My parents are still recovering from a call I made to them when I was in college to tell them that I would no longer fulfill their dream of becoming a doctor. A year later, they became further distraught when I abandoned their backup wish, that I would pursue a career in engineering. To this day, I’m not certain how much of my decision can be attributed to my mountain of student debt, further years of educational requirements, youthful indiscretion and confusion, or other intangible factors - but I decided to go to Wall Street and pursue a career in business.
Convincing my parents that working at an investment bank did not involve cashing checks behind a teller window was about as far as I got in explaining the world of high finance. Over 20 years later, just as my parents have begun to accept that I could survive given my career choice, I recently visited them, and informed them that I had left the finance industry to join a “startup”.
The challenge of explaining what was meant by “joining a startup” led me to long for the days when I formulated explanations for “venture capital” and “private equity”. Thankfully, my parents are avid readers of chinese news publications. Yesterday, they sent me the following article:
While I can not read traditional Mandarin (or any Mandarin), my mother’s brief annotations of the article describes www.upstart.com as a popular, new company that helps college students by allowing others to invest in them. In her note, she congratulated me and mentioned that she was proud.
Scott Wu
Corporate Development Lead
I found an organization similar to that, as well and I couldn't be happier moving to our rented serviced apartments in central london to start going to school and build my future. Thanks a lot for providing awesome posts for us!
ReplyDeleteWow, thanks for sharing, Scott. That's a nice moment. I think it resonates with a lot of Asian Americans and children of immigrants who chose non-traditional career paths. Upstart will hopefully help more young people from such backgrounds pursue what they're called to do.
ReplyDeleteCue soundtrack from "Mulan": "Now I seee, that if I were truuu-ly to be myself, I would break my family's heaart!"