An Alumnus’s Real Story: Three Deaths and Rebirths, from Aspiring Writer to AI Entrepreneur

The “Alumni Real-Life Archive” documents how alumni made decisions at turning points, giving current students a wider range of real paths to consider.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

The full arc of my life

If I had to describe my experience from college until now, I would call it “three deaths and rebirths.” The path changed direction repeatedly as I rejected old assumptions and rebuilt.

My first “death” was the transition from aspiring writer to science student. I was born into a family of Chinese-language teachers, read more than 1,000 books in middle school, and dreamed of cycling across China with a skewer attached to my bicycle, eating barbecue as I wrote. In high school, I won second prize nationally in a worldwide Chinese essay competition. But I believed the humanities had limited power to change the world, and my idol Bill Gates showed me the force of technology, so I decided to switch to science. My science grades were average, but luck helped me enter USTC through early admission with the lowest admitted score in my province.

At university, I underwent a second transition, from poetry club founder to aspiring researcher. At USTC, I found a literary society and a history association, but no poetry club. On a cold winter night under pouring rain, I created a QQ group that later became a formal club with 1,200 members. At the same time, I met mentors at X-Institute and began treating “apply for a PhD in the United States” as an executable goal. I went from nearly missing the threshold for graduate-school recommendation to becoming a nominee for the Guo Moruo Scholarship. I immersed myself in research and received four PhD offers, including one from UCLA EPSS.

My most recent “rebirth” took me from scientist to venture-capital researcher. I declined UCLA’s offer and came to UT Austin to study land surface models. During my PhD, however, I faced serious physical and mental challenges. I experienced an anxiety attack and was taken to the emergency room. I tried trading in the secondary market and found that my assets grew too slowly. I began exploring the AI wave on my own and concluded that entrepreneurship offered a faster feedback loop and a clearer path to practical impact. I eventually decided to become an investment apprentice.

I did not plan this path. At each turning point, I chose according to the information and understanding I had at the time, then kept adjusting my direction.

Decisions that mattered

I learned early not to treat setbacks as final defeats. Encouragement from my family and guidance from more experienced people reinforced that habit. Another influence was getting together with my girlfriend, although that happened naturally. Our conversations, partly because I do not always listen to her, prompted many of my major decisions.

Beyond those influences, the decisive turn in my career occurred during my PhD.

What was happening then? I was already pursuing a PhD at UT Austin and studying land surface models. I had declined UCLA in favor of what I considered the “more useful” field of land-surface research, yet I found that the feedback loop in research was still too long. A paper might take a year to move from submission to publication, while the real world changed from week to week.

How did I make the decision? It was not because someone told me what to do. I went out on my own and saw the real state of the industry.

I did not study computer science as an undergraduate. I even abandoned my computer science minor. In the AI era, however, I found that vibe coding let me get started quickly. I began building one project a day, from an AI system for polishing articles to an AI agent that could make phone calls. My GitHub activity reached 4,000 commits in one year.

I did not shut myself inside the laboratory. I traveled to the Bay Area, New York, and Shanghai to attend USTC alumni events focused on AI and finance. I attended the “Shiwen” event organized by the Bay Area alumni association. Along the way, I met alumni who answered younger graduates’ questions about career development.

These practitioners gave me a view of the industry that textbooks could not provide. I saw teams test whether technology created value and founders find a bug in the afternoon and fix it before dawn.

This search for firsthand information changed how I evaluated my career options. I first worked as an investment apprentice to learn business logic.

Your relationship with your environment

Many of my skills and ideas did not come from classes. I acquired them by acting in real environments.

When I moved from the humanities to science, for example, I faced a standard humanities-family environment. Both of my parents taught Chinese, and our home held more than 3,000 books, newspapers, and magazines. I chose to push against that environment. I disliked rote memorization, and Bill Gates had become my idol. I switched to science despite the pressure, even though my grades in it were not exceptional.

When I created the poetry club, USTC had a literary society and a history association, but no poetry club. I chose to respond to a gap in the environment. On a cold winter night under pouring rain, I started a QQ group. Later, we paid for power strips out of our own pockets to run club events and nearly got into a fight over access to an electrical outlet. These experiences taught me how to complete something in an environment with scarce resources.

The shift from research to entrepreneurship happened while I still had an established research setting, an internationally recognized advisor, and access to laboratory resources. I built a second environment around product work, using AI tools to compensate for gaps in my coding experience and to build products quickly. In group chats, my early posts about AI were treated as spam, and people sometimes told me to send a cash gift before posting again. I changed what I shared after considering how the posts looked to other members. I moved from short, low-context posts to material with more detail and practical value, which gradually helped me participate in the community.

