14 years later by Yan Z. '12
what I've been up to in the past one-seventh of a century
Hi! Remember me? It’s only been 14 years since my last MIT Admissions blog!
Back then, I was a starry-eyed over-caffeinated food-obsessed Course 8 major with a penchant for iconic phrases like, “Could this brutalist hallway be any more translation-invariant??!”
A lot has happened since those halcyon days when virtually nobody had a smartphone unless they were participating in a Media Lab study. (Yes, we would dash from lecture halls to Athena clusters, 15” Dell Inspirons clutched tightly under-arm, to scintillate our understimulated brains by opening emails with subject lines like “free leftover iceberg lettuce in E52”; in fact, a single TikTok in 2025 delivers more dopamine than we would experience in an entire school year.) Besides a global pandemic, at least three decent memes, and the rise of LLMs like the one writing this blog post, the years 2011-2024 bore witness to my transformation from a directionless physics major into a jaded programmer.
What happened, you ask? Well, in my senior year at MIT, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do after college, so I took the path of least cranial activity and applied to physics graduate school. In case that didn’t work out, I also applied to what I thought to be two safe backup options: unpaid laborer on an organic farm in Hawaii and coordinator at an open science nonprofit. As it so happened, I was rejected from both of those jobs and accepted to all four Physics PhD programs as well as the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, a predicament eerily reminiscent of when I got rejected from The Cheesecake Factory but accepted to MIT in my junior year of high school (after which I dropped out). After weeks of first-world agony over which top-tier astrophysics PhD offer I should accept, I decided to go to Stanford.
Despite doing well academically, I had a depressing first trimester and took a leave of absence at the end of it. In January of 2013, I had no income, no permanent residence, and apparently no hireable skills in the startup-crazed city of San Francisco. No matter how many tech companies I sent a resume to, nobody wanted to interview me. Internally, I knew I’d find some way to prove myself to them; it just wasn’t going to be straightforward.
Although my only real coding experience was a month-long IAP course where the first assignment was to implement RSA encryption in Scheme, I had already been indoctrinated into the free software movement by my MIT housemates. Plus I was paranoid about online privacy and using PGP to encrypt my emails, thanks to renowned whistleblower Chelsea Manning visiting the aforementioned house at MIT shortly before doing the aforementioned whistleblowing. With interests like these, I naturally gravitated toward the burgeoning 2010s cypherpunk movement, learning to program by contributing open source code to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Tor, teaching myself the basics of cybersecurity, and losing out on millions of dollars by understanding the cryptography behind Bitcoin but not buying it. Slowly but surely, I started convincing friends who were running shoestring-budget startups and nonprofits to pay me something resembling minimum wage for my time as a programmer and security auditor.
After almost a year of clawing through the SF technocracy, all while sharing a room with an MIT dropout who had run away to join the circus (neither of us could afford the full $900/month rent), I finally received two dream job offers on a cold November night. One was to be the first security engineer at a small company called Stripe, founded by some of my MIT friends during a summer in which I was incessantly annoyed with one of them for forgetting his kitchen duties (I had no idea what could be more important). The other was to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a Staff Technologist, under the wing of Peter Eckersley, a dear friend and mentor who sadly passed away in 2022. Everyone told me to join Stripe, but I picked EFF in the end.
The rest, as they say, is history. I won’t bore you now with my career minutiae, but some of my proudest achievements are helping secure over 500 million websites by launching Let’s Encrypt, finding a vulnerability that allowed me to remotely sniff browsing history, triumphantly sauntering back onto the Stanford campus to give a guest lecture in web security, and building a new web browser called Brave, of which I’m currently the Chief Information Security Officer.
Morals of the story:
- Don’t be too afraid to pivot to a career unrelated to your major.
- Optimize for life-long learning.
- Buy Bitcoin in 2011.
Anyways, no blog post is complete without pictures, so here are 14 photos from 2024 to compensate for my 14-year hiatus.
Starting off with a slice of my idyllic post-graduation life, here’s a sweater I knit for a bunny at my local rabbit shelter, who was chilly because he had to be shaved:
The Bay Area had a rainy winter, which meant wild mushrooms were plentiful by February. We took a foraging class and crawled through many, many wet brambles to unearth these:
Afterwards we cooked and ate the mushrooms that were unambiguously not going to kill us.
Later that month we took a short trip to Tahoe to traipse around in snow, which I’d experienced once or twice at MIT.
Azuki, my 9 year-old beloved pet bunny, had to go to the vet for a tooth trim.
After the pain meds kicked in, he was very floppy and needed help flipping over.
Fast-forward to August. We traveled to China and stopped by the Malaysian Durian Festival, which was (confusingly) in Hong Kong, because we are durian fanatics connoisseurs.
Apparently that wasn’t enough durian, because afterwards we went to Singapore and experienced a “Durian Omakase.”
By the time I got back to San Francisco, it was peak fig season!
Sadly, California’s bountiful autumn was cut short when I was forced to travel across the Atlantic for a work trip. Actually this was quite exciting as my company works remotely, and many of us have never met in person. I gave a few presentations and participated in a hackathon which was really fun.
When I got back to SF, it was both election season and Halloween season simultaneously. We celebrated by putting up a spooky spider collecting election mail.
I wanted to share the spider on something the kids these days call “Instagram,” so I went to the library to do some research. Good thing these books never go out of date!
Having lived in SF for over a decade, you’d think that by now I would have found all the scenic ocean views. Nope. Here’s one that completely escaped my notice until November 2024:
One of the perks of living in the Bay Area is an unending supply of jaw-dropping sunsets. Eventually you get used to it and stop noticing them, but you take the picture anyway to prove on social media that you went outside.
That’s all for now. See you in another 14 years!