Today marked my graduation from college - the end of my career at UC Berkeley, and the official start of my professional life. I've been waiting for this day for as long as I could remember, and I'm honestly astonished that I managed to graduate. I've tried to drop out of college three times. But every time, someone managed to convince me back. And I'm happy that they did.

My first attempt to drop out began after freshman year. Three summers ago, I met a few other young entrepreneurs in a hot tub at a programmer's party called "Super Happy Dev House", and we all discussed the idea of dropping out of college so that we could start our startups. How to break this news to our parents and why dropping out makes sense to do. Being the ignorant kids that we were, no alternative argument existed. By the end of the evening, we had convinced ourselves that it was the optimal path to success. And in this hot tub three summers ago, I befriended another young founder and computer science major named Brian. We kept in touch by email, and I ultimately found out that only Brian and I remained in college. The other young upstarts kept to their word and dropped out.

In the three years since that night in the hot tub, I've received the education I dreamed for, and unique lifetime experiences that I wouldn't otherwise have in the real world. Among them being a great education in computer science, and most importantly, meeting my cofounder and best friend Andy Su. While I realize that I may just be justifying the decisions I made, I would do college all over again just to meet Andy.

Andy and I have been incubating side projects for almost two years now. We launched internshipIN together in November '08, did most of our computer science class projects with each other, recently launched a Java IDE called Breve, and started inDinero before summer break last year. It was through UC Berkeley that we got the Lightspeed Ventures Summer Grant. It was through UC Berkeley that we won the Venture Lab competition and got free money + office space on campus. It was also through UC Berkeley and the CSUA on campus that we got hooked into the YCombinator community, and recruited two more great hackers to join inDinero. It's just weird to think that none of this would have happened had I dropped out three years ago.

I owe thanks to my friends for supporting me, my advisors for keeping me in college, UC Berkeley for hooking me up with an incredible team of co-founders, and my parents for supporting me through the past four years. This is just the start of an incredible journey.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, (and graduate of U.C. Berkeley) gave this fantastic commencement speech at Carnegie Mellon University yesterday. My favorite quote:

“You cannot plan innovation. You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be at the right place and be ready.”

This goes back to what I wrote about a few days ago. People try to carve out their perfect path to success, but there's only so much that one could do. Lead a fulfilling and exciting life, and amazing opportunities will come your way.

It's been an incredibly exciting year! With today being my 19th birthday and the end of my first year studying at Berkeley, I felt that it was time to glance over the great things that have happened in the past 12 months. I've been incredibly lucky for all the great things that have happened, and wanted to give thanks to the people who made it happen, as well as my naive sense of how best to live life.

Back in the fall, I was talking to Cal Newport about an upcoming book he's writing, and came to realize that the exciting things from my life came my mere desire to do fun things; not from my "selfish" attempt to actually further my career. As a student, I felt that my job was to do anything and everything to grow as an individual, and attending class was far from efficient in achieving that task.

I don't usually enjoy blogging about my "personal life", but I thought it'd be nice to do something different. Many of you have asked me to give a more personal touch to my blog, so here it is: a short list of some cool things that happened to me this year, and the incredible people I have to thank:

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- Just a year ago on May 17, I graduated from Simon's Rock, the Early College, with my Associates Degree. I first went to Simon's Rock to leave the boredom of high school, and to get a jump start on my career. If it wasn't for my freshman-year roommate insisting on going to Berkeley one day, I'm not sure if I'd follow in her footsteps.

- Over the summer, I landed a gig at PBwiki (now PBworks.com) as a summer web developer, and had the time of my life. The founder, David Weekly, has since become a close friend and adviser for my current company. If it wasn't for a referral from a blog reader, I wouldn't have landed that incredible opportunity.

- In my first week as a student at Berkeley, and in the first Discrete Mathematics class, I met a cool guy named Andy. We were the only first-year students, and the TA told us that we'd better make friends if we planned on surviving the class. Fast forward a few months, and he'd eventually become my best friend and co-founder for internshipIN and our latest company, Indinero. If it wasn't for the blunt TA, I'd still be looking for that perfect partner.

