The Life Plan

Intro about me

Who am I

I a third year computer science student at UNSW. Currently doing a internship at TikTok over the summer. Working towards getting a return offer.

As a student, I can either choose to continue my study this year by pursuing and honours research degree for 1 more year, or I can graduate mid of 2025 without the honours.

I am happily married, despite the disagreement from my family side. Have lovely wife and her family, and currently apply for her permanent residency in Australia.

By the end of Jan 2025, I will be Australian.

My Capabilities

For myself, my values lies within the following fields. First, the brand recognition of my university and the company I am working with. These are perfect platform to expand my connection, since people from similar background or environment will have a positive connotation for each other initially, which invokes the interest of connect. Also, these titles will make others assume you have the capabilities and ability that they might value and get out from your future interactions.

Secondly, I am working communication skills, to ensure that I am articulate, charismatic and passionate when I talk to someone. This is most important skill to have and to work on. To write and speak in such way will give me unfair advantages in every area.

Third, I have knowledge in various area, and still actively trying to expand them. Such as technical interview skills, software development capabilities (since I am a software engineer), some insight into marketing (Beginner). But none of them are at the stage where it could give me monopolistic advantages. Therefor I need to double down on some of them, deep dive into the field and optimise it for success.

Lastly, some value exist from the family background. However, can be limited now.

Current situation

Let me provide some addition context to you , so you can understand my situation better.

First, my internship at TikTok concludes at 28/02/2025. After that, depending on the result of my internship presentation, I might get a full time graduate return offer in 2026. If the presentation goes well, I also have the opportunity to work part time as intern between 2025 to 2026. (But I can choose not to, so that I can focus on more important tasks)

TikTok right now have only one day of working from home. (During these day, I basically have full control of my time). If I am going to continue to apply for the upcoming recruitment cycle. I will be primarily focusing on two kind of firm. First would the the companies that have the option to work fully remotely, such as Canva, Atlassian... Second, would be extremely competitive firm with high salary, like the trading firm.

If I decided to apply to these firms, there are few thing I need to do to prepare.

  1. DSA questions like leet code questions (for both tech and trading firm)
  2. Obj oriented design questions (for trading firm only)
  3. Behaviour questions (for both kind of firms)
  4. Reach out to recruiter and employee in the firm, and ask for a referral (for both kind of firms)

The university start on 17th of Feb. If I chose not to do any honours, I will have 4 course left. UNSW have 3 semesters each year. I can either choose to do all 4 in on term (extremely high workload), or 2 course each for the first 2 terms.

Also, before, I paid for a $5000 course to do research with a Ivy League professor, and publish my paper. Then base on my result, the professor can choose to give a me recommendation if I apply to master in other universities. The work load should be similar to one university course.

This weekend, I am going to attend a co-working session for a Sydney startup incubator. They are hosting this on a weekly basis. I wish to meet founder and enthusiast with similar journey to me. Learn from them and exchange ideas. This network may be a great opportunity to expand my network and reach.

Health

Mind - 4/10

My desired mind state is to have a range of ideas and knowledges, that shapes my value and my world view. But the input of information I receive is quite limited. I have little social interaction with others, limited time to update on the world news and explore topics of interest via different mediums. (books, podcast, articles...)

Hence, I need to figure out a way to boost the efficiency of broadening my knowledge and worldview, and as a consequence consolidate my personal values. Following are few method I think will be beneficial in expanding my mind.

Find Mentors

The first thing on the top of my mind is to talk to people who are successful or even just a step ahead of you in specific domain. In this way, you are learning years of experience and insights in short and digestable essences. But two difficulties of this, you need connection to those people, and have the ability to ask great question that can benefit yourself at the current stage. Also, connect with those who have great potential, where their values lies in the future.

So, lets discuss and solve these two issues. For the first issue, how do we obtain connect to successful people at their respective domain? Well, any form of social interaction required exchange of value, therefor think what value do you have right now to exchange. (Refer to the value section) For the second issue, how do we ask good questions? That comes down to two points, research the interest and journey of your connect, and what do you want to get out from this conversation. Such as referral, learning a new industry, learn from their past experiences... Once you have these value, we need methods and environment to exchange these value for connections:

Books, podcast

The most pragmatic way of learning knowledge and expand mind is by ready though the master piece that others have written, and then try to apply this to my own life. But this also raised two questions.

First, most books have have less that 20% valuable content. The remaining are either filler sentences, or trying to build up the revelation of the idea. Although I understand the remaining 80% of the content has the purpose to consolidate and depict the central idea, but I am not sure whether it is time efficient to do so, by taking large chunk of my time out of a day for this slow input.

