I’m writing about the experience here (link to post #1, #2, #3, #4).

I’m having a quarter-life crisis.

For a lot of people, it shows up in hilariously predictable ways. A trip to Asia. Running a marathon. Applying to grad school. Becoming a DJ.

By most definitions, I’m a posterchild for the quarter-life crisis: I ran an ultramarathon in Argentina in 2023. I quit my consulting job at Bain to go to grad school in China. I’ve Googled “beginner DJ equipment” more times than I’d like to admit, and I’ve dropped “You know John Summit used to work at Big 4?” in conversation with women — which tells you everything you need to know about where I’m at. And to top it off, I just completed a six-week solo backpacking trip through Southeast Asia.

Halfway through the Schwarzman program, we have winter break. The 144 scholars scattered across the globe, from Beijing to Beirut, Sydney to Shanghai. I had the savings from work, and I finally had the time to go on the solo backpacking trip I’ve thought about since undergrad, but held off on for years.

I booked a one-way flight to Bangkok and wrote a few half-baked ideas into a Google Sheet — which is a generous description of what was really a series of destination names held together by optimism and a Banana Pancake Trail Reddit thread. Thailand, Laos, Vietnam. Forty-one days.

What happened

Thailand

I landed in Bangkok late at night after a four-hour flight from Beijing. I did the tourist checklist — Wat Pho, Wat Arun, Grand Palace, a half-day trip to the Railway Market and Floating Market — while adjusting to living out of a suitcase and sleeping in hostels. The best discovery was Aether, a rooftop cocktail bar I stumbled into on my last night. It turned out to be one of the coolest spots of the entire trip.

I flew south to Krabi and took a longboat into Railay — a beach enclosed by limestone cliffs on three sides, with no roads and no cars and only accessible by boat.

On the southern end of the island sits Rayavadee, a luxury resort that looked straight from a White Lotus episode. Rooms start at around $2,000 a night. My hotel was $220 and maybe 60% as nice. Every morning for four days, I snuck through the entrance of Rayavadee to run around the grounds — past the pool area, down the beach path, through the gardens. I just acted like I belonged, and apparently that was sufficient. Running those paths at 7am with the limestone cliffs catching the early light, the whole place nearly empty, was bliss.

Most afternoons after lounging by the pool, I'd walk through the jungle to Phra Nang beach — a cove at the far end of the island — to watch the sunset. I spent time there with Willem (Netherlands), Karina (Germany), and Sam (UK), other backpackers I met on NomadTable. On my last day I went on a boat tour of Four Islands, which was beautiful, but honestly none of the islands were quite as nice as Railay.

I then headed north to Chiang Mai. My favorite day of the trip happened here, and it was one of the cheapest. I rented a motorbike for a day and rode around the city without much of a plan: a Bib Gourmand lunch (pork curry and khao soi at Huen Muan Jan), a contrast therapy spa with a great aesthetic and a pool, a coffee shop called No. 39 with a live DJ in the afternoon, a botanical garden with dozens of trees native to northern Thailand. I walked through the Chiang Mai night market at dusk and got mango sticky rice for dinner. The whole day cost $50, and it was more fun than days that cost five times as much. That pattern kept repeating throughout the trip.

I did a day trip to an elephant sanctuary — bamboo rafting, feeding the elephants, bathing in the mud with them, and visits to local villages to see traditional fabric weaving. I also did a day trip to Doi Inthanon, and hiked to the highest point in Thailand.

From Chiang Mai I took a bus to Pai, a small, slow mountain town about three hours northwest and a popular spot on the backpacking circuit. Pai is the kind of place backpackers find for two days and end up staying in for two weeks. I was there for five days and didn't want to leave.

I rented a motorbike and spent a day riding through the surrounding countryside — Chinese Village, Yun Lai Viewpoint, Bamboo Bridge, Pai Canyon. I did tipsy tubing with Neil (Canada) from my hostel (essentially a daytime rave / float trip combo with 400+ other backpackers), which was fun until we both drank a little too much and made the wise decision to skip the third stop and go home to nap. I had a sunset dinner up on a hill overlooking the town.

But the thing I didn't expect about Pai was that it turned out to be the most productive stretch of the trip. A coffee shop on the river became my workspace for a few afternoons, and I made more progress an upcoming TEDx talk I'd been putting off for weeks. There's something about a place that asks nothing of you that paradoxically makes it easier to produce something. I noticed this pattern in other slow towns too — Luang Prabang, Danang.

Laos

I flew to Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage city on the Mekong River, and had a Korean BBQ dinner to celebrate my 27th birthday (KBBQ is a new-ish birthday tradition of mine). Turning 27 alone in a foreign country sounds like it should be emotionally loaded, but honestly, the birthdays are starting to blend together.

Luang Prabang is quieter and slower than anywhere I had been yet. I hiked Phousi Hill for views over the city and the Mekong. I joined a monastery tour to learn about the daily life of Buddhist monks. I attended Garavek Storytelling, a traditional performance space where local storytellers and musicians share Lao folklore. I met another solo backpacker named Hannah (UK) sitting next to me at Garavek, and we joined a few other backpackers from NYC for dinner, drinks, and bowling.

The highlight was a day trip to Kuang Si Waterfall: a boat along the Mekong to the national park, a hike through the jungle, an afternoon at the falls, a stop at a rice farm to learn the harvesting process and make fresh sugarcane juice, and a sunset boat ride back.

I also visited the UXO Visitor's Center, which documents America’s cluster bombing during the Vietnam War. The US dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos — more than was dropped on all of Europe during World War II. Laos became the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. An estimated 30% of those bombs didn't detonate, and they're still killing and maiming people today. The center is run by the organization doing the slow, dangerous work of clearing them.

I ran into another Schwarzman Scholar at a random bar in town! I knew many in the cohort would be travelling through southeast Asia, but I wasn’t expecting to run into anyone in Laos. The world is small.

I went on an overnight trip north to Nong Khiaw, a small mountain town about five hours from Luang Prabang. The drive was rough — narrow roads, potholes, tiny villages. Once we arrived, we took a slow boat down the river and hiked up a mountain to a campsite. There were about thirty of us, mostly British and Dutch.

The next morning we all woke up at 6am and walked to the edge of the campsite. Overnight, radiation fog pools into the valley below until everything turns white — just the river threading through breaks in the cover. I sat there for a while. No phone — there was no reception up there. It was one of those moments where you stop thinking about everything else and just sit, something I don’t do enough of.

Vietnam

I flew to Hanoi and checked into a hostel in the Old Quarter. I went for a morning run around Hoan Kiem Lake, visited Ngoc Son Temple on a small island in the lake, and walked through nearby temples. In the afternoon I joined a street food tour through the Old Quarter with a father and son from Wisconsin. The tour ended at Train Street, where a train passes through a narrow corridor of bars and restaurants every few hours.

I asked the tour guide if she wanted to get drinks that weekend. And this is one of the few moments on the trip where I deliberately challenged myself in a way that had nothing to do with logistics or sightseeing.

For context, I spend a lot of time in my own head. I default to over-analyzing situations. And I’ve struggled since college with a worsening social anxiety that I’m not sure most people who know me would guess — it looks like high inhibitions, less risk-taking, and an analysis paralysis in social situations that makes it harder to just be a dude in his twenties having fun and talking to someone he thinks is attractive. The irony is that I think becoming analytically sharper in my career has made me worse at this. I’ve become more precise in my thinking and less spontaneous in my living.

So when I met our tour guide and thought she was cute, I made a decision I don't make often enough: I just asked. She was pretty, and I knew I'd never see her again, which paradoxically made it easier. We went to a rooftop bar and walked around beer street for a while. We talked about our lives, what we wanted to do, about travel. Nothing insanely romantic. But I made a friend, had a great night, and built a little bit of confidence in myself.

