartment for hangouts
College is a place for you to explore your breadth before you explore depth. Try literally everything and keep what sticks. Your comfort zone should be the last place you spend your time.
So?
TLDR; college was worth it. The tradeoff is time and money for relationships and unique experiences. You only live this life once, be very intentional with where you spend your time.
-> Kyle