I also traveled on my own to USTC alumni events in the Bay Area, New York, and Shanghai, where I built relationships with other alumni. Through hackathons and internships, I came into direct contact with the market.

My choice was to find new environments. I realized that most existing curricula were designed decades ago and did not follow how people learn. I published a first-author SCI paper, applied for funding, entered hackathons, and received a nomination for the Guo Moruo Scholarship. I pursued each of these outside class. I began building a support system early and moved beyond the single environment of research into the open terrain of startups and investing.

Looking back

At this point, I understand “making choices” in several new ways.

Choice is a continuous process, not a one-time act. As a student, I thought choices were major decisions at life’s crossroads. Now I see them more like driving, where you constantly adjust the steering wheel. I did not wake up one day and suddenly choose entrepreneurship. I first tried the secondary market and found it too slow. Then I tried research and found the feedback loop too long. Only after exploring AI and connecting with alumni did I find the entrepreneurial path.

Information quality matters more than the decision model. The question is not how you analyze, but what you analyze. I could shift from research toward entrepreneurship because I gathered high-quality information. I saw how quickly entrepreneurs iterated and what AI agents could already do. This information was unavailable in a classroom. I had to go to the scene and obtain it on the front line.

The controllability of failure costs is the most important dimension of a decision. My three “deaths” did not become real deaths because each failure cost was manageable. If moving from the humanities to science had failed, the worst outcome would have been missing admission to a good university, but I could have repeated the final year. As I move from research toward entrepreneurship, I remain enrolled in my PhD and have a route back. If the startup fails, I am still young and have time to try again.

Repeated effort made these changes possible. When I lacked coding experience, I used AI to learn. When I lacked industry knowledge, I attended alumni events and asked USTC alumni for help. Continuing to write code, publish articles, and build relationships allowed those efforts to accumulate over time.

Life is not a mathematics problem with a standard answer. It is more like exploring in fog. Each collision tells you, “This road is closed.” You change direction and keep going.

What matters is continuing to explore and learn from each attempt.

Let time reveal whether a choice was right. Meanwhile, keep gathering information and adjusting course.

Follow-up questions: Group B | Specific events and real scenes

Question: Tell us about a conversation that left a strong impression on you.

In the summer of 2025, I sat in a cafe in Suzhou with an old friend from X-Institute. The air quality index was off the charts, and a gray sky hung outside the window.

I said, “I think I have been getting carried away lately. I found a girlfriend, received PhD offers, and built the poetry club. It feels as if I can do anything.”

He was silent for a moment, then said, “Think about other people. Use your brain.”

I froze. “What do you mean?”

“How much of your success comes from your own ability, and how much came from your environment? USTC’s platform, the opportunities at X-Institute, your advisor’s resources, the advantages of the era. Think about other people, those who do not have these resources. Use your brain. Do you actually understand how the world works?”

The conversation lasted only a little more than ten minutes, but the words “think about other people, use your brain” stayed with me. They pulled me out of self-satisfaction and pushed me to think about my privilege and responsibilities.

Question: Was there a moment when things that once seemed unrelated became connected?

Yes. I recently needed to revise my introduction for a pitch, which made me think about my three “deaths” again.

At first, the three deaths seemed completely illogical, willful, disloyal, and rebellious. Looking back, I can see how each change shaped the next. Moving from aspiring writer to science student changed my education. Moving from scientist to venture-capital researcher changed how I understood career choices. The third change brought those experiences together: I became an entrepreneur and investor who retained a writer’s approach to observing and explaining the world.

I have kept a diary for 20 years and used output to force input. That writing practice supported my inbound marketing. Research trained my mathematical reasoning and my assessment of technical claims. My investment internship added a capital-allocation perspective. I understand the three changes through the Marxist idea of the “negation of the negation,” or critique followed by critique. They also taught me to recover from setbacks.

A final word

If I could give current students one sentence, it would be this: Do not pursue the “correct” choice. Pursue the choice that gives you the most information.

My path is full of “mistakes.” My grades were poor when I moved from the humanities to science. At USTC, my 3.3 GPA nearly kept me from qualifying for graduate-school recommendation. I was betrayed while building the poetry club. I shifted toward entrepreneurship midway through my research. Each “mistake” gave me new information, and that information showed me new possibilities.

Life is not a mathematics problem with a standard answer. It is more like exploring in fog. Each collision tells you, “This road is closed.” You change direction and keep going.

What matters is continuing to explore, building a support system, and keeping the cost of failure manageable. At each turning point, gather the best information available and choose on that basis.

Let time reveal whether a choice was right. Meanwhile, keep gathering information and adjusting course.