I visited Hoa Lo Prison, which documents the imprisonment of Vietnamese revolutionaries under French colonial rule and the detention of American pilots during the Vietnam War. It's not a comfortable visit. The Vietnam War killed somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 million Vietnamese people, the vast majority civilians.

If you're going to spend time in a country severely harmed by colonialism or war, especially as someone from the West, you owe it to yourself to spend some time educating yourself on it as part of the trip. I spent that evening watching Hearts and Minds (1974), the Oscar-winning documentary released slightly before the war ended. I’d recommend it to anyone going to Vietnam.

What I found genuinely moving was how little resentment I encountered from Vietnamese people. Fifty years after one of the most brutal conflicts in modern history, Americans and Vietnamese can share a meal and laugh at the same things.

After Hanoi, I took an overnight bus north to embark on the Ha Giang Loop. Nearly every backpacker says Ha Giang was the highlight of their trip — I didn’t believe them, and was gladly proven wrong!

Ha Giang is a mountainous province in the far north of Vietnam, a UNESCO Geopark bordering China. It’s one of the most diverse places in the world, home to numerous ethnic minority communities including the Hmong, Tay, and Dao peoples. The loop is a four-day motorbike circuit through the mountains — narrow winding roads, massive drops on both sides, and views that stack endlessly in every direction.

I went with a group of twelve backpackers from Sweden, Scotland, Spain, the UK, Germany, and Chile. We rode through rural villages, stopped at waterfalls and viewpoints, rode a bamboo raft through a cave, and stayed at homestays each night — shared tables, a lot of happy water (local rice wine), and karaoke late into the night.

The landscape is spectacular, but what was most impactful was the people. On the last day of the loop, we rode through several villages celebrating Lunar New Year. Families had their front doors open. Kids were playing outside. Home life was spilling out into the street in a way that filled the dirt roads with warmth and energy. Little kids would see us riding by and wave — excitedly, instinctively, the way kids wave at anyone. One girl was wearing a Moo Deng shirt. Another had an Italian Brainrot character on hers. We stopped for a few minutes and played with a group of them.

It's one of those moments that ends up mattering more than the bigger, more photogenic ones. Strip away enough layers — nationality, language, politics, economics — and most people are just trying to build a decent life for the people they love. Kids haven't been fully socialized into their cultural contexts yet. They don’t know what separates you from them. They just wave.

I spent two days in Ninh Binh — biking through the countryside, hiking to Mua Cave Viewpoint with its views of the entire valley, a boat ride through Tam Coc winding between rice paddies and limestone formations. I then went on an overnight cruise through Ha Long Bay — kayaking between limestone islands, hiking to the top of Ti Top island at dawn.

For the final stretch, I flew to Danang, a beach town in central Vietnam and a much more chill vibe than Hanoi. It was the right note to end on. I went for morning runs on the beach, ate bánh mì at Bành Mì Phượng, spent afternoons reading, and on my last full day rented a motorbike and drove the Hai Van Pass — a mountain road with ocean on both sides that ends at a small fishing town. I stopped for coconut coffee at the summit.

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Reflections

Travel humanizes the world in a way that nothing else does.

There’s a version of a Southeast Asia backpacking trip that’s essentially an extended exercise in extracting value from a place: favorable exchange rates, cheap labor, beautiful scenery, all the fun with none of the weight. I don’t think that’s inherently wrong. But if you spend time in countries with complicated histories — especially as a Westerner — it’s worth engaging with those histories rather than just passing through them.

Wherever I went, kids were just kids, playing in the street or wading in a creek. Families were families. The abstractions that politics and media build around other countries — the threat narratives, the caricatures, the talking points — dissolve pretty quickly when you go to these places. You realize everyone is human, everyone has hopes and dreams, and everyone just wants to build a better life for themselves and their families. The world would look very different if more people actually visited the places they form opinions about from a distance.

We live in a bubble, and most of us don’t realize how small it is.

I don’t have any close friends who didn’t go to college. I’m sure many of my friends are in the same boat, and it’s an uncomfortable fact. Most of my social world is Americans — largely from the coasts — who went to good schools and now work in medicine, law, consulting, finance, or tech. That’s an extraordinarily narrow, incredibly privileged slice of humanity. Spending six weeks in countries where most people are living lives that look nothing like mine made me much more grateful for what I have. It showed there are many ways to live a fulfilling life, and the version I’ve been optimizing for is just one of them.

I am unfortunately too old to backpack — and I have too much money.

Let me be honest about both of those things separately.

The age thing first. I’m 27, which objectively is not old. But I’ve spent the last four years working long hours in consulting and then Hollywood, tracking how I sleep, managing a fitness routine, watching what I eat. My hairline is receding. I have back problems now. And then I showed up to hostels where someone had food poisoning in the next bed over and two guys walked in at 2am, turned the lights on, and started having a full conversation at full volume. You stop being able to run on adrenaline and vibes at some point. That point, for me, has arrived.

The money thing is more uncomfortable to admit. I came into this trip with savings from three years of working, and somewhere in the last year or two I quietly became someone who has opinions about hotel quality. I used to be indifferent to that stuff. I’m not anymore. I found myself doing cost-benefit calculations throughout the trip — a few more dollars for the room with the king bed, the convenient flight time instead of the cheap one — and almost always landing on the nicer option without much internal debate. I came home knowing that my backpacking days are unfortunately behind me.

The people on these trips probably shouldn’t be, and the people who should be aren’t.

Seneca wrote a letter called “On Travel as a Cure for Discontent.” In it, he quotes Socrates: “Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels.”

Most of the people I met backpacking were using travel to avoid committing to something: a career, a direction, a place, a version of themselves. You can tell within about forty-eight hours whether someone is traveling to see something or traveling to avoid something. A six-month trip that is really a long avoidance of commitment is not particularly transformative. You can cross borders without crossing any internal thresholds. The reason that set you wandering is ever at your heels.

The people who would actually get the most out of a trip like this — ambitious twenty-somethings early in their careers, who are a little burnt out and maybe a little lost. The actual cost of taking a few weeks off to decompress and reflect is much lower than they perceive. They're heads down at the bank, in the school, at the startup. Too afraid that a few months away means stepping off the ladder and maybe falling behind. I get it. I almost wasn't here either — I chose to study for the GMAT instead of doing this trip in college.

I don’t properly appreciate my freedom and independence.

When you’re single in your mid-to-pushing-late-twenties and most of your friends are settling down, it’s easy to fixate on what they have that you don’t. I’ve struggled with loneliness and worry I may never meet that special person. The benefits of a serious relationship are visible, but the costs are not.

What I’ve come to appreciate more clearly is that the freedom to follow through on unconventional bets is an advantage I’ve been taking for granted. Moving from Atlanta to LA for a new job in Hollywood, leaving Bain to move to China, spending six weeks solo through Southeast Asia — none of these opportunities would’ve been easy to pursue in a relationship.

It stings to feel like I’m doing well in my career, my finances, my health — and other people are doing all the same things just as well and they have a partner. That’s a whole dimension of life that’s basically nonexistent for me right now. But this trip helped me see more clearly that the freedom I have is something I genuinely value and am actively using, not just a void I’m waiting to fill. I should appreciate my independence while I have it.

Travel produces growth — but only up to a point, and only if you have something to return to.

There’s a reason the periods of life with the most growth are not the most comfortable. Discomfort is a precondition for growth.

