Finding Momentum

There are big changes on the hori­zon. I feel like I could expand on each of these, but I’ll just bul­let point them for now. They may be entries in their own right in the future…

• Now that Annie, Esther and I have all grad­u­ated, my par­ents have moved to Shang­hai (my dad’s found a new job there). So it’s a big change for our fam­ily, and I’ve been grap­pling with the changes that come with it. Among the themes: the loss of home, the power of par­ents’ love, grow­ing up and… yardwork.
• I’m grad­u­at­ing in Decem­ber, and am watch­ing my col­lege career draw to a close. With it comes the inevitabil­ity of shift­ing rela­tion­ships and a dif­fer­ent lifestyle that I can no longer deny or dodge.
• I’ll take a month off in Jan­u­ary to relax at home, then in Feb­ru­ary, Sarah and I are tak­ing a mis­sions trip to Botswana to visit her old mis­sions agency. It’s a place that’s held a huge place in her heart for a long time, and I’m going with my eyes, ears and heart open to see what Africa’s all about. More on this soon–I can’t wait!
• That wild and wacky ride known as recruit­ing has drawn to a close, and I’m enter­ing the work­ing world! I inter­viewed widely, and was blessed with two job offers (in an econ­omy like this one, hav­ing an offer is a bless­ing in itself). I had to take a good long look at myself and ask: what are my pas­sions? What am I great at? Where do I want to live, what kind of work envi­ron­ment do I want to have, and how easy is it to make rela­tion­ships? How much do salary and perks actu­ally mean to me?In the end, I had to make a deci­sion between a posi­tion at Sales­force and a posi­tion at Riverbed. It was a tough deci­sion that came down to the wire, but in the end I chose to join Riverbed. I’ll be work­ing as a UI designer; my team will design man­age­ment inter­faces on Riverbed’s fam­ily of net­work appliances.

  I was attracted to Riverbed’s friendly engi­neer­ing cul­ture and felt that I had the great­est oppor­tu­nity there to develop and exer­cise cre­ative design skills. I’ll start in March, which leads me to…

• I’m in the process of search­ing for an apart­ment in San Fran­cisco (or Berke­ley). My buddy Jack and I are plan­ning on liv­ing together, and we’re look­ing for a third room­mate. If you’re inter­ested… let me know!