The Retrospective on 2023

Before I start my retrospective, I’d like to give a brief self-introduction. I’m Yongtae Kim, also known as Tate or Yongtae, a brain engineering student. For the past three years, I have been working as a backend engineer at a women’s fashion platform A and a game platform U, gaining various programming experiences. Currently, I am back in college and studying brain engineering as a major.

As 2023 comes to a close, I remember it as a year where many special things happened. The events I’ve experienced this year and the direction I’ve taken are expected to have a huge impact on my life unlike anything I’ve experienced before. In this article, I’d like to summarize and reflect on some of the big transitions and decisions I’ve made this year, and I hope it will be helpful not only to me, but also to others who are trying to find a direction in life like me.

At the beginning of this year, one of the main topics of concern for me was career decisions. Last year was the time when I made the decision to return to school as my work as an industrial technician was gradually coming to an end. After that, I started to think about what path I wanted to take, and I found it difficult to make progress on my own.

The idea came from my girlfriend at the time, who thought it would be more helpful to get advice from adults who had already achieved in their field rather than trying to figure it out on my own. This idea proved to be exactly right.

I tried my best to connect with adults who had achieved in various fields, because the goal of this project was to open up a variety of perspectives, not to be limited to a specific career, but to explore different life directions to find possibilities.

In conversations with doctors at Samsung Medical Center, professors in the field of artificial intelligence at KAIST, developers at artificial intelligence companies, representatives of bio ventures, consultants in the bio industry, and professional counseling psychologists, I received valuable advice from a variety of perspectives. These are too numerous to record in writing, so I will look for opportunities to share them at some point.

One piece of wisdom from my counselor was particularly inspiring. He told me that the preceding theme to thinking about a career was not about a job, but about what kind of life I wanted to live, and that I needed to figure out what would make me happy. This served as a key methodology for setting a direction for my life.

I decided to find my own direction by looking at the different sources of my happiness and extracting various keywords. I’m trying to crystallize my dreams around keywords such as bio, psychology, artificial intelligence, consulting, and management. I’m considering various strategies such as research, technology development, and entrepreneurship, and I think that studying for graduate school in the US will be an efficient means to realize this.

Of course, career is only one part of my happiness. There are many other aspects to consider, such as health, safety, friends, and so on, but I’ve found meaning in setting my most long-term goals. This is just an initial setup, and I’ll continue to fine-tune my career direction in the future.

As the weather heated up, I went through two big changes, just like the cicada’s fable: the first was a breakup with my ex-girlfriend, and the second was leaving my job at Company A. But looking at it differently, I ended up meeting my precious soulmate, and gaining a career at my previous company that gave me the wisdom of Korean social life and great development skills.

Leaving the company upon the expiration of my Industrial Technical Personnel to go back to school was a short period of time and a long period of time, and it was a bit of a thrill as it was my first social life. However, it felt good to have some time to myself. At work, I hadn’t seen the sun except during my lunch break, and it felt a bit awkward to walk around in the sunshine between the buildings in Gangnam.

Just before I left, I said thank you to the senior back-end developer, front-end developer, and Android developer who were the crew of the delivery team. Also, the team leader and back-end developer of the Japanese business team were very helpful, and I learned a lot from them. I think there were a lot of good people in the company, and I would like to express my gratitude to them.

So during this time, I had coffee chats with friends I hadn’t met before, with new developers, but I did it a little bit too much. I don’t usually meet people that often, but somehow I ended up having a coffee chat with someone new every day for the whole month.

It was a bit overwhelming for me as an introvert, but it was fun, and I think I may have inadvertently found a new hobby. Most of the new people were very interesting to talk to, and we were able to have colorful conversations about a variety of topics, not necessarily about development, but about current events, careers, hobbies, friends, companies, etc. And the best part was that sometimes the other person would benefit from the conversation, and sometimes it would help me organize my thoughts.

I’m happy that I have a lot of friends, and I’m even happier that I can talk to them at any time, and I’m happier that I remember those moments with them no matter where I am. And in talking to them, I’ve crystallized and shared a helpful way of thinking, which can be called life wisdom, and that’s metacognition.