This trip was in that same vein. Solo travel forces you to make decisions without a safety net, navigate friction without anyone to offload it to, and be present in a way that’s easy to avoid when you’re surrounded by routines and familiar people. I deleted all social media during the trip. There’s genuine developmental value in solo travel. There’s also genuine loneliness in it, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

But there’s a ceiling. The psychologist John Bowlby once said that “Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base” — and the key word is from. The exploration and the return are two halves of the same cycle. David Brooks, who draws on Bowlby often, puts it this way: people with a secure base are more free to take risks and explore the possibilities of their world. The base isn’t a limitation on the exploration. It’s what makes the exploration possible and meaningful in the first place.

The benefits of travel don’t scale linearly. They’re logarithmic. After two weeks, cities start to blend together. After four weeks, the days compress.

The people I met who’d been on the road for six months weren’t accumulating more growth — they’d decoupled the exploration from the base entirely, and without the contrast, both sides lose their charge.

And at some point, the thing that restores the aliveness isn’t another destination. It’s going home.

Forty-one days later, I’m back in Schwarzman College for the last few months of the program. I came back a little more grateful, a little sunburnt, and with a clearer sense of what I actually want — which turns out to be less exotic than I expected. A city to build a life in. A company I can build a career at. A life partner. And people I don’t have to hold loosely because I know an expiration date is coming.

Did I “find myself”? I don’t know. But I stopped looking quite so hard, and that might be the same thing.

Advice for backpacking southeast Asia

• Track your spending, and there’s a weak correlation between the price and quality of travel experiences. I logged what I spent every day. I averaged about $150 a day and ~$6,300 for the full trip. The lowest day was $60 and the highest was $350. Some of my cheapest days were my favorites: the motorbike day in Chiang Mai, the sunrise in Nong Khiaw. Some of my most expensive days were just fine. There's almost no correlation between money spent and quality of experience, and recognizing that helps you make better decisions in the moment.

• Build in time to reflect and decompress. Normal trips are go-go-go because you’re limited on time. You load the itinerary up and typically have plans from sun up to sundown. Backpacking rewards endurance over speed. I found I needed ~1 lazy day each week and a few evenings in my hotel room to keep me going the full 41 days.

• Travel is a learned skill. Figuring out your preferred style — solo vs. group, slow vs. fast, hostel vs. hotel — is the most important part of developing it. My advice is to figure it out before you go. The people who have the best trips are the ones who’ve done enough self-reflection to know what they actually enjoy, not what they think they’re supposed to enjoy.

• Book transport and lodging in advance, but keep everything refundable. I got burned in both directions — booking too far in advance on non-refundable accommodation meant penalties when plans changed, booking too late meant higher prices and fewer options.

• Don’t book the return flight for an open-ended trip… I’m an idiot for this one. I booked a nonrefundable return flight assuming I would fly out of Pnom Penh on 2/28. I ended up flying out of Danang on 2/26. Trips this long are open ended — keep them open.

• Be spontaneous, but not reckless. The best experiences on this trip were things I couldn't have planned — the random riverside Bib Gourmand spot, the Bangkok rooftop bar, the random conversation that turned into a drink that turned into a good evening. Leave room for those things to happen. But book the flights and the beds in advance, or the unplanned parts become logistical nightmares.

• Travel-size bottles are designed for about two weeks. I found this out the hard way. By the end of the trip I was out of toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, and hair product. I also lost two credit cards, a retainer, and a scarf. Pack more than you think you need.

• Airalo might not actually be that good for eSIMs? I normally buy eSIMs from Airalo purely out of name recognition and convenience, but I did a comparison with Trip.com after finding out they also sell eSIMs and found Trip.com was 50% cheaper and had 5x more data.

I’m writing about the experience here (link to post #1, #2, #3).

What happened

Module 2 had a different energy than module 1. The novelty of living in China and being at Tsinghua had started to wear off, and I slowly settled into new routines. Travel seriously picked up. I’ve been on eight trips and counting, and we're not even halfway through the year.

Between modules 1 and 2, the cohort split into small groups and went on Deep Dive, a week-long trip to different regions of China. I went with nine others to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province and one of the most culturally rich cities in China. We taught undergraduate students at a local university, ate hot pot for the first time (the broth so aggressively spiced it felt like I was in an episode of Hot Ones), watched Sichuan opera, visited the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, drank tea at local teahouses, and hiked Mount Qingcheng (青城山), a sacred Taoist mountain draped in fog.

I took four classes in module 2:

• Institutional & Social Transformation in Contemporary China (we had this class in both module 1 & 2)

• Geoeconomics (a term for the use of economic instruments as tools of statecraft)

• Critical History of Globalization

• Business Ethics

I also started working on my Capstone (essentially a Master’s thesis), which will be a comparative case study of how entertainment companies in the U.S. and China are leveraging AI in content production.

I went on a weekend trip to Xi’an with Austin (a gov’t and civic leader from the U.S. and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Mahir (a startup operator from Canada), Galen (an aerospace engineer from the U.S.), Shaun (an ESG consultant from Macau), Jason (a doctor from Germany), and Michael (a climate activist from Austria).

Xi’an is the capital of Shaanxi province and home to what I'd argue is the best regional cuisine in China. We took a cable car to the top of Huashan mountain, ate roujiamou (肉夹馍) and biangbiang noodles (𰻝𰻝面), biked the perimeter of the ancient city wall, and visited the Big Wild Goose Pagoda.

One of the academic highlights this module was a series of evening lectures from Karl Eikenberry, retired three-star general and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and one of Schwarzman's most distinguished faculty members. He lectured on the current situation in Afghanistan, the history of the Silk Road, the organizational structure of NATO, and Saudi Arabia's economic transformation. I’m excited to take his course in module 3, Leadership in Diplomacy and Security — the lineup of guest speakers is insane.

I went on visits to Zhongguancun (China’s Silicon Valley) and Zhen Fund (a prominent early-stage Chinese VC). I’ve learned a lot about the startup ecosystem and the capital markets in the U.S. and China, and it’s interesting to see where the two countries diverge. The most important distinction is that innovation in China is much more state-directed because the state is the largest capital allocator (however, private markets and competition are very real forces in China’s economy, meanwhile, most Americans still talk about China like it’s a planned economy).

As I’ve said in previous posts, the diversity of Schwarzman Scholars is truly astonishing. The diversity reveals itself in unexpected ways, and one of the best is through Steve's Briefs. It’s a student-led speaker series where scholars present on topics of their choosing. I listened to talks from Joon (a software engineer from Korea) on digital privacy, Fei (a doctor from Singapore) on Singapore’s unique healthcare system, Cowiya (a VC investor from the U.S.) on the history and origin of afrobeat music, and Matthew (a business leader from Hong Kong) on his experience working as a management trainee at a major Chinese SOE.

I attended a day-long workshop hosted by the head of our career services department based on Stanford’s Design Your Life Course. I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking through my career and future plans after Schwarzman, and while this workshop didn’t really change my outlook, it was a helpful exercise in further crystallizing those plans (The TL;DR is strategy & ops in the media and entertainment industry, either at a YouTube / Netflix / Disney etc. or a startup — if you work in entertainment, let’s connect!).

There was another open mic in module 2! Instead of doing stand-up this time, I wanted to push myself to try something new. So I wrote a spoken word poem (you can read it here, and if you do, I’d love to hear what you think).

Several guys in the cohort including myself, Bat (a nonprofit leader from Mongolia), Issa (an aspiring surgeon and former D1 soccer player from the U.S.), Phillip (a climate activist from Austria), Emmanuel (an urban planner and investor from Uganda), Nas (a Harvard M.D. candidate from the U.S.), Leon (a journalist from the U.S.), and Prince (an aspiring M.D. candidate from the U.S.) continued an initiative started by a Cohort 9 scholar called the Barbershop.

