I’m at the edge of my seat, soon to announce what I've been working on for the last few months. This reflection is the first of many pieces I’ve been brewing. If anything here resonates, you can find me on X or joliegcy [@] gmail.com. I also share semi-regular updates. New students, wanderers, staunch critics, or even to riff. I'm open.
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What they don’t tell you about school is that it ends on a random given Wednesday. Two weeks ago I wrote my final final, and just like that, la fin. I found myself basking on the steps of the exam hall for the two hours that followed, dragging my feet just because I could. There was a magnetic weight to the place – I didn’t want to leave, I couldn’t, not yet. Something about endings makes you nostalgic for even the parts you struggled with. My relationship with university has been tumultuous at best—a love-hate affair that leaned heavily toward the latter until, one day, it didn’t. I’d become sentimental to an institution I spent years trying to circumvent. But that’s the thing about time—it has a way of recontextualizing. Or maybe you just grow up.
My last day on campus.
The realization that I’ll never step foot on this campus as a student again pulses dully in the back of my mind. This isn’t the reflection piece I thought I’d write. I imagined something more defiant. Instead, I find myself noting bits and pieces, so many things I want to say, to share to my younger self, things that are seemingly disparate but, in reality, don’t feel complete until you put them into context with one another. Context shapes form.
Biggest Takeaways
If you’re just skimming, I’ll quickly emphasize three buckets that supercede all else:
1. The Place You're In
Your environment is not neutral. It's either propelling you forward or holding you back. Choose wisely. I cycled through ten different living situations in four years, each one teaching me something different about the cities, communities, and forms of the self that catalyze my best thinking. The right environment isn’t about comfort, but it can’t be overly volatile, either. While you should frequently put yourself in high-entropy places where people collide and ideas are challenged, there’s also merit to marinating in a city – something I didn’t fully grasp until last year. Getting into a good flow, loving where you are for what it is, is freeing. There’s no such thing as a perfect city.
People can compare Dubai vs. Singapore vs. SF all they want. It doesn’t change the fact that location is highly, highly situational and the onus is largely on you to make a place a home. I sulked about Toronto for the longest time, expecting people to gravitate to me, despite doing little to enable them to find me. That’s on me. You have to do the heavy lifting, too.
2. A Mission to Make Your (5-Year) Life’s Work
I don’t believe in linear careers anymore, but I do believe in medium-term zeniths. I look at everything I’ve ever done and where they’ve taken me – despite my neuroticism, most of this journey was unplanned (caveat: I expand on how serendipity =! luck below). From neuroscience to documentaries, from belief networks to now, it feels like a decently coherent exploration to me, but only in hindsight, impossible to map had I relied on foresight.
In your 20s, trying to pin down The Thing™ feels overbearing and arbitrary, and so the strategy I’ve adopted is to find problems complex enough to sustain my interest for a few years, but not something so vague and abstract that I have no idea where to start and burn out (decision fatigue is another point I’ve struggled with). Advice I give is to pick something thorny enough that you won’t solve it quickly, something with enough dimensions that you can approach it from multiple angles as your skills evolve. If you feel compelled enough to commit, medium-term, to something, the pivots you make should align you closer and closer with the principle. All other questions flow downstream from that.
3. A Person You Want to Spend the Rest of Your Life With
By far the most accelerating force in my life has been the right partnerships—intellectual, creative, entrepreneurial, and especially romantic. Find your mirrors and know your foils. Over time, you develop a mental filter for people you want around you – and those you don’t. That’s the easy part – but you need to learn to trust this filter and adhere to it. The best conversations are with people who reflect your core values but challenge your methods. People whose strengths compensate for your weaknesses and vice versa.
And then there's that one person who changes everything, yet simultaneously is the grounding force for what you do. For me, he sees the patterns in my chaos before I do, prevents the spiral before it begins, strengthens my ideas as they go. He calls my bluffs with a raised eyebrow and bolster my confidence when I'm wavering.
This third point is by far the most important, but interestingly, has been the most unwavering since I was a teenager. I feel extremely grateful to have consistently found incredible people to surround myself with.
Loosely inspired by PG’s How to Do Great Work
Some Specs
To anyone who’s unfamiliar – a quick recap of my last four years.