- In February, I went to my first TED Conference in Long Beach, CA. In the 5 days I spent there, I grew more as a person that I ever have before. If it wasn't for meeting a random TEDster on the beaches of Jamaica, I'd never have gotten an invitation to go.

- In April, my company landed a $35k grant from Lightspeed Venture Partners. If it wasn't for a random emailing from Berkeley Alumni who told us (and other students here) about the summer program, we'd still be looking for money.

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This past year has been filled with incredible serendipity, and the excitement in my life is more-or-less fueled by it. None of these fantastic things happened by directly looking for them, but rather by putting myself in the the right place to be exposed to the right people. Most of the great things on my list stem from having gone to Simon's Rock, and by living as exciting a life as I possibly could. And If it wasn't for high school being so crappy, I wouldn't have had the motivation to apply to college early.

Human life is so dynamic that there's no good way to plan for good things. People ask me all the time, "how did you get invited to the TED Conference?" And the only honest answer I could give is "by living the most exciting life that I possibly can." People are always focused on achieving the next logical step in their education or career, but that often prevents them from doing exciting things that would indirectly get them closer to achieving eventual success.

For example -- As a high school student, if I actually cared about going to college, I'd focus day and night on my school work. But by following my philosophy of "living the most exciting life possible," schoolwork failed to meet my criteria. So I did the most exciting thing I possibly could do, and that was to start a company. One year later, I got into college. And the admissions people looked specifically at my botched attempt to run a company while attending school, and accepted me half way through my 2nd year of high school.

Sure, my theory of life doesn't always work to further your career, but at least it promises you this: You'll grow tremendously as an individual, and live an exhilarating life. And if you have just that, I can guarantee you eventual success.

Disclaimer: I am by no means saying that college dropouts or students with poor grades are dumb -- I'm simply defending the hiring practices of Google and why their practices hold rational meaning to them.

There are so many little things about a prospective employee that can tell you, as the entrepreneur or hiring manager, whether or not the candidate is capable of being a reliable, long term, team player. For example, if I'm hiring a person, I'm going to look at how many schools this person went to and whether or not s/he graduated. I'm going to look at his/her smoking habits. I'm going to look at how long this person remained at his or her last few jobs. If I'm hiring manager for a company like Google, which receives thousands of resumes daily, I'll quickly eliminate people who didn't get a college degree, who smoke on a daily basis, and who weren't able to keep a job for more than two years because each show a lack of commitment and/or a preference for short term over long term goals. There are so many brilliant people who don’t have college degrees, but it takes much longer to screen these people for commitment. I don't think companies like Google care about what you learned in college so much as they care about your desire to stay with a company for more than a few months. They want employees who are able to work on projects that they aren't necessarily in love with.

Many people critique Google for looking at college transcripts, but I'm going to defend them on this for several reasons:

1) High GPAs show the ability to do everything (besides business/computer science), and this is often a good measure for what happens in the workplace. This isn't to say that dropouts are unable to prosper at a company like Google, but it's an easier way to weed out the definite slackers.

2) A transcript allows Google to see what kind of courses you took. Did you only take computer science classes? Did you stick with your Jazz Ensemble for all four years, or did you join in and out depending on the semester? Are there any independent studies? All of these gives clues as to who the person is and what their commitment to their studies are. Maybe you took a class in philosophy which you had absolutely no interest in whatsoever, but were you able to get at least a B?

3) I hate to say it, but looking at college transcripts is an easy way to weed people out. If you're running an amazing company, you'll get thousands upon thousands of transcripts, and you can't possibly take everyone. By weeding out college dropouts and those with poor grades, it's much easier to focus on those who are likely to succeed in a large company.

As Seth Godin often says on his blog that resumes give a reason for companies to reject you, which is exactly why Google asks for them in the first place. It makes the hiring process much better for them! For those of you who don't have a college degree or resume, find people to hire you based on something you did. Through keeping this blog, I've received many recruitment emails from technology companies. Although I'm yet to receive my college diploma, I'd feel reluctant to hire someone without a college diploma unless s/he has solid work experience to compensate. Even a college diploma is no longer enough to hire somebody. I'll take this even further to say, if I receive an offer to work for a company without an interview and review of my past experiences, I would feel reluctant to join because it shows something about how smart my colleagues in this company may be.

