• Nov 01, 2025 *

I believe that all our fears are largely due to uncertainty. It’s then intuitive to keep as many doors open “just in case”. Ironically, that intuition often leads to all doors being merely creaked rather than open because of what I call the Efficient Door Hypothesis: the more doors you keep open, the more closed they all become. Every competitive path is crowded with specialists who’ve committed fully. Your discipline, the main resource needed to push past mediocrity, is finite and replenishes slowly. Yes, you may “80/20” each door, but that 80% is precisely where real competition begins. Hedging doesn’t create optionality. Rather, it guarantees you’ll be outcompeted everywhere.1 So, I’ve come to believe that one should pick a singular door and burn the boats.

I empathize, it’s scary to make such a move. It’s a hard, seemingly permanent one. Your upperclassmen and mentors will tell you about how you can “always pivot” and “change your plan”, and though you’re sure they’re right logically, it still feels unnerving to commit. I’ve seen this everywhere: high school students choosing between exam tracks, underclassmen picking careers, even osu! players refusing to specialize. I’d like to share and reflect on one such situation that I’ve gone through recently: switching from pre-med to tech.

Story

In early high school, many of my online friends from osu! were doing genuinely impressive things: one was building tablet drivers, another was creating an open-source Alexa alternative, and another was building Minecraft mods that thousands used. What they were doing felt real in a way nothing else did. I was convinced they had innate problem-solving skills that I didn’t, like they had access to some deeper layer I couldn’t reach. So, every conversation felt like trying to join a cool kids club I wasn’t part of. I never got deep into tech because it seemed impossible to be the best at it. Too many kids were already coding since they were 12, and I’d be starting years behind. So I demoted myself to spectator, gave up before trying, and hustled for wet-lab chemistry research instead to pad my resume for college applications.

Though I enjoyed the stint, I didn’t enjoy it enough to do academia, so I did pre-med to put that chemistry “spike” to good use. However, I frankly didn’t think that was safe enough as an international student, but Duke’s CS major requirements were a joke, so I ended up doing CS + Chemistry on a pre-medical track.

I remember setting up 30~ Zoom chats from Saudi after I got into Duke to validate my idea to mixed responses. Some thought it was an oxymoron to be CS + pre-med, others thought it’s doable as long as I pick only one as a career. I initially focused on pre-med because I wanted my high school publications to not go to waste. But really, I still didn’t think I could be the best at tech.

However, uncertainty slowly crept. Every Organic Chemistry midterm had me envying my friends doing hackathons together. Every discussion on React had me wishing I could contribute. It felt like a “cool kids club” that I shunned myself out of because “I couldn’t be the best if I started this late.” All the time they spent on hackathons and reading up on the differences between remote shells felt fundamentally worth “more” than trying to become a doctor.

Eventually, I realized that I always wanted to do tech. It’s where I found the most aspirational people I’ve met, but admittedly, I had an irrational hierarchy where tech just felt superior to everything else. I logically knew biology had sophisticated experimental design, chemistry had elegant synthesis optimizations, but I couldn’t help viewing them as “less.” Not less valid or important, but less cool in a way I couldn’t articulate. Even if I became the world’s best orthopedic working at Mayo Clinic, I knew I’d look at someone building infrastructure at Vercel or a deep tech company and think they were doing something more worthwhile.2

It’s irrational; it’s closer to religion than reasoning. But being honest about this shallow yet real gut feeling was the first step toward actually closing the other doors. Once I stopped pretending I was making a “rational” choice, the path became clearer:

1. People who started programming a decade ago were not programming everyday. I can condense their training if I keep at it consistently to catch up.
2. Being “the best” is completely subjective. After a certain point when you reach table stakes for playing with the best in your field, it’s about figuring out your own voice in the game instead of boiling down such art to a numbers game with a leaderboard attached.

It was a hard option to commit to because it’s easy to be mediocre in such a saturated field. Besides, I didn’t want to seem like a bitch for leaving pre-med. It’s easy to boil down this switch to “pre-med was too hard for him.” I wanted to be the guy that “saw it through,” and my ego refused to let it go. The final straw was when I saw peers “fail” at getting into S-tier medical schools while I was miserable doing another discussion set of Organic Chemistry II. At that point I thought I might as well “fail” doing what I’m convinced by. So, I decided to hang up my boots and commit to tech.

