I walked into UC Berkeley's EECS program without ever having owned a computer. I had never played Minecraft. I had never written a line of code for fun. My classmates had been doing all three since middle school. This is the story of what happened next — and why I think it made me better.
The Room I Walked Into
UC Berkeley's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program is, by most measures, the top EECS program in the world. That's not school pride talking — it's the consensus of the people who study these things and the revealed preference of the global technology industry. The students competing for those seats come from everywhere: top high schools in Singapore, India, South Korea, all over the United States. They arrive having already done research, shipped projects, won olympiads. The caliber in that room is something you feel immediately.
I was not that. I came in as Engineering Undeclared — a designation that carries less than a five percent acceptance rate and grants full first-priority access to every engineering discipline at Berkeley. It's the general admission for people whose interests cross boundaries. I was proud of that. And then I got to campus and realized I was surrounded by people who had been preparing for a very specific race that I didn't know was happening.
My classmates had laptops with stickers from hackathons I'd never heard of. They talked about internship timelines the way other people talk about seasons. They had opinions about compilers. I had a passion for building things and a vague, powerful conviction that technology was where that passion belonged. That was it. That was everything I brought.
The Imposter Wears Your Face
Imposter syndrome is one of those terms that gets used so often it loses its teeth. Let me be specific about what it felt like. It felt like everyone around me was operating from a manual I had never been given. Not a better manual — the same one. The one that apparently came standard with a childhood of programming contests and computer science electives and a family computer in the bedroom.
I didn't have a computer going into Berkeley. I had not played Minecraft or any game that might have quietly taught me something about systems or logic or building. There was no gap year with a side project. There was no formative moment at age twelve where code clicked. I was genuinely starting from zero, in a place designed for people who were starting from somewhere much further along.
I learned what LeetCode was my sophomore year. Not in the sense of sitting down to practice it — in the sense of having its existence explained to me by a classmate who had already been grinding problems for a year. The recruiting pipeline — the summer after freshman year internship, the return offer, the new grad role locked up by junior year — was already well underway for people around me. I was still learning that the pipeline existed.
For a while, I responded to this the wrong way. I tried to close the gap by becoming someone else. I tried to absorb the culture, adopt the timeline, fit into the shape that the CS career path had been cut into. I put down what I actually cared about and picked up what I thought I was supposed to care about. That is the quietest and most damaging thing imposter syndrome does — it doesn't just make you doubt yourself, it makes you abandon yourself in the attempt to belong.
Why I Was Actually There
The turn came when I stopped trying to explain away the gap and started asking a different question: why was I admitted?
Not in a self-congratulatory way. Genuinely. Berkeley's Engineering Undeclared pathway is not designed for the student who already knows exactly what they want to do. It's designed for the student who thinks across disciplines, who doesn't fit cleanly into one box, who has the intellectual range to move between fields and find something at the intersections. That described me more honestly than any CS profile I was trying to imitate.
My passion was democratized building — making things that people who don't have technical privilege can access and use. My interest was in frontier innovation, in the places where what's technically possible and what people actually need haven't fully connected yet. Those instincts led me to EECS because engineering is the language of making things real. But it was never the destination. It was always the means.
Engineering is a means to an end. That sentence sounds simple and it took me two years to actually believe it. The students around me who had the pipeline, the leetcode grind, the internship trajectory — they were optimizing for mastery of the discipline. I needed to optimize for something else: becoming the kind of person who could take an idea from nothing to real, who could lead people toward it, who could build the technical foundation and the vision at the same time.
Building What I Came to Build
Once I stopped performing the CS identity and claimed my own, things started making sense. I threw myself into the things I was actually drawn to. I led in physics and AI. I got into business development at Berkeley, which is where I started understanding that technology is only ever as meaningful as the problem it solves and the people it reaches. I was working at the intersection of technical depth and real-world application — exactly where I'd always been meant to operate.
My childhood passion was entrepreneurship. Not the romanticized version of it — not the hoodie-and-whiteboard version — but the genuine drive to build something that didn't exist before, to invent a solution to a problem worth solving, and to do it with enough technical fluency to see it all the way through. Berkeley gave me the environment to develop that fluency. But it also kept testing whether I'd trade the thing I actually was for a more legible version of success.
I didn't trade it. Or rather — I traded it for a while, came back, and held it tighter after that.
Confidence Is the Work
The clearest thing I took from Berkeley wasn't a technical skill. It was an understanding of what confidence actually is and why it's not optional.
Confidence is not arrogance. It's not the performance of certainty or the suppression of doubt. It's the settled knowledge of who you are and what you're for — and the willingness to move from that place even when the room makes you feel like you shouldn't. In an environment like Berkeley, where everyone's credentials are visible and the hierarchy is implied in everything, the absence of confidence is existential. You either know why you're there or you spend your whole time justifying it to yourself.
It took me too long to find that settled place. But I found it. And what I found was this: confidence is the purest source of energy we have to claim what we're going after. Not talent, not timing, not access — those things matter, but they can't be summoned. Confidence can. It's a practice. The baseline goal underneath every other goal.
I didn't need to have owned a computer at age twelve. I needed to know, clearly and without apology, why I was in that room — and build from there.