The moral of this story: If you think rationally about it, Google has a reason to recruit people in the way that they do. Fewer people leave the company not just because they offer amazing job benefits, but because they attract people who are more likely to stick it out and see the good in whatever they're working on. Most of the people I know at Yahoo are high school or college dropouts, and most of them are seriously contemplating leaving their job. While Yahoo is yet to better their job benefits, hiring committed people from the onset is often a significant part of the battle.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college, Bard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

Since childhood, I've associated computer science with geeky and socially inept little boys, and for rational reason: because all of the computer geeks I knew were in fact geeky and socially inept little boys! But as I mentioned in my previous post about computer camp, I've wanted to go into tech from an early age -- before the idea of entrepreneurship ever occurred to me. However, as I became less socially inept, I began associating myself with the non-geeks. The jocks! The cheerleaders!

People often ask me if I feel as if I'm being taken advantaged of, or if being a girl makes things more difficult. No and yes -- I don't feel as if guys are mean to girls in computer science. If anything, guys are more willing to help a cute girl debug her code for obvious reason. But is it more difficult? From a social standpoint, definitely. Most girls in tech are podcasters or videobloggers -- Veronica Belmont, Julia Allison, and Alana Taylor among them. They're all great people, amazing at what they do, but that leaves few girls who are hardcore geeks. There aren't many girls starting their own companies. It's almost expected that I go into community or marketing, but I've since decided to go against these societal expectations.

I'm now at a crossroads in my educational career because I need to decide my major. Do I major in computer science, economics, international relations, or what? As a friend of mine mentioned, what if I'm terrible at computer science or what if I'm terrible at economics? The educational path I choose will determine the people I associate with in my classes. The computer science program at Simon's Rock attracts the uber geeks, whereas the economics program attracts the more popular kids. Why does this matter so much? Because I see education as being more than what's learned in the classroom -- it's the independent projects that I would start with my classmates. It affects my social life, which matters more than you might think for girls. Regardless as to what major I choose, I'll plan on surrounding myself with both econ and comp sci people.

As time goes by, the negative image of computer science and geeks will fade away. With more "socially capable" individuals in computer science, people like myself will feel more inclined to choose a math or science related subject as a major. I met Leah Culver at a dinner in Amsterdam, and her story is inspiring. She went to school thinking that she'd go into art or graphic design, and left with a degree in computer science. She did what she felt passionate about, and others like myself will follow in a similar path. Just last week, I met a girl through my blog named Cassie Wallender, who also began college at age 16 and took up programming and business from an early age. In the coming few years, we'll hopefully see more and more girls flooding the halls of science departments!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college, Bard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

The following post was inspired by a breakfast conversation I recently had with a successful entrepreneur:

If there's a single thing you should take away from business school, it is to ignore sunk costs If your company is going nowhere, cut your losses and move on.

There are three things that could happen to your company: 1) It can succeed by going IPO, getting acquired, or by making a modest profit. 2) It can fail. 3) It could go nowhere. The absolute worst thing that can happen to for it to go nowhere. Few thoughts:

Firstly, it's widely agreed that entrepreneurship is best while young. You're the most ripe for doing business from the second you finish school up until your mid-late 30s because you have less to lose. At a younger age, you're more connected to what's going on in the industries you're associated with. If you start a company in your early 20s and the company drags on for more than a few years, you're wasting precious time. If you don't see lots and lots of growth or if your company's not bringing in cash, cut your losses within a few months of starting the company and move on to the next opportunity.

If your company lacks a business model, yet it continues to grow, you should have the option to sell out. Matter of fact, you should probably think long and hard about selling such a business after two to three years of working on it. If you had a serious business model that proved to be effective, this would be different. Given that the company is (supposedly) growing, you'll probably be getting acquisition offers left and right. What's important is that you always have the option to sell. The discussion of selling a company will vary from person to person. There is no correct way to do this, because while some entrepreneurs prefer to exit early, others prefer to create businesses for the long term.

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was offered billions by Yahoo to sell Facebook? Many of us critiqued him for not selling, because the future of Facebook was unknown. Most of us would kill to sell our company for even a few million! But his reasons for not selling probably weren't monetary related. If Zuck had $2B VS $20B, the course of his life wouldn't change all that much. He wants to build a true business for the long run, and selling out to yahoo would be premature. As long as Facebook continues to grow, he has the option to exit.