First Year: Worked a government public health job. Did a short consulting stint. Booked a one-way ticket to Singapore, tissue-engineered. Got my first taste of raising a round.
Second Year: Filmed a documentary in Malaysia/Singapore on access to health in rural Southeast Asia. Learned about CPG/consumer analytics in Thailand. Left, dove into biotech in Berlin, met my soon-to-be founding team. Moved to NYC, built a consumer analytics company.
Third Year: Continued building, selling. Expanded on creative work (short-form), did moderately well.
Fourth Year: Completed graduate coursework. Found myself surprisingly in love with learning. Consulted a few early-stage bio/tech teams. Put off my PhD.
Sometimes There Was No (Clear) Logic
Plenty of what I did made little sense at the time, from the outside looking in. I do want to note that my approach – and what I suggest to most people – is not to “shoot your shot and see what sticks”. You need to balance strategic ignorance (a flexibility and desire to learn something new, see what unfolds, the understanding that greatness cannot be planned) with strategic serendipity (putting yourself in the right environments, focusing on one thing at a time as soon as possible, but also knowing when to pivot, and recognizing that you can engineer serendipity.)
And how do you know if you’re on the right path? Or how to ‘time’ your moves? Again, this is highly situational. It’s another mental calculus you develop on your own, and experience (see mistakes I made below) are the only teacher. The rational mind wants patterns and purposes; the actual journey is messier. Some of my best decisions looked like mistakes initially, and some carefully calculated moves led nowhere.
Philosophies
Thoughts in domains that have evolved.
On School
I almost dropped out. Multiple times. (Note: dropping out means leaving completely – not gap years, temporary withdrawals). I mean genuinely packing my stuff, scheduling meetings with the registrar. What kept me?
Moving the hype aside:
Being educated does not subtract – it is always additive, or at worst, neutral. I’ve met people who’ve dropped out and regretted it, but never people who stayed at school and wished they’d dropped out. You can always change what your major, add a minor, move schools completely. Learning and having an environment to do that is a net positive.
Most people need accountability and structure to perform. You might think that you’re excellent at focusing and holding yourself to standards. Maybe that’s true, but for most mortals, we do benefit from having some form of rigidity, whether that be deadlines, people to report to, a team that relies on us, etc). School isn’t a bad place to have that.
Four years in the grand scheme of life (assuming you live to ~78) is ~5% of your life. 5% of your life for meeting great people, huge opportunities to upskill, faculty who can condense 20+ years of research into a semester-long crash course – that’s pretty incredible.
For children of immigrants (most of us are immigrants to somewhere, even if from many generations ago) – I personally still feel the privileges of my life today are the culmination of generations upon generations of hard, rigorous labour. Your great-grandparent would have loved to be in your position, for learning and advancement to be a full-time endeavour. It would be a shame for me not to take full advantage of this. This is especially pertinent for women – we had to prove ourselves even more to have the right to education. Getting educated is a hat tip to my grandmother and great-grandmother and the women before them who are watching.
The university as an institution is full of hidden beauty, elegance…
I now hold the stance that you probably shouldn’t drop out, unless you really have a tippity-top reason to. And you need to be honest with yourself. School is not a failure mode. There are many modes to a university – a liberal arts, Western-centric institution might not be where you thrive, but don’t write off further education so hastily.
Staying was a blessing in disguise. It taught me to extract value from the university on my own terms. Some might call it creative misuse. The real opportunity was in finding the gaps, beyond academics, between things and using them as leverage.
You can bend will if you want it enough. I became gluttonous for learning. I found ways to stack practicals and other geographically-binding ‘requirements’ (I use this term loosely, because most requirements are constructs, in my opinion) during ‘on-site terms’, which gave me the flexibility to be wherever I wanted in the world (see projects below) during off-terms while still graduating on time. The usual protest is “I don’t have enough time!” but that’s null—there are exactly as many hours as you decide to allow.
In third year, working in New York City with a team twice (and thrice) my age made me miss the presence of other young people, so much to the point that I attended NYU lectures and worked on projects with the students (note – I was never enrolled). The closer I got to graduating, the more I realized I did truly love absorbing knowledge. The world is your playground. If you live in the North America, you can do almost whatever you want with the resources you have. It’s your job to do what you will with them.
