HY: Oh, tremendously. When I first went to MIT, I was there to study economics as a major. I later wanted to do something else together with economics, because I felt it was good to have more exposure. I had taken classes in computer science and architecture, and I ultimately decided on computer science. Being at MIT, around a whole bunch of engineers did somewhat influence me to take up computer science – which is obviously very relevant to what I do now.

I remember that, in my junior year, a friend encouraged me to apply for this Google internship. I’d just taken a couple of computer science classes and didn’t even have a resume – I hadn’t prepared one because I already had a job back home due to my scholarship. But my friend pushed me to do it. I tried it out, got the job, and did an internship there for a summer. The biggest thing I realised from that was that there are so many things that you could do that aren’t even that hard, sometimes it’s just about taking that step of trying.

I think the biggest difference between students at MIT versus other universities is not that students at MIT are any smarter. If you did well in the education system here, you could do well at MIT. The difference from the people I’ve met there is not that they were inherently smarter, but that they were willing to try harder. They weren’t just content with graduating and getting a good grade or class of honours. They would go and try to build a solar car or start a clinic to treat heart attack patients in some country. They weren’t inherently good at these things – because nobody inherently has such knowledge. But because they were willing to try, even though they didn’t know anything, they would get good at it after a short period of time figuring out the basics.

When you’re a student, there’s this mystique built around having a long professional career, and having experience. But having seen how many organisations and teams are run, if you can put together a school fun fair, for example, that is the same set of skills that you need to run an organisation. I’m not even kidding. It’s just making sure that you’re keeping track of what’s going on, ensuring that your team knows what to do, communicating openly and honestly, prioritising your goals. It’s the same thing.

I had a friend who was just inherently super organised. We were planning a trip to Costa Rica for our group of friends. She, for that trip, had put together a binder of arrival times, pictures of restaurants and contact numbers. And she did that because that was just the kind of person she was. None of that is inherently a super high intelligence task, but that one binder is more organised than some multi-hundred million-dollar projects I’ve seen, and this was for our little group trip to Costa Rica. If you can do that, then I think succeeding professionally isn’t as far away as you think. It’s not as mystical as you think. I think that was a big insight.