ChoJin’s Quarter

As you may have noticed, I had been quite quiet during March and Avril. I think it may now be a good time to reflect on what happened: I moved back to France, “definitely”, leaving my friends, my nicely-paid job, and my life as I now had used it to be, “to purse other opportunities” (as we like to say back there when we leave a company). Which opportunities? Well… I decided to take a chance in life, go back to school and try to become a doctor (hopefully a surgeon). Funny, isn’t it?

This is probably the biggest decision I made so far in my life and I found it very difficult to explain to others the wind of craziness, which went through my head before taking this decision. I’ll try to sparkle some sense here and there throughout the post, but I can’t guarantee it would make sense at all. This post is a mess, and therefore somehow a perfect reflection of myself…

To start, I think I just try to do good, whatever it might mean. I won’t adventure myself saying I try to be good in general, because any filmmaker knows that even the biggest villain never thinks he’s a bad guy. Somehow, no matter what we do, we all think we are good people anyway. So of course I try to be good, but by whom and which standard? I’ll leave the morality question to Richard Dawkins, who devoted a whole chapter to it in his book “The God Delusion”. No, I just try to do good when I can, hopefully even when it doesn’t benefit myself (how can I be sure it doesn’t benefit myself? A “benefit” can be quite subtle and at multiple levels, can’t it?).

Like everyone else I try to deal with my bad sides, my bad character, my ego and my vanity. I’ve done so many things I’m not really proud of, I lost count. I hurt peoples, knowingly and unknowingly, without apologizing to some of them even when I wanted to. For instance, I really hope I’ll stumble upon this girl from High-School one more time and that this time I’ll have the courage to ask for forgiveness. Not for my own salvation, but to let her know that I deeply regret the way I treated her; being young can’t excuse stupidity, can it?

So to go easy on me, I tend to remember (or seek?) the good things I’ve done. Stuff I’ve done to help others, and which somehow impacted their life, however insignificant my contributions might have been. I think for instance of my good magician friend from college. Back then I, somehow randomly, got an offer for an internship in the Silicon Valley. You can easily imagine how symbolic it is for a computer guy to get such an offer. Of course I accepted this offer (and you can see what happened next, by following the photos in the Gallery), but I also asked whether or not they were interested in having someone else.

I can still remember the smile on our faces when for the first time, “titou” (the friend I never thanked enough for bringing me there) drove us around the Valley: “Here is Sony… here is Canon… here is Creative… here is Cisco’s land….”; Oracle, Adobe, Intel, Ebay, Apple, Google…they’re just all there. And It’s funny how a seemly insignificant action can have so many ramifications. Forward six years, and this friend is still in California, found the love of his life, and is getting married next month (good luck guys, you’re cute together ).

Of course, I didn’t do much in all of that, neither did I when I just passed another college friend’s resume, a friend who ended up being hired in one of the biggest company of the Silicon Valley. And the butterfly effect taking its place again, he, in turn, passed someone else resume and you can easily imagine the rest. So yeah, I didn’t do much, merely applying the same principle of the movie called “Pay it forward”: from time to time some people give you a helping hand without expecting anything in return; I feel it’s natural to do the same when you can, the exponential law taking care of the rest.

But still, when I think about it, I smile. At least I can retrospectively say that I did some good, at some point. I smile also thinking about this butterfly effect. “No destiny but what we do”, right? But still, random is sometimes funny. Who knows… if my teacher didn’t give me Simon Singh’s book, and I hadn’t done its “Cipherchallenge” (full time…), maybe I would have worked harder at school and ended up in a totally different engineer school (meaning “more renowned”). Then, who knows… no Silicon Valley, no helping-friends-to-get-there, and… no wedding! (or at least probably not there with the same person )

I just try to do good… I guess making a better world starts around you, with amazingly simple small actions. Problem is, I felt I could do more. I’ve been doing computer stuff since I was a kid. I started programming in LOGO and Basic around 7. I’ve been in front of a computer almost all my life (started to play games on an ORIC1 around 3), and I still love it. But I always wanted this to stay what it was: a passion, a hobby. Something you do at home for the fun of it. From the moment it becomes a job, you just can’t come back home and jump on your computer again to continue program your own stuff. I mean, I’m might be a geek, but I’d like to have a somehow balanced life. I love to learn new things too much to hardly do anything else than computer stuff, days and nights.

In spite of all my bad sides, I always felt I have been somehow blessed with an almost-ok-working-brain And as such, I was a little bit disappointed in myself; sitting in front of a computer all day, whereas I felt I could do a “greater good”. Not that it’s a bad job, or useless job or anything like that. It does have an impact in other people’s life. After all, without the type of software I was working on (EDA software), ultimately, we wouldn’t have any chips and therefore no electronic appliances (which could be medical stuff of course, among other things). But this impact was just too abstract to me. I needed something more direct, more social, and maybe simply more rewarding (by my standard of course). I felt I was becoming more and more altruistic: taking a real pleasure in disinterested practices for the well being of others was something I could easily relate to. I wanted a job where the word “compassion” had a real meaning.

I have so many passions and so many interests… hell I’m even learning sewing! Couldn’t I find something I’m really passionate about but which would bring these missing pieces? I always loved the biology and the medical fields. When I think about it now, I remember reading with admiration articles about new techniques and new treatments all the time. But I don’t know why, it just never crossed my mind that I could become a doctor. I remember, when I was 8 or so, I wanted to be an astrophysicist and unlock the mystery of the universe, then around 14 I once told my dad I will get a Nobel prize for curing cancer and AIDS (yeah, both of them! ). I guess that, on my way, I got lost in the middle of all those bits, kilobits, megabits, gigabits, and now terabits…

I certainly re-evaluated my ambition about the Nobel prize (the Nobel prize is anyway a recognition of what you have done, not a trophy or a finality of some sort…), but being a surgeon… I just don’t have words to describe it. It’s just all I can ask for, it’s technical, it’s intellectual, it’s social, it’s a lot of responsibility - but in a good way -, and you help people with compassion… I don’t know… I just want to do that for the rest of my life.

So I came back to France. I can’t deny it was a hard and risky choice but I wanted to follow my gut and pursue my ideal. I have no regrets, quite the contrary in fact. I lived something crazy, almost surreal there, especially considering my family background/class. And regrets would be, if I didn’t try med’ school. I prefer to try and fail than wondering about it my whole life.

Some says I’m courageous. Future will tell us if I was being courageous or foolish. It’s funny to imagine how the outcome can easily change the adjective being used

I miss you all guys,