Ask for what you want. Work for it. Don’t accept no for an answer. There's a parallel universe of opportunity that exists for people willing to ignore the “supposed to.”
Here, I’d like to hat tip the professors and faculty who injected my learning with so much more depth and meaning – Professors Joy Fitzgibbon, Erica di Ruggiero, Dan Breznitz, John Vervaeke, Arvind Gupta, Fan Wang, Josh Tenenbaum.
On People, the Environment You’re In
Question everything, and then everything about that. Just because you’re at a school/company/environment that’s excellent doesn’t automatically equate to your excellence. You still have to prove yourself. The name gets you a good distance, but we’re in an age now where talk is cheap and people are actually internalizing this belief. You can still regress to the mean. You’re not immune.
One of the most dangerous traps is inflating your own hype just because you’ve landed in a prestigious environment. I've watched brilliant minds grow complacent in the warm bath of institutional validation, while hungrier, scrappier people from “lesser” places outworked and outthought them.
The other end of the barbell is falling into de-institutionalized hype cycles—doing, saying, mimicking what’s cool because the group you’re in thinks they’re cool. Starting projects because they’ll give you two minutes of fame. It’s, at the end of the day, groupthink on one end or the other. Both can blind you.
On Relationships, Family, Life
I watched relationships dissolve because of calcified beliefs. Some people locked in their personalities, or verbalized a desire to change, but never put pen to paper. It’s too bad, because the most fascinating people who remain in my life today are the ones who remain fluid, who refused to let their identities get cemented so early on in life, who acknowledge there is more to learn and room to grow.
Family dynamics morphed, too. One of the biggest unlocks has been moving the needle away from “parents” and more to “friends” with my mom and dad. Watching my parents change alongside me has made me appreciate that, although people generally calcify as they reach middle-age, it truly isn’t a hard and fast rule. I love that my dad now gingerly asks questions about worlds he doesn’t recognize. He really tries to understand my work. When I tell him about the possibility of silicon-based brains, he makes an analogue of that with electrical engineering (his background). We see each other as respectable, competent professionals, and we’ve built an additional layer of trust and camaraderie. My mom doesn’t quite get the technicalities, but she wears the MIT letterman jacket that I bought her with pride. It’s a different form of acknowledgement and mutual respect.
At the same time, I’ve quietly accepted that some parts of my life – opinions, actions, beliefs – will remain foreign to them. It’s a fine balance where both parties know they will never fully understand and encompass the other, and you settle, but no resentment lingers. Nothing feels lost. I think this only happens when you truly, deeply love someone unconditionally.
On Risk and Difficulty
Risk is not the same as difficulty. Something can be difficult to do, but holds little to no risk. (most biological research, for example, on an individual scale). Crushing test scores, securing research positions, presenting at conferences—these things are hard work but follow established paths with predictable outcomes.
Conversely, some of the riskiest moves I've made seemed deceptively simple in execution: booking one-way flights to cities where I knew no one (highlights: Auckland, Slubice, Tel Aviv), starting conversations with strangers who intimidated me, pitching half-baked ideas that could be brilliant or complete garbage.
Risk isn't about being reckless; it's about developing an intuition for which uncertainties are worth embracing. Too little, and you’re stuck in the same loops as everyone else, fighting for scraps in crowded lanes. Too much, and you're burning resources on shots so long they border on delusion. The sweet spot lies in recognizing which uncertainties contain asymmetric upside—where potential gains dramatically outweigh the downsides.
And then – the hardest part – training yourself to sit in that uncertainty for a potentially uncomfortable period of time to deeply understand the context of said risk.
Institutions train you to eliminate variables, to control for them, to produce clean, replicable results. But real innovation (and character change) happens in messy, complex systems where not all variables can be identified, let alone controlled. Become antifragile.
