When I was in primary school, most of my friends spent their weekend learning swimming, karate or music. I am the odd one learning 心算 every sunday morning. In fact, none of my friends took the class with me. Lets just say it wasn't the most fun thing to do. It's math. I don't remember me enjoying it a whole lot but I spent a good 2 years on that. On hindsight, I should probably attribute my relatively outstanding academic performance to that learning.

The first weekend of Form 1 was the society/club new-member recruitment day. Every student body was displaying their best offer to attract new members. I remembered seeing the seniors, donning in their smart Scout or St John, uniform, marching coherently according to command. Police cadet was really impressive. The karate kids were showing off their brick-chopping skills. Badminton club and computer club were the crowd-pullers too. In the end of the day, I didn't join any of those. Instead I became a member to a club called "Amateur Wireless Society" (无线电研究会). No other school in Penang had such student club. It's the odd and unpopular one because it taught a student to build a AC/DC bridge rectifier or etch a circuit board with Hydrochloric Acid, anyone? The club surely had one of the lowest recruitment rate of all the student bodies. Nonetheless I was proud to be the VP of the club in Form 5:) Now I think of it, this club probably sowed the seed of my path to ECE undertaking.

I applied to 3 universities while I was in MARA, namely Michigan University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Southern California. MU rejected me. CMU rejected my admission to ECE department but offered me a place in Mechanical Engineering. USC was my safety net. I would have gone to USC if I choose to follow my friends. It was clearly a safer and easier choice too. Nonetheless, I went for CMU, with the goal of admitting as a ME major and eventually switching to ECE major. Until today I consider it as one of the best decision I have made in life. CMU was tough but it rocks!

Malaysian students in CMU liked to play badminton. Badminton interest seems to be in the blood of every malaysian. Not me though. Maybe I wasn't a great player to start with so I never bother to join them. In Junior year, a friend introduced me to Squash game. I grew to love the sport and used to play 2 to 3 times a week, against random opponents and in the process met many new friends. It's on the squash court that I met the ABC girl whom I had crush on and that made up part of my interesting college life. I have been enjoying playing Squash for the past 7 years, and keep counting. I love it!

I took bunch of computer science courses during sophomore and junior year. CMU is just THAT software-oriented. In Junior year, while most of my friends were going in-dept in software, I was the lone ranger that choose to go for hardware/computer architecture route. I think the reason being I did pretty badly in one of the CS courses and that sort of killed my interest to pursue further in software. Upon graduation, almost all my buddies went to software companies in Bay area. Oracle, Apple, VMware, Microsoft, you name it. I am the outlier in hardware semiconductor industry. On hindsight I could be better off if I were to follow the crowd in CMU and become a programmer in Google/Oracle/Msft. In reality, Software engineering is constantly ranked the top-most desirable job in the US. RTL coder is not! Having said that I have no regret in getting into semiconductor field. The working experience in Seagate, Qualcomm, Marvell and Intel was all good. 

The decision to leave the US and come back here wasn't a hard one to make. It's however difficult to part with my 10-year bonding with the US. Most people won't leave the US for Malaysia, but I shall do what I need to do. 

All of the above were some unrelated event that happened some point in my life. There were decision-making along the way and looking back I think I have made some unconventional move that didn't conform to majority of the people/friends around me. Surely those were pretty trivial decisions in life but all of them added colors and new experience in its unique way. I don't need too many reasons to travel a different path, do I?