The concept was to create a space for men to connect and have meaningful conversations about topics that aren’t often discussed, such as mental health, relationships, and positive masculinity. At first, I was worried about the optics (or even the interest) in creating a support group specifically for men, but the response so far has been overwhelmingly positive. So many men, even highly successful men, are in need of spaces like this where they can find connection and community. I’m excited to host a book discussion later this month with UGA’s Foundation Fellowship on Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man.

I’m interested in exploring ways to expand the Barbershop concept and promote men’s mental health — if you have any ideas, or the initiative resonates with you, let me know!

Schwarzman has an industry mentor program that pairs each scholar with a leader in their respective field. My mentor is Jane Shao, the President and co-founder of a major Chinese theatrical exhibitor, Lumiere Pavilions. She invited me and a few others to see Avatar: Fire and Ash in IMAX 3D. I had no idea IMAX 3D was even a format, and apparently it’s James Cameron’s preferred format to see the film. It was incredible.

Several others in the cohort are movie buffs, and we started a groupchat to organize film screenings in the college. We watched Stranger Things S5, One Battle After Another, Nosferatu, Frankenstein, Nomadland, and Knives Out. I was able to see 56 films in total in 2025 (including 15 Oscar Best Picture nominees), and hope to do the same (or better) in 2026. I’m on Letterboxd @garrettwilliams if you want to follow along.

Nicole (a fiscal policy leader from Panama) and Matthew (a business leader from Hong Kong) organized a weekend trip to Shenzhen (the manufacturing and tech capital of China). We visited WeBank (fintech platform), Insta360 (camera/drone company), a hedge fund, and an apparel startup. I loved the city! It feels like a blend of SF, Honolulu, and Miami. It’s also close to Hong Kong and Guangzhou. The nighttime light show is unreal. You can watch a clip of it here.

Yilin (a consultant from China) organized a ski trip in Chongli, a small ski town about a 2-hour train ride from Beijing. I hadn’t been skiing in over 10 years, but I picked it back up quickly and was able to ski a few black routes with Phillip. The conditions weren’t exactly Vail, but it was less than a third the price of skiing in the U.S.

The holidays arrived and, with them, a wave of homesickness I hadn't fully anticipated. Thanksgiving made me miss my grandmother's cooking. Christmas made me miss my family and our quirky traditions like eating at Waffle House on Christmas Eve.

For New Year’s, a big group of us went to Hong Kong. Shaun (an ESG consultant from Macau) organized a boat for the countdown and fireworks show, but unfortunately the fireworks were canceled due to the apartment building fire that occurred a few weeks prior. I visited Lantau island, went hiking, ate dim sum, visited art galleries, and tried a Michelin star restaurant with Lex (a journalist from the U.S.).

I went to a lunch hosted by several industry mentors in the private sector. We watched the chef demonstrate how shaomai (烧麦), a type of dumpling, is made.

In my Geoeconomics class, I co-authored a case study about the Chinese automaker BYD, which we presented to a panel of professors and ex-consultants. We had the opportunity to develop the case further to be published by Tsinghua SEM or Harvard Business School, but I decided to prioritize other projects in the spring (to be shared soon!)

We capped off module 2 with the annual Winter Gala. A group of scholars formed a band called Dora and the Explorers (since the lead singer’s name is Dora), and we listened to the band play a few songs, plus performances from other members of the cohort.

Some of the guest speakers in module 2 included:

• Tara VanDerveer, the most successful women’s basketball coach of all time

• Cui Tiankai, former Ambassador of China to the United States

• Long Yongtu, chief negotiator for China's accession to the WTO

• William Rosoff, former General Counsel of RJR-Nabisco

• David Li, founding Dean of Schwarzman College

• Michael Hart, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in China (AmCham)

• Jim Kralik, founder of Linden Street Capital

I don’t have an elegant place to slot these photos in, but here are some pics of the college. It’s weird to spend so much time in one building, but it’s a beautiful building to spend time in.

Reflections

I’m always in motion — and it has cost me.

I wrote a poem this module (the same one I mentioned earlier) about a pattern I've been living for years. The short version: I've built my life around movement — optimizing, chasing, leaving. It has served me. But it comes with a cost I hadn’t fully grappled with until recently.

Looking back, I've been in motion for almost a decade. Kansas City → Athens → Atlanta → Los Angeles → back to Atlanta → Beijing → probably LA or SF. Six moves in eight years. And through every chapter, I've had a version of the same experience: eager to be at the next place before I've finished being where I am. At UGA, I was already mentally in Atlanta. At Bain, I was already dreaming about going on externship in LA. On the externship, I was counting down the days to China.

I wrote in the poem that "there's alienation in self-actualization. In your becoming, there's an othering — from prior communities and prior selves." What I meant is that the relentless pursuit of the next thing is, among other effects, a slow erosion of depth. You can't build real relationships with people you're already mentally leaving. You can't fully inhabit a place you're already preparing to depart.

This is the thing Schwarzman has held up to me like a mirror. I haven't found my people here yet the way I hoped I would. That's partly the program, partly circumstance — but honestly, it's also partly me. I invest in contexts. I'm less practiced at investing in people for their own sake, uncoupled from what a shared environment provides.

I don't have a clean resolution to this. But recognition is the first step toward change. I hope the next chapter is longer — a city I can stay in, a company I can grow with, relationships I don't have to hold loosely because I know an expiration date is coming.

I don’t like group travel as much as I thought.

This module disabused me of a romantic notion I’d carried about group travel. The reality: everything takes longer. More waiting, more compromise, more collective decision-making on things that don’t really require consensus.

I still went on group trips and don’t regret them. But I’ve come to accept something about myself — I like being around people, but I don’t love moving through the world in large packs. I want to experience the place I’m traveling to, at the speed I want to, and the people I’m traveling with can sometimes take away from the depth and the richness of that experience.

I’ll still go on group trips, but I’m planning more solo trips for the spring, including six weeks of backpacking solo through Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam during winter break.

Building social capital feels unproductive in the moment because the returns aren’t immediately realized.

Building capital in any area of your life — whether it’s human capital, social capital, or cultural capital — is a function of upfront investment and time.

Returns on human capital are more immediate and can be easily quantified through grades, standardized tests, performance reviews, or job promotions. It’s all about directly translating knowledge into better output / performance.

Social capital is strange to invest in because the returns are delayed, indirect, and impossible to predict. Sometimes you put real time and energy into a connection that leads nowhere. Sometimes a conversation you almost skipped is a total unlock.

The best frame I’ve found is opportunity surface area — the idea that relationships don’t pay off in linear ways, but that expanding the surface area through which people and opportunities can find you increases the probability of something good happening. It’s part of why I started writing publicly. The newsletter and the LinkedIn posts have introduced me to people and conversations I never would have had otherwise.

I miss work.

Something unexpected: In a weird way, I miss consulting.

To be clear: there were tons of things I didn’t like about consulting, and I was ready to leave for greener pastures. But I miss the parts that gave my weeks shape. The pressure that clarifies. The sense of working alongside people on something with real stakes and real consequences. Graduate school is rich and strange and fortunate, but the learning is also detached from outcomes in a way that can make the work feel performative. You write the paper, you get the grade, you move on.

I've also noticed that I've lost some of the discipline I built at Bain. More control over my schedule means more opportunities to let standards slip — on sleep, on exercise, on output. Nobody is forcing a tight rhythm. And when nobody is forcing a tight rhythm, you discover the limits of your intrinsic motivation.

This has made me think harder about the kind of environment I want next. A startup — with its chaos and urgency and demand for execution over process — sounds more appealing than it did a year ago.