Significant Mistakes I Made
Without a doubt, failures shaped me more than the successes. These were my most formative f*ck-ups:
Dumbest financial decision – a) choosing to live alone in an apartment in one of the most expensive neighbourhoods in downtown Toronto, b) spending 7/12 months away from said apartment, and c) not subletting during these chunks of time. Why? Because of borderline irrational concerns with hygiene and safety (please – it’s Canada) and a fear of breaking a sublease rule nobody was actively enforcing. Expensive lesson in questioning assumptions. Also my life became much lonelier until I moved back in with people.
Listening to my parents’ financial advice. I respect my parents (see above), but the world they prepared for is different from the one I live in. Their risk calculations are calibrated for a different economy, different technologies, and different social structures. The instruments they bet on and reasons for said bets are wildly different from my beliefs and reasoning, and I had to learn to go with my intuition.
You can’t fly away from your problems. Between second and third year, I was visiting, on average, a new country a month, sometimes two countries a month, as a form of ‘productive’ procrastination. All this led to was loads of surface-level, logistical busy-work and escapism from the real stuff that required more thoughtful deliberation.
Not being firm with when to let go. To let go of people, roles, projects, ideas. Early on, I struggled with knowing when to draw the line: when to stake out vs when to move on. This is yet another highly situational intuition that you only learn by feeling/doing. I've clung to dying initiatives, waning relationships, and outdated self-conceptions well past their expiration dates.
Not taking my philosophy classes more seriously. And not taking more philosophy classes in general. To actually hold texts in your hand and play out an internal dialogue between thinkers is like having transcendent dialogues across generations and eras.
Things I Did Well / Am Proud Of
I overcame (some of) my fear of depth and commitment. Still a work in progress, but I used to be a chronic sampler—starting everything, finishing nothing, chasing short dopamine hits of novelty. Internalizing that mastery requires a different relationship with time and attention. I had to unlearn the “what if there’s something better out there and I just haven’t found it yet?” mindset that kept me skimming the surface of too many topics and just Do the Thing. There will be infinitely many things to explore and you realistically can’t do them all. There are also known unknowns you can only uncover by spending some time in something. If you don’t like it, you can spit it out.
I learned that I can learn anything. I developed a trust in my own competence and I moved between research, bio, neuroscience, data science, VC, government, policy, law. Effectively, I can speak the language of multiple domains with decent fluency and easily learn anything I’m missing to fill in the gaps. What felt like the wrong bets at the time paid off. The dots connect retrospectively in ways you could never have engineered.
Note: the above is true because you can run specialists like APIs (I talk about this in a podcast with Omar Shehata here). When you've dabbled in enough domains, you develop an intuition for how they interconnect. You become a translator between specialists who can’t talk to each other directly. This is a superpower in a world of fragmentation and uncertainty.
The people I have in my corner. The people I get the honour of calling friends. I really see this point as something treasured. It’s the incredible joy I get from seeing all the homies win, for my kids to benefit someday from network effects (something my parents didn't really have)
Growing this digital garden. This site has reached viewers/readers around the world, complemented with projects I’ve run on the side, and the people I've had the privilege to work with.
Miscellaneous Unlocks
These didn’t quite fit elsewhere but they get an honourable mention before we go further:
Got my first pull-up, and then a muscle-up shortly after (within the span of ~4 months)
Averaged 60 books per year and adapted my reading philosophy (digestion > speed, because nobody really cares how many books you’ve read, Jolie)
Ran a ton, accumulated 800-1000km in the last ~two years (I went through 8 pairs of HOKAs, highly highly recommend Bondi 9’s, not sponsored, but it would be an excellent next unlock…maybe?)
Things I Wish I Did More Of (But Don’t Hold Regrets)
AKA things I’d tell my younger brother, but he doesn’t listen, so for the receptive youngin':
Explore more coffee shops and just sit. Sit down. I mean it. I found my thinking spots too late in the game. There’s something about the ambient murmur of a good cafe that loosens stuck ideas, and sometimes it’s nice to be around people in white noise.
Take the streetcars (go beyond the comfort of the Yellow Line). Go far, get lost. You have no reason not to—Google Maps exists. I stuck to the familiar routes (only travelling to get to a place, not for the journey) and missed the weird corners where the hidden culture lives.
Read philosophy, read philosophy you think you disagree with. Skim Nietzsche, compare it to Hegel. Philosophical frameworks give you language for experiences you’re having but can’t articulate.