We also talked a lot about the productivity tools that we always have on hand, and the one that we talked about the most was Obsidian. It’s an advanced notepad that can do Zetelkasten, it can do second brain, it can do diaries and retrospectives, and I wrote the first draft of this post in Obsidian. I realized that Obsidian’s initial hurdle was too high, so I wrote and shared an Obsidian Tutorial for Korean users.

The concept of metacognition has been around for quite some time, and it’s one of the most widely recognized concepts in Korea. What I realized through many coffee chats was that my usual way of thinking utilizes a lot of metacognition. It may not be special to you, but I found that the attitude you habitually take in your daily life can be special to others.

With the help and advice of the many friends I met during the coffee chat, I was able to refine my thinking and clarify my goals. Talking about metacognition intrigued me, and I wanted to share how to find moments in everyday life that required metacognition and share them with those who needed them. After considering several formats, I settled on a seminar format to prepare myself to teach my thoughts.

I put a lot of thought into how I wanted to present the seminar over the course of several weeks, and with a lot of help from friends, I was able to organize the content of the seminar to my satisfaction. A new friend I met during the seminar was also very supportive, helping me turn what could have been a general talk into a professionally marketed and organized seminar.

After a month of hard work, I was able to successfully organize the seminars, which are held on Saturday mornings. Initially, about 10 people came to Google Meet to hear me speak, but over the course of four seminars, the number of learners grew through word of mouth and testimonials. I can’t say for sure that I was successful, but I think the quality of the talks was good enough for me to be satisfied, and the Q&A after the talks made the seminars understandable.

One day during the seminar, I realized that some of the learners wanted more personalized consulting rather than general metacognitive knowledge. There was no difference in the content of the existing coffee chat on how to apply metacognition and consulting, so I decided to organize a consulting session. We listened more deeply to the client’s situation, found problems, categorized them into areas that could be solved with metacognition, and shared how.

After several consulting sessions, I received favorable feedback from many clients. After the consulting sessions, I spent a month preparing and taking the TOEFL test for an exchange student in preparation for returning to school. It was shorter than my original three-month plan, but I was able to prepare more intensively and get a decent grade. I plan to take the test once more next year.

After the vacation, I returned to my university in Daejeon for the start of the school year. When I came back to school and met my college friends, I realized that most of them were graduate students, except for a few returning students. I think it’s because I’m in my third year, so everyone is old enough to be in a master’s program. It was fun to spend time with my old friends and meet new ones in the literature club.

I am now an undergraduate student. I don’t get a paycheck every month, I don’t have a commute, and instead I live the life of an undergraduate student with class attendance and assignments. As an undergraduate student, I’ve had a variety of experiences: signing up for courses, attending classes, completing assignments, joining clubs, hanging out, and preparing for the next day’s classes. I enjoy my undergraduate life by enjoying festivals, sharing meals with my foreign student buddy, and participating in and voting in student government elections.

In my department, we had a required course called “Instrumentation”, which required us to participate in one experiment a week and submit a report before and after the experiment. This course was notoriously difficult, requiring us to dedicate three days a week to instrumentation. I took it this semester, and it was very time-sensitive.

Meanwhile, I enhanced my research skills by doing a research internship in a lab in the Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering. Through participating in lab meetings, I gained real-life experience in a lab and valuable talks with senior graduate students, as well as information about the academic world. In particular, the experience of attending conferences gave me a great hint to choose a path as a researcher.

At the end of the semester, while I was taking my midterm and final exams, I was given the opportunity to be an exchange student. My university has a joint campus agreement with a university in the eastern United States to run an exchange student program, so I applied and was lucky enough to be accepted. This exchange student experience is expected to play a very important role in my future activities.

With the start of winter break, I am back home in Seoul and doing various activities in preparation for my exchange program. After the exchange program, I plan to apply for an internship program in the summer to improve my research skills and adapt to the American culture. I am also meeting up with friends I didn’t meet in Daejeon every day in Seoul to get to know them and have fun.

Thus, 2023 has passed as a year of chaos and transformation. A lot has changed, and I think it is a great achievement that I have somewhat crystallized the direction of my life. I will continue to work towards the future I want, and plan to become a person who leads innovation in the bio and IT fields. I will continue to grow through various challenges such as exchange students, research internships, and graduate studies. Thank you for reading my 2023 retrospective so far. You are always welcome to request a coffee chat.