I can still see the look on Maggie's face.

We were both applying to American grad schools, and she was flipping through my portfolio. She tried to be tactful, but the message was loud and clear: If you had ever seen anyone else's portfolio, you would know yours isn't good enough.

It felt a little condescending. But I also knew she was right.

The Dinosaur Age

I went straight to work the moment I graduated. Before graduation, I had already landed a job in Taipei, and my parents insisted that I start immediately, without missing a beat, "so we wouldn't let the employer down." So I had no break, no Gap Year, not even a summer vacation. (I did eventually get my Gap Year, but that was decades later. Another story.)

That was the dinosaur age. Getting online meant a dial-up modem with that screeching, static-filled handshake. There was no Google, no social media, and no online maps. For young people in Taiwan back then, the entire internet lived on BBS—a text-only bulletin board system that was essentially our early version of Reddit. I would browse BBS to read internet stories to pass the time, or lurk on the beauty and fashion board to figure out where to shop and get my hair cut.

Without digital maps, I explored the capital by clinging strictly to the MRT lines so I wouldn't get lost. My radius was tiny.

Back then, I knew nothing about how adult life worked. I lived with my aunt, my mother's younger sister, so I didn't have to pay rent. Naturally, I assumed every cent of my paycheck was fun money. I shopped like crazy, buying whatever caught my eye, completely unaware that people were supposed to save money—or that earning an income meant paying taxes. When that first tax notice landed in the mailbox, my jaw hit the floor. I had a full-time job and a paycheck, but looking back now, I was still very much a kid.

My colleagues at the firm were mostly Taipei locals with their own established lives. We grabbed dinner occasionally, but they weren't the kind of people looking to reinvent their weekends. Slowly, the boredom set in. A quiet, stubborn feeling that life had to be more than this loop between an office and a train platform.

Ambition as a Shield

I was a kid from the south of Taiwan. I had zero "global perspective." The thought of living abroad had never once crossed my mind.

Then I heard through the grapevine that a few college classmates had gone to the US for graduate school.

My gut kicked in: I'm going too.

I told my parents, and they loved the idea. Classic Asian parents who measured a good child by academic achievement. They ran a small retail shop in Pingtung, and my mom had always carried this quiet, defensive chip on her shoulder—convinced that people looked down on small shopkeepers and assumed their kids could never achieve academic success. I knew that the moment I said "graduate school in America," they would back me unconditionally, even if it meant taking out a hefty bank loan.

To the outside world, I suddenly looked like the poster child for ambition—what we call shàng jìn in Taiwan: the disciplined daughter grinding at work by day, determined to study abroad and break into international firms.

Except none of it was a plan.

I didn't have a plan. Not because I was against planning, but because the concept simply didn't exist in my world. Growing up in Pingtung, nobody around me had mapped out an academic path, and nobody had ever taught me how to build one.

Later on, people would constantly preach about having a 'vision,' a 'purpose,' or a 'goal'—demanding that I have one, without anyone ever explaining how. To this day, those words still feel completely abstract to me. I still don't really know what they mean, or how anyone actually lives by them.

So, the unvarnished truth? I. was. just. so. bored.

I wanted to know what else life had in store. It was pure gut instinct: I just wanted to see what happened if I lived somewhere else.

Of course, I couldn't say that out loud to anyone. If my mom knew the real reason, she would have had a fit. So I raised the shield of "ambition" to protect myself. Years later, whenever executives in high-rise conference rooms asked for my five-year plan, it was the exact same shield I held up.

And the truth I couldn't say back then? I'm telling you now.

Not a Portfolio, a Company Brochure

Getting ready took two full years. I worked full-time by day, then spent my evenings in test-prep classes grinding through the TOEFL and the GRE. Then came the portfolio, and the nightmare of American application paperwork.

I was completely out of my depth. But on the BBS study-abroad board, people talked about hiring an agency—counselors who would hold your hand and help you navigate the bureaucracy. For a non-native English speaker, those dense, legalistic application forms were terrifying. So I hired one.

Naturally, I applied to the Ivy League schools. If you don't know the landscape, you just reach for the brand names everyone talks about.

My manager at the design firm offered a grounded piece of advice. He had studied at a university in Denver, and he told me: "Pick a school you can actually afford. I had a friend who went to Harvard, and the tuition ate up every penny he had. He couldn't afford to do anything else." So, on his recommendation, I added the school in Denver as my safety.

And then came Maggie.

Maggie was from Taipei, brilliant, and had gone to the top elite girls' high school in Taipei. For whatever reason, she had landed at the same university as me—a mid-ranked private university, and not in Taipei either. (In Taiwan, the most prestigious universities are all public, while private schools sit in the middle of the pack.)

When Maggie flipped through my portfolio, she saw immediately what I couldn't.

My portfolio was filled entirely with projects I had worked on at my firm. In reality, it was just a corporate project brochure. It had nothing to do with my own creative vision or design philosophy. But I didn't know any better. To be honest, maybe I didn't actually have much creativity back then anyway. Worse, having never seen anyone else's portfolio in my life, I didn't even know how to fake it, let alone give my work an upgrade. In the dial-up era, before Pinterest, Behance, or high-speed internet, there was virtually nothing to reference.

I had no idea what a good portfolio looked like. What I submitted was essentially an office punch-card log.

The Only One That Took Me

Maggie was accepted into Carnegie Mellon, one of the best design schools in America.

Me? A clean sweep of rejections from every Ivy League school I applied to. Only one envelope came back with good news: the school in Denver.

My safety school became my only school.

So, I packed my bags and went. I don't plan life—I prefer to go where the wind blows. And this time, it blew me all the way to Denver.

As it turned out, Denver was wonderful. But that's a story for the next post.