Have a white noise playlist for the gym/running. I find it hard to focus on podcasts/songs with words. Design your environments—physical and digital—to support the kind of action you want to be doing in that context.
Just say the thing. I recently adopted a mindset that (most) things are better left said. Transparent vulnerability is more effective than forced composure. People connect with honesty. Radical candour has served me extremely well. Just saying the thing when everyone else is dancing around makes a huge difference.
Things I'm Going to Miss the Most / Wish I'd Valued More
Libraries as third spaces uniquely reserved for students. There’s something sacred about places designed around thinking and learning. No transaction required, no time limit, no expectation except that you engage with ideas. These spaces are disappearing from the broader world, making campus havens all the more precious. It’s also comforting having other students, often from the same university in one space – there’s a form of relaxation? Comfort? That you get knowing that you’re all connected by some thread in this space. I spent every day my last week in Toronto using my student card to access every campus library, and am so glad I did.
A living space to call my own. I moved, on average, once every 2-3 months. It was exciting, but the novelty wears off and you kind of just want a place: to be able to buy nice vases and shoes and know they’re all there. To have really, really close friends and be able to plan get-togethers, unrushed, not because I’ll just be passing through town and we have a window of 2-3 days to see each other. I say this as I'm about to move to NYC for the third time, so the irony isn’t lost on me. Feeling rootless has diminishing returns.
Professors in their natural thinking habitat. Seeing academics in their thinking spaces and noticing the intimacies that make a place theirs is always interesting. Dog-eared books arranged by some system only they understand, walls adorned with comics that inspired them as kids, desks cluttered with artifacts from research trips. Family photos tucked between research prizes and framed degrees. All of these reveal more about who they are as humans more than lectures, and the conversations flow through intellectual territories, personal histories, and speculative futures.
For example, Professor Dan Breznitz and I have excellent conversations not in an office, but in a coffee shop in Toronto’s West End.
Formative, Delicious Media
Shaped me.
Scientific Freedom the Elixir of Civilization - Few people stumble across a book that near-perfectly captures the crux of their work. This book is effectively my manifesto (for my early-20s arc, at least). The idea that progress requires protected space for fluid movement and exploration, not just directed problem-solving. The most valuable research often comes from giving brilliant minds room to follow their curiosity without immediate practical justification. This was so, so formative and shaped many of my thoughts about the future of science, innovation, and research.
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective - The thesis that objectives can limit discovery of the truly novel; that novelty and innovation emerge from exploration, not optimization. I used to ask people “what are you optimizing for?” and felt so cool. Not anymore. This made me rethink how I approach goals and progress.
Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morality) - “Under what conditions did man invent the value judgments good and evil?” (see above: question everything).
A Cluster of Fiction & Variety: Maus (Parts I and II), Perfume, the Rape of Nanking (a must read for anyone of East Asian descent, imo. Really shapes your perspectives and helped me understand my grandparents’/parents’ generation much more deeply.)
A Cluster of Formative Articles: by Matt Clancy, Michael Nielsen, Sam Arbesman, Stuart Buck, Stuart Kauffman, Andy Matuschak, Patrick Collison & Tyler Cowen.
More on my bookshelf.
The World Is Waking Up
Okay, so this 22-year-old goes through university and seems to think she’s enlightened or something. What does all of this amount to?
This entire reflection is a case study in navigating a fundamental paradigm shift happening right now in every sociological level, from the individual to the collective. I’m part of a generation watching institutional frameworks dissolve in real time, developing new mental models while figuring out what to keep, what to replace, and what to abandon altogether.
If you graduated 50, 20, or even 5 years ago, some of your calculus of what to adapt would have been astronomically different. The people who thrive will be those who sense the shifting currents before they become not just obvious, but legible. Maybe I’m in my head, but I see my path as a signal of broader transformations across education, work, and how we create/capture value.
For me, these shifts are most evident in science, innovation, and R&D—the worlds I know best. These are domains where the gap between institutional structures and actual progress is becoming a chasm. Where funding models designed for a different era constrain the very breakthroughs they claim to support. Where young researchers are increasingly forced to choose between career advancement and meaningful discovery.