Structure and process matters, but not equally in every context.

New things sometimes don’t need structure because structure can kill experimentation. High agency people don’t need structure or process because they are more likely to be intrinsically motivated. In those contexts, what matters most is alignment on mission/vision and intended outcomes, and then being flexible on process.

I learned a version of this running a student-run VC at UGA, and I’m seeing it again at Schwarzman. It’s informing how I want to manage teams going forward and has made me more excited about the idea of working at a startup, where execution matters much more than process.

There’s a U.S.-China perception gap.

Over 250,000 Chinese students study at American universities every year, about 1 in 4 of all international students in the United States. They learn our history, our political system, our values and contradictions, often in our own language. Many of them arrive with genuine curiosity and leave with a nuanced, if critical, understanding of how the U.S. works.

Meanwhile, fewer than 1,000 Americans are studying at Chinese universities. We largely don’t speak the language. Our understanding of China is filtered almost entirely through American media, which oscillates between techno-paranoia and geopolitical chest-thumping. Americans’ mental model of Chinese life is frozen somewhere around 1980 — a command economy, an authoritarian monolith, a place of poverty and repression. That model is decades out of date.

The asymmetry in understanding is dangerous. You cannot effectively compete with — or meaningfully engage with — a country you don’t understand. And the cost of that misunderstanding isn't just strategic; it's a contribution to the kind of hostility and ignorance that makes conflict more likely. Better American understanding of China is essential for navigating the most consequential geopolitical relationship of the century.

If an American visited China, they would find a beautiful country steeped in history, rich in culture, and filled with incredibly kind and gracious people that love their country, love their neighbors, work hard, and genuinely just want to make a better life for themselves and their kids. And if a critical mass of Americans visited China, I believe it would fundamentally alter U.S.-China relations for the better.

Everyone is embellishing, all the time.

I’ve been surprised by how common it is for people to stretch aspects of their professional background. This isn’t limited to Schwarzman, but it’s more common here. “Startup founder” sometimes means “a weekend project that links to an inactive domain” and “full-time experience” sometimes means “part-time internship”. This isn't unique to Schwarzman, but it's more visible here, where people are adept at selling themselves.

I'm still figuring out where the line sits between storytelling / personal branding and straight up dishonesty. But the prevalence of embellishment is making me more skeptical as a general matter — and, I hope, more rigorous about my own integrity in how I present myself.

It’s hard to know what will be worth your time until you go.

I've attended lectures that sounded unmissable and left feeling indifferent. I've dragged myself to events I almost skipped and walked out having had a conversation that made the whole week. The topic is almost never the determining factor.

I’ve come to think the main driver of a good event is rarely the topic. It’s often how engaging the speaker is. You need someone who (1) is genuinely passionate and knowledgeable, (2) can communicate clearly and compellingly, and (3) understands the audience they’re speaking to.

This sounds simple. But many accomplished people are bad at one or more of those three things. It’s interesting that professors are evaluated on research output but rarely evaluated on how effectively they communicate that research to the general public, or how well they teach.

Reflection is pretty great

Reflecting on my experience in this program — both the good and the bad — has helped me process it in real time. I’ve recognized some of the struggles I’ve been facing, and recognition is a prerequisite to taking action. I’ve gotten better at writing. And several people have reached out personally to tell me that they found my writing helpful.

Advice for future scholars

• Implement systems to periodically document and reflect on the experience. It can be private journaling or something public like this Substack, but build in some system for periodic reflection. The year moves fast, and it's easy to get swept up in the pace without ever stopping to process what's actually happening. The moments you don't capture are the ones you'll lose first.

• Cultivate spaces that encourage deep conversation. People here are willing to go deep — on politics, on identity, on the hardest questions — but those conversations don't happen accidentally. They require scheduling, a welcoming environment, and someone willing to facilitate. Some of the most meaningful discussions I had this year happened because someone took the initiative to cultivate them. A group of Latin American scholars organized a discussion in the pub on the history and ethics of U.S. regime change operations in the wake of recent news from Venezuela. Chandler, a U.S. Marine veteran in the cohort, organized a discussion for the American scholars to reflect on our experience living in China while watching the rules-based international order their country built slowly fracture. These important conversations don't happen spontaneously. They’re cultivated.

• Treat the program with respect. The future success of Schwarzman Scholars is contingent on the character of the people in it. Show up on time. Follow through on your commitments. You're receiving a $100K+ education for free, and for every person sitting in this building, there are 40+ who wanted to be here and weren't given the chance. Show some appreciation for the opportunity you’ve been given, recognize the expectations and obligations of that opportunity, show some humility, and don’t be so entitled.

• Give to the program and to your cohort. You were selected because you bring something specific and valuable — a background, a perspective, an identity, a talent. Find ways to share it. The scholars around you are genuinely eager to learn from each other, and the formats for doing so are everywhere if you look for them.

• You are not alone. You will have emotional highs and lows in this program. The highs are real, but so are the lows. The adjustment is hard. The overwhelm is normal. Whatever you're struggling with, someone in this cohort — or a former scholar — has been in a similar place. Talk to them. Let people in.

I’m writing about the experience here (link to post #1 and #2).

What happened

After we settled into the college and finished the two-week orientation, I just wanted to catch my breath. That two-week period was the most kinetic life experience I’ve ever had.

And then we started classes!

For context, the academic year at Schwarzman is organized into four roughly 8-week long modules. After orientation concluded, we started Module 1.

I took four classes in M1:

• Global Media & Entertainment Industries

• Contemporary & Social Transformation in Contemporary China

• History of Modern China (1911-2011)

• Beginner Chinese

Each day in the program looks different, but my typical weekday looked something like:

• 7:00-8:00am: Morning workout, either run or lift

• 8:00-9:00am: Breakfast in the Schwarzman College dining hall

• 9:00-10:00am: Coffee with another scholar in the cohort (I made a goal to have coffee / lunch 1-on-1 with 40 scholars by the end of the year, and have been scheduling most 1-on-1s during this time)

• 10:00-12:00pm: Class! On Mondays and Wednesdays, History of Modern China. On Tuesdays, typically a workshop about our Capstone projects or an all-cohort meeting. On Thursdays, I meet with my discussion group for Institutional & Social Transformation.

• 12:00-1:00pm: Lunch, typically in the Schwarzman dining hall

• 1:00-2:00pm: Chinese class! I was in the beginner class with 9 other scholars.

• 2:00-5:00pm: More class! On Mondays and Wednesdays, Media & Entertainment Industries. On Tuesdays, Institutional & Social Transformation. On Thursdays, I’m free during this time!

• 5:00-6:00pm: Dinner, typically in one of the Tsinghua dining halls (My favorite is Qingfeng, but I’ll talk more about dining halls later!)

• 6:00-8:00pm: Some kind of event, such as a guest speaker, panel, student-organized activity, or sport

• 8:00-11:30pm: Calls with friends/colleagues back in the U.S., homework, study, hang out in common rooms with other scholars

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The weekdays are packed. The workload is lighter than my experience working in consulting, but the social intensity, constant context-switching, and all the programming outside of regular classes make the program more draining than I expected. The saving grace: no class on Fridays, and I usually finish by mid-afternoon on Thursdays, which frees up long weekends for sightseeing in Beijing and travel around China.

It’s difficult to explain everything that happened in Module 1 in an elegant thematic or narrative structure, so here is a roughly chronological summary of everything that happened.

Sanjeev (a fellow ex-consultant from the U.S.) and I checked out a 24/7 spa — I had never heard of the concept before, and this was one of the weirdest experiences I’ve had in Beijing so far. To call it a “spa” is an understatement — imagine a spa open 24/7 that also has a full buffet, a kids playground, mahjong tables, kareoke rooms, an arcade room, a movie theater, and private rooms for sleeping and watching TV.