For other companies that either aren't growing or aren't finding a way to exit, cut your losses sooner rather than later. If you start a company and within three months, you realize that you don't click with your co-founder, get out. He or she is wasting your irreplaceable time and energy.

Even if you know that it's time to get out, it can be incredibly difficult to sell. After all, you've been growing your business as if you were raising a child. Sending your child to college is always difficult -- sending your child to college years before the average child goes is even more difficult. I see selling businesses in a very similar light. It's different from person to person, and when the time is right, you'll know when to exit.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

Most of you have only met the superficial version of me. I've been thinking a lot about my personal brand in the recent weeks, and I've come to a few major decisions as to how I want people to perceive me. Through my blog, I have complete discrepancy as to how and what I write about myself. Until lately, it's been completely overdone. For some silly reason, half the people who have heard of me perceive me as a child prodigy. The other half either think I'm arrogant or don't care. The purpose of this blog post is to tell you that I'm more of the normal teenage girl than you probably think.

Firstly, I don't deserve the credibility that I have. I'm out there in the tech world and I'm sometimes mentioned on people's blogs. Big deal! I haven't sold a successful startup and I don't have a product that I've launched this year. Yet somehow, I get invited to speaking engagements and other fancy elitist groups. Instead, you should see me for and only for my enthusiasm and potential. I'm off to an early start, but in a few years, that won't matter. Nobody will care in 10 years that I went to college early and failed at a few startups when I was 16 years old. I guess I'm slightly worried that I've been spending too much time talking to you guys and not enough time doing something great. Until I find amazing success, none of you should have the right to call me smart.

Next, I much rather you guys view me as a child prodigy than as a whore. Sure, my personal branding has been overdone, but at least it was overdone in a somewhat positive direction. Unlike Paris Hilton, people have a slight clue as to what I want to do with my life. Smarts are sustainable, looks are not. As one of my friends said, "if you're going to be famous, at least have a business model." People associate my name to business and technology. As for Paris Hilton, well, people look at her as a hot girl with an empty brain. No matter how hard she tries to change her personal brand, people will be stuck in their old ways of thinking. So, if you overdo your personal branding, "do it with a business model" :)

Internet celebrity Julia Allison wrote on her Tumblr yesterday:

I’m in the midst of a transformation right now. Actually, it’s not so much an internal transformation (although there’s that, too) but a realignment - so my outside matches my inside, so the perception matches the reality.

The quote just comes to show that people don't understand who she is. They read about her in Valleywag, but they don't know how fun, enthusiastic, and smart she is in real life. I've been told so many times by my blog readers that I'm different from how they thought I'd be. Some thought that I'd be formal, proper, intelligent and well-spoken, whereas others thought I'd be a snotty-arrogant-uptight-child-prodigy-bitch. One reader suggested that I overdid my professional brand, whereas Julia blurred her personal and professional brands together.

In real life, I'm just an adventurous teenager. I like to do something called having fun. I have something called friends. I go to class, I do my homework, I play instruments, I play sports, and do all the things you'd expect a normal 17 year old kid to do. (minus the many fun business/tech trips I've been on). Sure, I'm in college, but that doesn't mean much about my personality. Instead, try to see through the fog: all of the random bloggers you stalk are real human beings and have lives outside of the internet. Their personal brand may be completely deceiving for all you know.

Like many girls, I've had that desire to have the spotlight on me. And I've gotten quite a lot of spotlight for a girl my age, but I've come to realize that it's nothing more than a distraction. I'm dedicating too much effort to building up my personal brand and not enough in a) leading a normal teenage life and b) working on doing something amazing, whether it be save the world or build a hot startup. As one of my friends Charlie mentioned, the most brilliant people he knows prefer to keep in the shadows. They don't have much of a personal brand, but their smarts and successes create the true credibility one needs to be known. I guess as of late, this idea has been much more appealing to me.

So what does all of this mean for you, me, and my future in blogging?

1) The blog lives on. I'll always continue to blog because I love you guys so much!