Specifically:
A new philosophy of the future of work, of education, is emerging. The four-year degree followed by a 40-year career model is dying at a rapid pace. Learning is becoming continuous, distributed, and self-directed (I am an increasingly strong proponent of self-directed PhDs). Work is becoming more project-based and revolves around first principles and individuals rather than an institution or a body.
In a growing number of circles, especially among young people, playing prestige games holds much less weight than they used to. The prestige economy is fragmenting, even beyond careers (see alcohol consumption, discretionary luxury spending). What was once a narrow set of idolized elite paths is diversifying.
The best thing you can do in your early career is stay close to the frontier when other people are still complaining. Position yourself at the edge of emerging fields, technologies, and cultural movements. By the time something becomes obviously valuable, the opportunity cost of entry has already skyrocketed.
The top ~10% of young people crave ownership more than status games. They're in it for infinite games. The rise of creatives and personal portfolios is evidence of this. When it feels like everything else in the world is being consolidated, those who value ownership grab to what they can, even if just a corner of the internet, and make it theirs. It’s a beautifully decentralized act, even if not intended as such.
Making a bet on myself is the most valuable investment possible right now. Everyone should consider taking “playground” years in their early 20s—I'll write another piece elaborating on this concept and link it here when it's done.
The Big One: I'm witnessing a quiet rebellion against institutional structures across the board. It’ss rarely framed as outright revolt, but the sentiment is unmistakable in conversations spanning labs, startups, academia, venture capital, and in between. The frustrations manifest differently—scientists lamenting how grants dictate research directions, entrepreneurs questioning venture capital’s homogenizing influence, educators recognizing accreditation systems that value compliance over innovation—but the core issue is the same: our frameworks for organizing knowledge and work have calcified. They’re optimized for a world that no longer exists.
What’s Next For Me?
3 months ago, I officially rejected PhD offers from [redacted] and [redacted]. I’ll expand more in a later piece. They’re incredible schools, but the guiding questions below have been keeping me awake, and each day I feel more and more compelled that this is my next 5 to 10 year pursuit. In an adjacent universe, there’s a version of me that’s kicking herself for not doing this. In this universe, this is my alignment so far:
The paradox of progress - there are many paradoxes (so many, in fact, that I’m working on a rolling list – and open to idea submissions), but top of funnel is why technological advancement so often fails to translate into improved human wellbeing. We have more computing power in our pockets than NASA had for the moon landing, yet productivity growth stagnates and happiness metrics decline. Something fundamental is broken in how we translate innovation into lived experience.
Brokenness of R&D - The research ecosystem is dysfunctional at almost every level. Publications are increasingly optimized for individual career advancement rather than knowledge dissemination. Funding mechanisms reward safe, incremental work over bold exploration. Peer review systems entrench orthodoxy rather than challenging it. How do we fix this without burning it all down?
Misaligned incentives – in spheres: learning/teaching, creating/output, and research/funding. When we design systems that reward outcomes rather than processes, we shouldn’t be surprised when people optimize for the metrics we’ve chosen. For example with students/cheating in school: the real question isn't how to design against cheating but how to create environments where intrinsic rewards of genuine engagement outweigh extrinsic rewards of credential acquisition.
Value capture before legibility - How do we identify and nurture industries, ideas, and innovations before they become obvious? The truly transformative opportunities exist in pre-paradigmatic spaces— domains where the rules haven't solidified, where conventional wisdom hasn't calcified, where the right questions haven't even been properly formulated.
Navigating the in-betweens - How do we bridge theoretical frameworks and lived realities, reconciling resource constraints and political agendas without sacrificing bold visions? (Think: universities operating independent of whichever political party is in power…maybe?) I'm fascinated by the messy middle where elegant models meet complex implementation challenges.
These are the questions I'm betting my next few years on. What this looks like in practice involves building experimental landscapes for nurturing scientific exploration, dialectic-ing and writing with my favourite people, and publicizing our learnings as we go.
At the time of writing – announcing this out of stealth in <1 week. [update: we've launched! See www.analoguegroup.org]
If you're wrestling with similar questions or working on adjacent problems, you know where to find me.