But assumes that the return of investment on time spent for reading is great, it raises the second question. How do we pick which book to read, how to evaluate the value and ROI of the books? How can I make sure the content within is truely gold, rather than just hyped up concepts that have no actual benefit on my life?

Or to think about this at a deeper level, am I avoiding something painful to do that is actually beneficial, by choosing to read books since it is less beneficial?

I guess the only way to validate the above idea would be consistently read with following principles:

Output

Output as much as possible, blogs, articles, twitter posts. This will help you to clarify your thoughts, and enhance your understanding on the material. (Feyman's Technique, teaching is best form of learning).

Also, output is a great method to expand you connections and networks online. (Need to interact with others) Although this only progress over the long term, direct outreach would be better for short terms.

When outputting, think that you are strategically marketing your self over the long run to build up reputation and influence on the internet or network. Provide value as much as you can, on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. Also need to stay consistent with your output, keep a swipe file of interesting post to rewrite and repost, and schedule your content output.

Your voice and contend should be directly related to the target audience.

Learning technical concepts / business concept

This part include all necessary skill to be a better software engineer and business founder. Topics includes but not limited to:

For this part, it is important to alway learning by doing. Think what project or experiment that you can do which leverage the new knowledge. This may turn into a great side hustle some day.

This method can also combine with the previous output method, and "learn in public". Sharing the valuable lesson you have learnt, and helpful materials that can benefit others.

Body 5/10

Soul 4/10

Need to establish a stable connection with God, by doing daily mindful praying.

Set aside time to listen to preach, or try to deep dive into Bible verses, learn what the meaning of life truely are.

Work

Mission

I want to have the ability to create a business by myself, using the skill and knowledge I process, solve a real problem in the world, and obtain financial freedom as the result.

If I set this as the north star goal for my career, there would be two pathway that I can think of, each have their pros and cons.

The first path would be start to work immediately as a software engineer in big techs, slowly improve and progress my career within. In the mean time build connection and technical knowledge on how to construct software. Once new opportunity emerges, you can leverage the networks and knowledges you have, to dive into the business straight away.

Let talk about the benefits of choosing this pathway first. Firstly, stable source of income amidst economic downturn, provide a safety net against the unpredictables. Connect to potential interesting coworkers and mentors. (But this built on the premise that you are working in a great platform with high quality colleges) Access to some internal information related to the firm and the industry. Also, there are reputation benefits. If you work at big tech, people will assume you have a decent work knowledge on technology and softwares.

But there are few things I am concerned about for this approach. First, been a software engineer at a large firm mean you are only responsible for a specific function. All of your learning and knowledge gain would be restricted to a small part of technology. You have limited knowledge on market and product side, have negligible impact on the business direction. By the time you have reached Senior Engineer, you will only be a expert on the technology within your team. Also in today's speed of new AI product and agent pop out of existence each day, you will have no idea whether you technical knowledge would be obsolete in the near future.

Drains your time, 5 days a week, 38 hours per week minimal. I need to assume during these time, I can do nothing except for works for the company. Cannot allocate time to any task I want to increase ROI of my time.

The second pathway, would be starting to build product immediately, in the mean time growing social network presence. In this pathway, I need to also engage with other enthusiastic founder, joint relevant communities, enter founder incubator programs and such...

This road have few benefits. You will have full control of your time (which can also be a reason for procrastination and focus on unimportant tasks). You can learn anything you want, and instead for working for other, all your effort will show in terms of your personal growth.

But the drawback are also huge. You are going to loose touch with all connection and resources from big tech, everything is on your own. Plus, with my current state of knowledge and network, anything project idea that I thought to be good, 99% of time would be crap, since I don't have the information or knowledge to identify and verify idea. Even by some luck I discovered the 1% of idea, I won't have enough resources (knowledge and networks) to make that possible. Every connection I have or can access right now, probably can't exchange resources or mentor me. For mentor I wish to find (if I can really find them, which is difficult), I would have nothing for exchange to them for their value provided.

How about I start a agency first? Help business and individual to build software MVP for their product ideas or automations. By doing this, I exchange my service for money, in the mean time improve my skillset as and software engineer and and entrepreneur. Also, I can gather what are the pain point that my client have, and turn it into a potential SAAS in the future.

But, to start this, I don't have connections, lead, and reputations. Also I am not sure if my knowledge and skillset are up to standard of doing work for the potential clients.

Or I can choose not to enter the workforce yet, continue my study of the honours degree. After that, try my hardest to get into the Ivy League school for master, which may potentially be a great platform to build up my connection and networks. But this takes time, where I am not learning and building in the actual market. By the time I finish my whole study, the landscape of the technical industry might be completely different.

Money

Growth

Relationship

Romance 10/10

Family 2/10

Friends 1/10