A Note to Strangers on the Internet
I'd prefer to stay anonymous. If you somehow figure out who I am, please keep it to yourself. That means a lot to me.
I want to preface this by saying I'm not writing this for sympathy. I'm writing this because my psychologist told me to put my goals somewhere I can read them every day, and somehow Reddit felt like the right place. Maybe because strangers can be surprisingly kind.
So here goes.
I grew up in a tier 3 city in India. Going abroad to study was already a big deal in itself. But I wasn't going abroad just to get a degree or land a corporate job. During COVID, I picked up *The Intelligent Investor* by Benjamin Graham and something just clicked. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life: build my own value investment firm, a small and select group of like-minded investors, nothing bloated or corporate. Just pure, disciplined investing.
With that dream in mind I enrolled at a well-regarded university in the UAE. Dubai and Abu Dhabi are serious financial hubs and I genuinely believed I'd get hands-on, intellectually rich learning. I walked in with high hopes.
What I found was a grade factory.
Students arguing with professors over half a mark. No real curiosity, no discussions, barely any social life. Everyone competing for numbers on a transcript. For 2.5 years I sat in that environment telling myself maybe next semester it gets better. It never did. I genuinely learned more about investing from books than from anything taught in those classrooms.
Then, somewhere in the middle of all that, I got an opportunity to attend a summer program at Stanford.
Honestly? I didn't know much about Stanford at the time. Coming from where I came from, just being abroad was already a stretch. I was skeptical going in because I assumed it would be more of the same, two months of grade chasing and zero real connection. I was seriously considering skipping it and going back home for the summer instead.
I had a horse back home. I was looking forward to that more than anything.
Ten days before the program was set to start, my horse died.
I hadn't booked flights. Hadn't registered for housing or classes. I had just gotten the visa and was already mentally halfway out. I was in a bad place after losing him and had basically decided to cancel everything.
My father sat me down and said something simple: go. Take your mind off the grief. Don't worry about grades. Just go and try to have a good time.
So I went.
The moment I stepped onto Stanford's campus I felt something shift. The campus alone stopped me in my tracks. Then I got to my dorm and found out I'd be sharing a room with two other people, which was completely foreign to me after the UAE university where everyone lived in semi-private rooms and barely acknowledged each other's existence.
That shared room changed everything.
You're forced to talk. You learn about people's cultures, the way they think, where they come from. My roommates were great and those conversations alone taught me things no classroom ever could. Then the classes themselves. So many options. So many formats. I took a course on humanitarian aid where we sat around a circular table and the professor just asked everyone what they thought. No hierarchy, no judgment, just genuine exchange of ideas and sometimes deeply personal stories. The professors actually listened. They were there to teach, not to grade.
It was the best two months of my life. No exaggeration.
Coming back to the UAE university after that felt like going back to a dim room after standing in sunlight. I struggled mentally. The environment wore me down and after a while my body started catching up with what my mind was already feeling. I developed a sharp pain in my stomach that I initially brushed off.
I didn't brush it off for long.
Back in India, the pain kept getting worse. Tests were run. I was sent to Mumbai for further evaluation. The doctors there were visibly shocked by the results. They told me I had a rare form of pancreatic cancer with lesions on my liver. Something, they said, that should not be possible at my age.
My family did everything. We flew to Houston for further opinions. Same results.
The doctors were honest with us. There was no established treatment. The best option available was a medical trial, which my family declined. For the next 14 months we looked everywhere, consulted everyone, tried every door we could find. The most doctors could offer was slowing the growth.
In that time I went from living a fairly normal life to losing strength, losing weight, and eventually losing the ability to walk on my own. I now use a wheelchair. My stomach retains excess fluid that has to be drained regularly just to help me breathe properly and eat.
I've also been dealing with severe depression and anxiety through all of this. I started seeing a psychologist and a psychiatrist and it has genuinely helped. One of the things they asked me to do early on was write down my goals. Not vague wishes but real, specific things. Then put them somewhere I'd see them every day so the desire to reach them stays sharp.
Here's what I wrote:
**1. Attend Stanford as a full-time student. Even if I'm older than most undergrads by the time I get there. A bachelor's in finance.**
**2. Travel the world.**
That's it. Two things. And they're enough. On the hardest days those two lines are what I come back to.
I don't know what tomorrow looks like but I'm hopeful. Genuinely. Writing this out and putting it somewhere real makes it feel more real, like a commitment I've made not just to myself but to something bigger.
If you read this far, thank you. Really. You didn't have to and you did anyway, and that means more than you probably know.