Vincent, a scholar from China and tea afficianado, organized a lunch outing and trip to the Beijing International Tea Expo.

I started exploring Beijing on my own. The city is very bike-friendly, so I’ve been going on bike rides and stopping to explore various hutongs in the city center.

Nina, a scholar from the U.S. and former Yenching Scholar at Peking University, organized a happy hour with the Yenching Scholars at an Egyptian-themed rooftop bar. It was such a cool bar!

Schwarzman competed in Tsinghua’s Graduate School Track & Field competition. I competed in the 1500m and the mixed relay race, and I got absolutely smoked. I’m hoping to run in the spring competition, and hopefully be in better shape (it would be great opportunity to try and PR in the mile).

Schwarzman organized a group trip to Lama Temple and Confucius Temple, where we learned about buddhism and China’s civil service examination system.

We had a week-long break for China’s Golden Week in the first week of October. Golden Week is one of China’s biggest holidays, as it celebrates the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

I went with a group of scholars — Fridah (a scholar from Kenya who was in my analyst class at Bain in Atlanta!), Leon (a journalist from the U.S.), Nasir (a Harvard Med M.D. candidate from the U.S.), and Tony (an urban planner from Australia) — to Mongolia!

We spent a few days in Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaaanbaatar. My favorite part was watching the Tumen Ekh Ensemble, which showcased traditional Mongolian fashion, music, and dance.

Bat, a nonprofit founder from Mongolia, then took us to Terelj National Park with a group of his friends, where we rode horses and ate traditional Mongolian food.

Tony and I capped off the trip with a 5-day trip through the Gobi desert, where we stayed in traditional ger camps, rode horses and camels, and climbed up the 1,000-foot Khongor Sand Dune.

I went on a solo weekend trip to Shanghai. I had lived in Shanghai for several months in 2019 to teach speech and debate at a startup, and it was interesting to see how the city had changed since COVID. Most striking was how much the air quality had improved in the last 6 years.

On weekends where I stayed in Beijing, I tried to knock a few major tourist sites off my list. I always hate living in a city for several years and then looking back at my time and being like “dang, I never did __ thing!”. Like when I lived in LA for 6 months and never went to the Hollywood Walk of Fame or the Griffith Park Observatory… which feels criminal in hindsight.

I was able to check out Temple of Heaven, Summer Palace, Tianenman Square, and the Olympic Park.

Roxanne, a startup founder from the U.K., organized a day trip to Tianjin for her birthday. Tianjin is a coastal city next to Beijing (only ~30 mins by high speed rail!) that has significant European influence.

A few scholars organized an open mic / talent show, and I performed standup comedy. One of my annual goals this year was to do standup, so it was great to knock this off my list. However, I told some not-so-PG-rated jokes to an audience that included several highly respected academics. I did make them laugh though!

It started getting cold in Beijing towards the end of the module, and I spent a lot of time working on final papers and projects for the classes I was taking. My favorite place in the college to study is the library, and it was fun towards the end of the module to see the library fill to the brim with activity. It reminded me of the communal stress (and frenetic energy) of studying for finals in undergrad, though thankfully less stressful.

Steve Schwarzman came to the college to give a talk, as well as a few other interesting guest speakers:

• Janet Yang, former President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AKA the Oscars)

• Djoomart Otorbaev, former Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan

• Achim Steiner, Administrator of the UN Development Program

• Eli Belotsercovsky, Israeli Ambassador to China

• Shih-Ching Tsou, indie film director and Sean Baker collaborator

• Pascal Lamy, former Director General of the WTO

• Daniel Rosen, Co-Founder of Rhodium Group

We also had a panel of Western political science and international affairs scholars discuss the U.S.–China power dynamic and the recent trend of democratic backsliding in the U.S.

Outside of classes, travel, and spending time with scholars, I prioritized making connections with people in the media & entertainment industry. I took interviewed for a few roles at TikTok, HBO Max, and a TMT private equity fund, which was a reassuring sign that I (might) have some skills that could be valuable enough for a company to hire me… (BTW — if you’re reading this and work in media & entertainment, let’s connect!)

Also, a quick word on the dining halls — this is honestly one of the best parts of being in China.

Tsinghua has a handful of dining halls around campus. Each one is MASSIVE and the food is amazing. They have hundreds of unique dishes covering every major region of Chinese cuisine. The largest dining hall, Zijingyuan (photo below), is 5 floors!

Reflections

Choices are infinite, but time allocation is zero-sum.

Schwarzman is overflowing with possibilities: classes, trips, guest speakers, language learning, clubs, social life, and recruiting. But time allocation is brutally zero-sum.

The biggest trade-off I had to make was to drop Chinese in future modules. Dropping Chinese was a painful decision, but it’ll let me reallocate time toward 1) travel, 2) the job search, and 3) exercise (which I’ve unfortunately let by the wayside in the last month).

You can’t do it all here. If you pretend you can, you just end up doing everything badly. You can maybe do 2-3 things well.

Unfortunately, humans are adaptable.

Maria, a scholar from Canada who went to a meditation retreat at a Buddhist monastery during the October break, shared a line that stuck with me: “Unfortunately, humans are adaptable.”

What she meant — and what I resonated with deeply in this program — is that even extraordinary environments normalize quickly. Within a few weeks, things that should feel once-in-a-lifetime (living in Beijing, being surrounded by a ridiculously interesting group of people, traveling to the middle of nowhere in the Gobi Desert) start to feel “normal.”

I’m not as eager and wide-eyed as I was at the beginning of the program. I feel fully acclimated to China, to the program, and to my new routines. I entered this program with so much adrenaline, and the orientation was truly such an incredibly experience, but that energy as subsided as I’ve fallen into new routines. I have to actively fight this feeling of normalcy.

Elite spaces are full of self-interested people.

People in spaces like Schwarzman are seeking status, signals, and brand. They are inherently self-interested.

I’ve come to learn that highly driven / talented people — whether people at Schwarzman, at Bain, in Hollywood, or at UGA — got to where they are in some part because they know how to prioritize their goals and desires.

You see it in small but telling ways. People flake on commitments or treat opportunities as disposable: no-showing company visits, guest speakers, and events, or cancelling plans last minute because something more interesting came up. Over time, that behavior strains relationships and can actively damage the reputation of the organizations they’re part of, to the detriment of others. Apparently this has been an issue in prior cohorts and has damaged Schwarzman’s relationship with a few companies / organizations.

All of this has made me more deliberate about where I put my time and energy. I’ve seen behavior in these spaces that I genuinely detest for being selfish, inconsiderate, or just plain rude. I do think you can be successful in life without emulating these behaviors. And I do think there are genuinely good people in these spaces, you just need to spend some time getting to know people and figuring that out.

Relationships are weird in transitional spaces.

When you know you’re only going to be in a place for a year, it changes how you show up. I felt this in LA when I was on a Bain externship for six months working at AGBO — dating and forming friendships was challenging because I knew I was going back to Atlanta. I’m feeling a version of that here too.

There’s a real question of depth: how much do you invest in people you might never see again? How much emotional energy do you put into building a life in a place that is, by design, temporary? I don’t have a clean answer yet. I just know that I’m hoping my next move is longer-term, and that I can finally plant my feet at a company and in a city for more than 2 to 3 years.

Graduate school can have a very different impact based on where you are in life.

I came in with a decent chunk of savings from consulting, 3 years of full-time work experience, and a relatively clear sense of what I wanted to do after the program. I feel somewhat grounded in who I am and what I want to do in life.

