Trip to San Francisco

My trip to San Francisco, set up by the Center for Entrepreneurship and the College of Engineering and Applied Science, ended up being one of the most formative things I did that year. As the co-founder of a physiotherapy startup, I wasn't just there to see the city. I wanted to meet other people building things, and learn from the founders who had shaped Silicon Valley.

As a computer science student, getting to visit the Apple garage, Apple's headquarters, and Google's San Francisco office meant a lot. Standing where some of these companies actually started was surreal. We also visited IDEO, where the engineers walked us through the design process behind products used all over the world.

Seeing places like Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital up close pushed me to aim higher as a founder. And wandering through Chinatown, Japantown, Koreatown, and Little Italy, eating my way through each one, turned out to be its own kind of education.

The highlight was getting invited to Notion's headquarters for the launch of their AI features at an AI meetup. There was a fireside chat with the co-founders of Chroma, a vector database I'd actually used in my own AI projects, which was surreal to watch in person. Meeting AI engineers and founders working on real, ambitious projects only made me want to be in this field more.

The trip hit me personally too. Growing up, money was tight, and being into technology sometimes felt like wanting something I couldn't quite reach. But standing at the Apple visitor center, looking out at the Apple Park ring, it sank in that startups had already taken me further than I'd pictured. Living and working in Silicon Valley, something that used to feel out of reach, suddenly seemed possible.

San Francisco stuck with me more than almost anything else I did that year. It left me convinced that no goal is really out of reach, and that with enough work and stubbornness, you can get further than you ever planned to.