How the Media Changed My Life

I did a bit of spring cleaning this week and found the newspaper cutting of the New York Times article I was featured in. This got me thinking about instances when the media had made a real positive impact in my life.

A Big Break with the New York Times

NYTIMES: The Streets Are Paved with PCs by Edward Wong.

If you haven’t heard how I got to be featured in The Streets Are Paved With PCs, you may be wondering how a girl from the Bornean boondocks managed to get herself into the de facto paper of the most populous city in the United States.

In 1998, the Asian Economic Crisis was threatening my studies with a Forex meltdown that sent the Malaysian Ringgit down to a frightening low. To avoid packing my bags for home I applied and was granted a work permit designed by the INS to help existing students from countries affected by the crisis.

With a license-to-work in hand, I went scouting for a job in New York City. Brushed off by most interviewers for an unattractive profile (I was an undergrad and worse, an unknown international student with no string-pulling option), I must have gone to about 40 interviews before succeeding in landing a job. Eventually my persistence (fueled by a hunger akin to a lioness in the Serengeti) got me a job as a Web Designer at Maestro Technologies, a small Internet Service Provider in the Financial District.

While I was working at Maestro, Edward Wong, a reporter for the New York Times walked into our office one morning to interview my boss for an article he was working on about immigrant high tech workers. When he had heard that I was a Malaysian student slaving away to subsidize my education-under-threat, he wanted to use my profile to complete his story.

That’s basically the short version of how I got on the New York Times.

HOW IT CHANGED MY LIFE
Growing up in a small place like Kota Kinabalu, I never imagined that I would be featured in the New York Times, let alone at 20 years old! This article gave new meaning to the song “New York, New York” and validated my own romantic notion of a triumphant break in the Big Apple made popular by songs and films. It boosted me out of financial desperation and became the break I needed for a serious career in technology. Shortly after the feature, I went on to build websites that would power global businesses and this continued over the course of my career.

This experience taught me that it didn’t matter how young or old I was, where I’m at in life, where I come from, what color my skin is, and what gender I am, as long as I have faith, a good attitude and steadfastness the universe will take me where I want to be.

Appearing on Teenage Magazine

Teenage Magazine today.

In an earlier instance, when I was a teenager I wrote a letter to the Editor of a popular Singaporean teen publication called Teenage Magazine to express my delight in the magazine. Two months later, my photo and note came out in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the magazine. Consequentially, I got hundreds of letters in the mail seeking for friendship, which created a pen-paling hobby that lasted a few years.

Introduced by the then Editor-in-Chief, I became pen pals with two of their cover boys. One was a national treasure whose achievements inspired, and the other a free-spirited adventurer who fanned my desire to travel the world. This was arguably the best time of my life because I was allowed to dream and share my thoughts without worrying about being judged or getting laughed at since they were older boys of substance.

HOW IT CHANGED MY LIFE
Having heart throbs as snail mail pen pals was a giddy-ing experience, but more importantly our correspondences created a literary ecosystem for inquiry, introspection and creative expressionism. The more we wrote, the better I got. My imagination was allowed to roam free and so my confidence in communicative writing really took form as a result.

Perhaps one day I will look back and see the effects of the media exposure I got from the Best Job in the World. For now, I’m just glad to share these reflections of yesteryear glories with a little bit of help from the media. Hopefully it will inspire you to follow your heart and chase your dreams, whatever they may be!