The flip side is that this doesn’t feel like the massive, transformational experience I originally saw the program as when I was in college. At 26, I’m less wide-open than I was at 21. That changes how impactful this experience will be how I see the world and what I want to do in the future.

It’s still a once-in-a-lifetime experience I’m incredibly lucky to be part of, but it feels more like a sabbatical than a gap year.

Living abroad means sacrificing some level of comfort, routine, and/or predictability.

Living in Beijing has been tough on my sleep, diet, and personal fitness routine, which sucks because I had made a ton of improvement to these in the years since college.

At Bain, I had a predictable workout schedule and fairly dialed diet. In China:

• Salads and raw vegetables are much less common.

• My sleep and workout schedule are constantly battling evening events and early morning / late-night calls with people in the U.S.

• I feel less in control of input/output, which bothers the part of me that likes tracking everything.

I don’t regret the trade-off, but it is a trade-off.

You need to balance planning and foresight with spontaneity.

I came in with a clear plan: travel a boatload, meet some interesting people, broaden my perspective, and recruit into strategy roles in the media & entertainment industry. At the same time, some of the best moments so far have been unplanned.

I’m still trying to find the balance between rigid planning (my default) and leaving space for serendipity, particularly in a place as chaotic and interesting as Schwarzman.

Even for just-in-time hiring, the job search process starts long before.

Naively, I thought that since most roles I’m interested in hire just-in-time, I could set career stuff aside until March or April of 2026.

The reality is that I have to be doing it now. Networking calls, early interviews, keeping warm relationships, monitoring openings — all of that takes real time and mental energy.

Compared to consulting recruiting, this process feels messier, slower, and more uncertain. There’s no defined pipeline for these roles. Success is going to be a function of my network and just hoping that the teams I’m interested in have openings next summer.

I was expecting to struggle in this program, and I am. And that’s good!

I expected this program to challenge me, but I wasn’t sure exactly how. I now know the most challenging aspect (at least for me) has been the social aspect.

Socially, I don’t feel like I’ve found “my people” here or have formed many close friendships, which has made the experience feel isolating at times. I expect that this will get better with time, but we’ll see.

There’s also a real sense that I’m not accessing as much of Beijing or Tsinghua as I could. Part of that is intentional: I chose to fully invest in Schwarzman first, because it’s the reason I came here to begin with. Part of it is structural: I don’t speak Chinese and only lived in China for a few months prior to doing this program. Layer on the fact that I know I’ll be going back to the U.S. in a year, and it’s been hard for me to really venture out and plug into the city at the depth that some others have.

That being said, growth only comes from struggle. The periods where I grew the most at Bain were the ones where I was under the most pressure. The entire reason I did this program was because I thought living in a foreign country and immersing myself with a group of people very different from me would catalyze personal growth because it would be difficult.

I wasn’t sure exactly how this program would challenge me, but I expected it to in multiple dimensions. That’s playing out now. I recognize that I’m struggling in real time, but I also know that in hindsight, I’ll be glad I went through it and will have countless fond memories of the experience.

Advice for future scholars

• Know what your post-Schwarzman goals are before the program and get a head start before the program starts. Networking from Schwarzman can be difficult. Few people outside international relations or China studies know what Schwarzman is — it’s incredibly impressive to those who know what it is, but it’s not nearly as well known as a top MBA or law school. Companies aren’t going to show up to campus and have dedicated recruiting pipelines like an MBA program would. The recruiting process is more self-directed. And I think this can be particularly difficult for people coming straight out of undergrad who would benefit from having defined inroads to careers in finance/consulting/tech. I would not recommend doing Schwarzman without a clear intention of what you hope to do after. And if you want to pursue finance/consulting/tech, I would recommend locking the job down senior year and then asking the firm to delay your start date to pursue Schwarzman.

• Start recruiting earlier than you think. Even for roles that hire just-in-time, networking and positioning starts months in advance. The head of our career services office put it bluntly when she told us we need to be having at least 2-3 conversations a week starting at least 5-6 months out.

• Enjoy the warm weather while you have it. Beijing gets cold quickly. Front-load a lot of the sightseeing in Beijing, because once it hits winter and it’s below freezing and the sun sets at 4:30pm, you won’t want to go out as much.

• Find reasons to step out of the college on a daily / near-daily basis. Without a forcing function to get you out of the building, it’s easy to spend the entire day indoors. For me, my forcing function has been getting coffee in the morning and heading to a Tsinghua canteen for dinner (vs. the Schwarzman dining hall).

• Random, but please for the love of god don’t try shipping stuff from the U.S. I had my parents ship me a few things and it took nearly 2 months, a flurry of emails hastily translated from Chinese to English and back, several forms, and $100+ in shipping fees and taxes. Not worth the headache. Trust me.

I’m writing about the experience here (see post #1 here).

What happened

I made it to China after a ~30 hour door-to-door commute. There were a few scholars on my flight to Beijing, and once we figured out how to hail a taxi to campus, my experience in China officially began.

(That is, after I had to drag my 3 suitcases halfway across campus in the rain because the taxi driver dropped me off at the wrong gate)

BUT WE MADE IT! IT’S REALLY HAPPENING!

The first week was a blur. The second we stepped foot in Schwarzman College, it felt like everything was moving at 100 miles an hour.

One of the defining features of the program — compared with other major scholarships like Rhodes or Knight-Hennessy — is the residential model. All 144 scholars from 38 countries live together in a single building.

The diversity inside this building is insane.

I’m roomates with people from China, India, Brazil, Nigeria, Pakistan, Mexico, Russia, England, Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Spain, Vietnam, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Dominican Republic, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Honduras, Panama, Tunisia, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Croatia, Singapore, Israel, Jamaica, Guyana, and Turkmenistan.

This year’s cohort includes startup founders, consultants, lawyers, doctors, surgeons, diplomats, investors, software engineers, product managers, researchers, community organizers, and more.

We started the program with registration, which took nearly two days. We got our Tsinghua and Schwarzman student IDs, set up our mobile phones and bank accounts, and applied for registration permits — it was a ton of forms.

Once that was finished, we had a two week-long orientation program that included general info sessions, guest speaker panels, teambuilding activities, a two-day leadership development program called Lingdaoli (designed in partnership with the Rhodes Trust). Orientation concluded with the official convocation where we received the iconic purple scarves and ties.

Some of the highlights during orientation was:

• An impromptu 6:00am mile time trial on literally day 1 of the program

• Hiking the Great Wall

• Attending Tsinghua’s graduate school convocation

• Visiting the Summer Palace

• Getting pampered at a 24/7 spa

• Several rounds of KTV with the Chinese scholars

• Hopping around different bars, clubs, and restaurants in Beijing

• Trying different canteens on the Schwarzman campus (my favorite right now is Qingfen!)

• Getting lost while biking around hutongs in the city center

• Organizing morning runs around the Tsinghua and Peking campuses

• A happy hour with our industry mentors (including Fortune 500 CEOs, Olympic athletes, national celebrities, and partners at Tier 1 VC funds)

Reflections

There is nothing like Schwarzman.

I consumed nearly everything online about the program before arriving — articles, videos, even a CNBC documentary from 2016. None of it captured the intensity of actually being here. During orientation, each day felt like a week. And after you get your bearings, you still have to adjust to living and studying in China, which is a first for most of the cohort.

I also found it hard to describe what I was experiencing to family and friends. It’s an unusual environment, and the learning curve is steep, and it’s hard to confide in your family and friends about what you’re going through because it’s hard for them to fully understand the weirdness of it all.

China’s digital world is completely separate from the rest of the world.

