Alumni Spotlight: Matthew Bunday
Matthew Bunday is one of OHS' most colorful alumni. To learn more about him, contributor Roald Fradkine spoke to Matthew in the interview below.
Pixel Journal: Please describe your experience at OHS as well as what motivated you to come to OHS.
Matthew Bunday: I joined OHS during the first year it existed, so I think for everyone involved it felt like an adventure. Looking back on my experience now, I realize that I didn't have the depth of curiosity and intellectual maturity to truly appreciate the caliber of teachers that I had, and I feel very grateful for their willingness to experiment with a new way of teaching. I think all of us students pushed our boundaries academically and we all encouraged each other to do so.
At times I felt bewildered and isolated, bereft of physical human contact. It felt frustrating sometimes to know that I'd met some of the most amazing people of my life but that I couldn't share a hug with them through our hard times. I lived in the Midwest, relatively far from many of the other students, so the few times I did get to hang with my friends I truly cherished. Some of the people I met influenced the course of my life forever. I fell very much in love with a particular OHS student and the ambition and drive that she inspired carried me a long way.
Like all OHS students (I imagine) I had the benefit of parents who cared deeply about my education. We didn't have much money but we had a lot of pluck. Eventually I had the option to attend either boarding schools of the Philips Exeter variety or OHS. At the time, I wanted to stay closer to my friends and family in Minnesota, and as someone who grew up on the internet I also wanted to take part in what I felt like represented the future of education.
PJ: What have you been doing since you graduated from OHS?
MB: After OHS I studied for two years at the University of Minnesota. At the time, I felt very disappointed in myself for not attending a more prestigious school, particularly Stanford where the then girl of my dreams went. I had taken classes at the U of MN since the age of 11 so I felt that I should have outgrown the place by then. The illusion of my disappointment so clouded my mind that I blinded myself to a world of opportunities for learning. In the first semester of my freshman year, my roommates and I got ourselves evicted from university housing for marijuana related offenses. I ended up in a downward spiral of addiction (marijuana, nicotine, alcohol, pornography, League of Legends) and further despair that I barely managed to conceal from my friends and family all the while hating myself more and more.
Fortunately, I experienced a crack of light in the black prison of my mind and once again saw the world directly without the negative filter of my thought patterns. After this awakening I began a journey of self-exploration into consciousness and reclaimed my mind using the authority of my willpower through meditation. I learned to consciously shape the direction of my thoughts and remove limiting beliefs.
I seized an opportunity with the HackNY.org fellowship program to start an internship at Sailthru, a New York tech startup. I will found my own startup, and I thought that I could best learn about startups from within one. I parlayed my way into a full-time position by the end of the summer and said goodbye to school. Fortunately, between EPGY, OHS, my own projects, and the courses I had taken in University I had more than the necessary skills to begin working.
After close to two years at Sailthru I joined Dev Bootcamp, an immersive coding program designed to take students from beginner to employable in 19 weeks. I found this job immensely rewarding. I had motivated and keen students and I learned so much from teaching. I would highly recommend to OHS students that they do a stint teaching. I derived an immense amount of meaning in my life from all the students who I met and watched grow.
As part of my teaching I coached many of my students on how to pass whiteboard interviews at prestigious engineering companies. After a recruiter contacted me I decided on a whim to put my own skills to the test and subsequently took a job with Google. I learned an immense amount from the rigorous engineering culture at Google before deciding that I preferred the startup environment.
Earlier this year I joined a startup, GuestFriend, as the first engineer. We've since dissolved the company due to my friend and CEO's unforeseen medical problems. Having seen our startup grow from two people to six people, hiring and mentoring a team, and learning cutting-edge technology I do not regret it for a minute.
Currently I've taken some time to consider my next career move and do some self-development (for instance confronting my long-held fear of water by finally learning to swim).
PJ: What are the things you value most at this point in your life?
MB: My family and relationships, my martial arts practice, and the opportunities life presents to help people improve their lives.
PJ: Is there a certain philosophy you've developed, or ascribe to, in your everyday life?
MB: Several. I like to think of them as micro-religions. I wanted to take the essence of religious ideas and make them modular and composable. I want to share Lovism, which only has two beliefs: I exist, U exist (I spell the word conventionally rendered 'you' as 'U' out of respect for your equal standing), and one practice: I luv U (I distinguish between platonic Luv and romantic Love). Lovism requires continual practice as I reaffirm ILUVU with each being I interact with. One can find my other philosophies on my website. [zencephalon.com].
PJ: What are your professional interests? In particular, what interests you in the startup world?
MB: I have a particular interest in the intersection of education and technology. I have dreams of founding my own startup, which motivates me to keep getting involved in startups in order to gain experience. From what I've seen, startups provide the most opportunity for growth because they will always have more work to do.
PJ: Outside of your professional interests and confronting your fear of water, what interests you?
MB: I enjoy all sorts of physical movement, in particular parkour and climbing in addition to my martial arts practice. I play a lotus drum, a type of melodic handpan. I enjoy exploring states of consciousness whether through meditation or neuropharmacology.
PJ: What type of martial arts do you practice and where/how?
MB: I practice an art called Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu, commonly called 'ninjutsu' due to its historical roots. I have class several days a week in both indoor dojo spaces and outdoor spaces (usually parks).
PJ: How does a typical day of yours pass?
MB: I like to start my days with a morning routine: strength training, martial practice, stretching, meditation, and a bit of Mandarin reading. I read during my commutes. In the evenings, I usually have my taijutsu class or I go climbing.
PJ: What role do you think OHS had in preparing you for the life you live now?
MB: OHS, and in particular the humanities portion, has prepared me to deal with complex and open-ended problems.
PJ: Looking back at your experience at OHS, what would you change?
MB: I would have changed my attitude from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, as described by Carol Dweck. I spent a lot of my time at OHS trying to wiggle out of situations where I felt dumb instead of embracing the challenges as a learning opportunity. Overall I missed out on a whole lot of learning because I only wanted to do things I felt good at. I also got caught plagiarizing. I've experienced a special form of regret upon realizing that I had the opportunity to learn something that could have come in handy later, and missed it.
I would also have told the people who mattered most to me how I truly felt about them, however scary that might have felt. Often, I've found the words we fear most to say most need saying.
PJ: Finally, what advice do you have for OHS students?
MB: Watch "Do Easy" by Gus Van Sant on YouTube. A little practice every day builds results over time. Learn deep abdominal breathing. Concentrate not on what U know and they don't, but on what they know and U don't. Read Robert Anton Wilson and learn to write in E-Prime. Meditate.