Nobody around me was doing what I was doing. Not in my grade. Not in my neighborhood. My friends were good people — genuinely — but when I talked about inverse kinematics or transformer attention mechanisms, I watched their eyes go somewhere else. That's not a criticism. It's just the truth of what it's like to be a first-generation kid chasing things that no one in your immediate world has a map for.
The First-Generation Weight
My parents didn't go to college. They don't have engineering backgrounds. They couldn't proofread my IEEE paper or critique my PCB schematics. What they could do — and did, every single day — was work harder than anyone I've ever met so that I had the time and stability to figure it out myself. There's a particular kind of pressure that comes with that. Not the pressure they put on me — they never did — but the pressure I put on myself. The weight of knowing what was traded so I could sit in a lab at San Jose State as a sixteen-year-old.
Finding Your People Later
I used to think that having no one around me who cared about the same things meant I was on the wrong path. Now I understand it differently. You don't find your peer group in high school hallways — not if what you're building is unusual. You find them in research labs, in online communities, in conference rooms at IEEE and NAACL. You find them later, after you've already put in the years alone. The loneliness isn't a sign you're wrong. It's a sign you're early.
What Keeps You Going
Honestly? Gratitude. When I think about quitting — and I have thought about it — I think about my dad working a night shift so he could drive me to school in the morning. I think about my parents counting the register at closing time in a candy store in Arizona, dreaming about a different life for their kid. That image has gotten me through more late nights than any amount of intrinsic motivation. I'm not building robots because it's cool. I'm building them because someone sacrificed everything for me to have the chance to, and I refuse to waste it.