I have like 5+ notes pages on my phone with ChatGPT conversations where I was trying to navigate which apps to download, which apps are for which use cases, whether to download the app version or use the mini-program in Alipay / WeChat.

It’s a pain to get everything working, but once you have them set up, day-to-day life is incredibly seamless. Shopping, food delivery, bike/scooter rentals, rideshare, splitting bills, etc. are all much easier on Chinese apps vs. American apps. I had the same realization when I was living in Shanghai back in 2019, which was “why in the world do things not work like this in the U.S.?”

The program is intense, socially and mentally.

You are almost never alone during this program. The building was literally designed from the ground up to maximize social interaction. Two intentional design choices that best exemplify this are 1.) Everyone enters and exits the building through the same doorway, which is right next to one of the largest common areas in the building, and 2.) Every route to your room goes through shared spaces that are almost always full of people. It’s energizing, but also exhausting.

The college is amazing, but it feels like living in a bubble.

We live, eat, study, sleep, and hang out in the same building. You’re living inside the bubble of this building, and it takes intention to venture out. Not only are you in the bubble of Schwarzman, but Schwarzman College exists within the larger bubble that is Tsinghua, which exists within the larger bubble of Beijing within wider China.

There is a noticeable difference in the level of integration in Tsinghua and Beijing broadly between scholars that speak Chinese and scholars that don’t. I knew this coming into the program from the conversations I had with former scholars, but it’s still something I’m trying to navigate.

Cliques form almost instantly.

As much as everyone in the cohort said that we are one community, people naturally gravitate towards the familiar. Initial cliques formed based on shared background, nationality, or ethnicity.

It’s unreasonable to expect all 144 people to be best friends with each other and hang out all the time, but it was a bummer to see the positivity and frenetic energy of the first few days slowly subside as people regressed into groups of people they were more similar to. It reminds me a lot of my first semester freshman year at UGA.

There’s a lot of self-selection.

Although the program is incredibly diverse, there’s a lot of self-selection. The majority of the cohort comes from either an ivy league university, a blue chip firm, significant wealth, or a combination of the three. Almost everyone came with prior experience living or working in a foreign country.

Within these concentric circles of status / privilege, it’s a small world. So while I was really excited for how diverse the cohort would be, I recognize that it’s still just a tiny sliver of humanity.

And although the program is only ~40% U.S. scholars, close to 60-70% went to high school and/or undergrad in the United States. It’s a more U.S.-centric cohort than I expected.

Advice for future scholars

• Define your priorities for the year before you arrive. The pace is relentless, and it never lets up. If you don’t set your intentions and goals early, the program will pull you in all kinds of directions.

• Consult the brain trust. Connect with several former scholars — people from both early cohorts (Cohorts ~1-5) and recent cohorts (Cohorts 6-10+) — and ask them lots and lots of questions.

• Connect with your cohort in-person. Build relationships early with people in your cohort, and try to meet up with them in-person. This is easier if you live in a major city. It’s especially helpful to form bonds with scholars that share similar backgrounds (e.g., same undergrad, same nationality, same city, same company/industry).

• Learn some basic Mandarin if you have time. It’s not critical for getting around (I speak basically none), but it unlocks many additional opportunities on and off-campus if you do, and can make practical tasks more seamless.

• Attend all pre-program events and webinars. You’ll get critical program information and also get to meet members of the cohort. They also shared some helpful advice for planning the year, recruiting for jobs, and preparing for courses.

• Make friends with the Yenching Scholars! The Yenching program is quite similar to Schwarzman, and Peking’s campus is directly adjacent to Tsinghua’s. We had a mixer on a rooftop bar with them and it was great to connect with a group of similar folks.

I’ll be writing about it here.

So, what am I doing?

I’m pursuing the Schwarzman Scholarship!

It’s a one-year, fully funded Master’s in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University. The program was established to promote mutual understanding between China and the West by building a global community of future leaders across disciplines and offering them an immersive learning experience centered around leadership, China, and global affairs.

I’m part of the 10th cohort: 150 twenty-somethings from 38 countries who span the professional and intellectual gamut — from nuclear non-proliferation analysts to AI researchers to startup founders to consultants, lawyers, and doctors.

This Substack will be where I process and share the experience. My goal is for these posts to be valuable for:

• Friends, family, and colleagues who want to follow along

• Incoming scholars or prospective applicants seeking a more detailed, intimate perspective on the program

• … And anyone curious about what it’s like to be in China as a foreigner in this current moment

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Why am I doing it?

Two transformative experiences shaped who I am and the way I approach growth, and both are at the root of why I applied to Schwarzman.

The first was living in China at 19. As a college freshman, I spent two months teaching speech and debate in Shanghai. It was my first time living abroad, and only my third time flying alone. Each day was a small test: navigating the city, learning to communicate, finding my footing in a world that was entirely new. I came back sharper mentally, more confident socially, and with a deeper curiosity about the world. I knew then that I wanted to live in a foreign country for at least one year before I turned 30.

The second was the Foundation Fellows Program at UGA. It’s a merit scholarship program, and it was the backbone of my college experience. I took classes, traveled, and lived alongside 100 of the smartest, most driven people I’ve ever met — all of us chasing wildly different paths but bound by the same curiosity and drive. That environment pushed me in ways I could never have manufactured on my own. After finishing school, I wanted to find a graduate program that could recreate that same dynamic of community and intellectual stimulation.

Schwarzman is a beautiful convergence of both experiences, times 10. I’ve learned that the slope of my personal growth is steepest when I place myself in unfamiliar, high talent density environments. This program is exactly that.

A few things I hope to gain from the program are:

• A naunced understanding of China and to how to use my career in media & entertainment to help avoid a potential Great Power conflict

• A foundational knowledge of China’s media & entertainment and technology industries

• A year of profound personal growth that only comes from being out of place and in over your head

Why now?

The defining geopolitical event of the 21st century will be the rise of China. The growth of its economic, technological, and cultural influence has outpaced the US since the 1980s. To understand the future is to understand China.

That’s especially true in media and tech. China has the largest consumer class in the world, and its media & entertainment industry is growing at nearly twice the rate of the U.S. Due to strict protections on domestic industries, China’s system of content production, distribution, and monetization has evolved largely independent of Western influence. That’s led to technological innovation and consumer behavior that’s entirely unique. In some ways, China’s media and tech industry is several years ahead of the US and is a reliable predictor of how the US industry will evolve (see: short-form video, livestreaming, mobile gaming, social commerce, micro dramas).

Then there is AI. China is one of only two countries with the resources and ambition to shape the trajectory of this technology at a global scale. AI is more than a technological race; it’s a geopolitical one. And it will define how societies operate, and unfortunately, how conflicts escalate.

I also came to this decision for more personal reasons. After three years at Bain & Company, I was eager to start the next chapter of my career. Bain was an incredible training ground. It taught me how to break down complex problems, communicate effectively, and operate under pressure. But over time, I felt an emptiness in the work. As a generalist in client services, it was hard to find meaning in the work when I had little choice over the work I got to do.

That being said, the skills and network I gained at Bain were instrumental in helping me land an externship helping lead strategy and business development at a Hollywood studio and writing a compelling Schwarzman application. Consulting is a fantastic launchpad for people who want to learn broadly, earn a high income, and gain exposure to many different topics and industries. For someone like me who had a strong conviction they wanted to work in media & entertainment, and knew it even before joining the firm, it started to feel like a holding pattern.

Schwarzman is the opportunity to reflect, reset, and pivot. It’s a chance to step out of the consulting bubble, widen my perspective, and focus my energy on the problems I care about solving.

In my next post, I’ll share the experience of adjusting to life in China and completing the first few weeks of the program.

Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like me to write about!