Reflections

Six months in, I’m still terrified I’m wrong some days. I’ve done so little compared to my vision, and being a retired blackpill3 often leaves me feeling like I’ll never feel comfortable in my skin in tech. Recruiting is obviously stressful in the short term, and maybe in two years I’ll write “On Keeping Doors Open” about why burning boats was stupid. However, though I’ve spent the lowest lows of my life the last 8-10 months, I’ve never felt so driven to wake up every morning. It feels like every commit or “LGTM” makes me closer to a vision I believe in, one that I find fundamentally exciting. Certainly, it has been better than stretching myself to maintain pre-med + tech. It feels like a step in the right direction.

There’s a thread that’s prominent throughout this story: I always knew I wanted to do tech. I came up with excuses and let my ego get the best of me, but I always pictured devs in an admittedly childish yet genuine “cool kids club” that I wanted to be a part of since I was 15. Talking to underclassmen, I’m convinced that most people know what they want, they’re just too afraid to admit it for one reason or another. Isolate your attention to that damn door. Found out you hate it after a few months? Close it back. Go all-in on something else. At least then you’ve turned a “maybe” into a “no” instead of spending years stretching yourself to maintain mediocrity at both.

I think what happened is a form of what Sartre called “bad faith”: we pretend we’re objects being acted upon rather than agents making choices. We say “I don’t know whether to do A or B,” but listen closely and you’ll hear “I’ve always found X about A compelling, but Y and Z are telling me to do B instead.” The parents, the prestige, the sunk costs; they become convenient excuses to avoid the terrifying freedom of admitting what we actually want.

I didn’t realize this while I was stuck between pre-med and tech. It took friends repeatedly asking “but what do YOU want?” to cut through the noise. Looking back, every argument I made for pre-med was about external validation (publications won’t go to waste, don’t want to look weak, already promised my parents). I never once said “I want to be a doctor.” The signal was always there, just buried under rational-sounding hedges.

Of course, some people genuinely don’t know yet. Maybe they’re earlier in exploration, or their preferences aren’t formed. But if you’re reading this and resonating, you might already know. The question isn’t whether you have enough information. It’s whether you’re ready to admit what that information is telling you.

Another caveat: I’m privileged to be able to burn boats. I parents who, while they had opinions, ultimately supported my choice. My family doesn’t need me to get them money ASAP. Not everyone has room to take risks. If you’re supporting family, on a visa with tight constraints, or don’t have savings to fall back on, hedging might not be optional, it might be survival.

To be clear, we’re almost never chasing a specific field. We may chase money, infamy, stability, and that goal post will change throughout our lives. Reflecting back, the most aspirational people I’ve met were the ones that were brutally honest with themselves from the beginning and went all-in on a path they believed in very early on.4 However, such brutal honesty and clarity almost never comes internally without external sources that force you to think critically about this. I still credit my close friends for my entrance to tech, and I hope to be a similar catalyst for them in other aspects of their life.

To condense my argument:

• Keeping doors open drains your finite discipline (the Efficient Door Hypothesis).
• Most people already know which door they want; they’re just engaging in bad faith to avoid admitting it.
• The answer is uncomfortable but clear: stop hedging, admit what you want, and burn the boats for it.

From my experience, the hardest part isn’t picking a door. Rather, it’s admitting which one you’ve wanted all along. Stop hedging. Once you stop pretending you need more time to “figure it out,” the choice becomes obvious. Burn the boats. At least then you’ll get closure on much of your uncertainty.

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This isn’t an argument against interdisciplinary work. If you want to do computational biology, do computational biology. The point is you commit to that as your path, not try to separately maximize being “the best biologist” AND “the best programmer.” Pick the intersection itself as your door and burn boats for it. Rest assured, though intersections exist between it and biology/tech, it’s still its own field with a separate skillset.↩ 1.

This led to reductive takes – “biology is rote memorization,” “physics is too theoretical” – that I knew weren’t fair even as I thought them. But fairness wasn’t the point. It’s about honesty about how I ACTUALLY view the world, even if its through an imperfect lens. Realizing this view has been the first step to improving it, and my love for biology and chemistry continues to be rekindled from time to time by people like Abhi.↩ 1.

Internet slang for adopting a fatalistic worldview. In my case, it was being convinced that starting late in tech meant I’d never catch up, so why bother trying.↩ 1.

Yes, some of them had engineer parents that influenced them one way or another given their proximity, but we’re all influenced by our environments, so although privileged, it doesn’t change my opinion.↩