2) I've decided to cut wayy back on my conference going. I have many connections as it stands and I don't need to waste more time networking with 50 year olds.

3) You hopefully won't have to see me on Valleywag again. As I've mentioned in other posts, the influx of press gives you a temporary high.

4) It's soo easy to get drawn into the fun culture of Silicon Valley. It's so easy that you sometimes forget to create something of value.

So for now, I'll try to stay in the shadows. I have no problem speaking at conferences or doing interviews or whatever, but I'll remain honest and true to myself: I'm a kid who's yet to succeed in business.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup and the managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. Big thanks to my friends Jacob Locke, Patricia Handschiegel, and Charlie O'Donnell for having helped me gather my thoughts on this.

All of us presumably live freakishly busy lives. As I write this blog post, I'm counting down the minutes I have left to send out my college applications. There is just SO MUCH STUFF TO DO.

So, I suggest that instead of just creating to-do lists, you create yourself not-to-do lists as well. If you don't do the list thing, it's important to be mindful of how many opportunities you have to do different things. Accepting every opportunity available to you would hinder your ability to do what matters most to you. For example, this year, I felt like I've done way too much. Or at least, I've committed to way too much. At school alone, I'm the treasurer for my student government, a Social Action Service Leader, and student taking a full load of credits (even though I don't need any more to graduate). By trying to run a business at the same time, I was being careless. By trying to add a social life to the mix, I was also being careless. Thus, in order for me and any of you to live happy fulfilling lives, it's important to prioritize the many things you'd like to do with the many things you can and should do.

This may come off as being a ramble, but I think it's serious. Look at your life, write down everything you're doing with the hours per week you spend on it, and prioritize what means most to you. Cross the stupid things off the list. Cross interactions with any dimwits off the list. Your life is hectic as it is; no need to deal with any stupid assholes who critique your everyday existence!

And as of right now, I'm crossing blogging off my list of things to do. That is, until I send in the college applications I'm supposed to be doing.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com.

I'm often asked if I plan on dropping out to start a company. Plenty of people see school as being absolutely useless, but the older people I speak to (30+) tell me to stick in school, party my butt off, study abroad, and have a good time. In the past year alone, I've gone back and forth on the two ideas. In the end, I've decided not to. Here's why:

This past summer, I was almost set on dropping out. I finished high school before I turned 16 and decided that I was too cool for school. I felt tempted by the success stories of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others. Only problem being that my very early experiences turned me into an arrogant little child. I've since spent hours speaking to seasoned entrepreneurs, including my loved mom and dad, about the importance of college for a young person like me. We decided that I need college more than most people BECAUSE I finished high school early. I never got the normal childhood experience.

Big shocker: To be quite honest, I can't name more than a few people besides my parents who understand who I am beyond the superficial level. There's more to me than most of you can ever fathom. Most people see me in one of two ways:

1) I'm an arrogant brainchild who's destined for failure.

2) I'm smart and destined to do great thing. My positive reputation is well deserved.

And with great honesty, I see myself somewhere in between. I'm smart enough to be in college, but I'm not smart enough to be able to drop out. I've accepted the fact that I'll often write incredibly stupid things on my blog only to regret having written them hours later. Fact is, I'm still learning. I'm still a teenager and it's very easy for people to forget that. The expectations people have on me is incredibly high. If anything, my Asian parents have lower expectations of me than anyone else does because they understand that I'm still a kid, regardless of how mature I may seem. As a teenager, I still don't know who exactly I am or where I'll end up being in 5 years.

But a few things I know for certain: I'll stay in college for all four years and still get my degree before turning 20 anyway. And once that happens, I'll be ready to focus full time on a company I'm passionate about.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com.

Ok... fine.. I'll admit it: Very frequently, I write a blog post about something that I dislike or expect to dislike. Several days later, I would then write about the same topic and have a much more positive opinion. Harvard Model United Nations just so happens to be one of these things.

After all, I've been to over 30 conferences now. I've only paid for two of them. Therefore, who could blame me for having such high expectations on what is a good conference versus a bad conference? Of all the events I've been to this year, I'll probably place Harvard Model United Nations in my top 5 list for all conferences I've been to. Impressive!

The first question is, what makes an event better than the others? The speakers, the topics, the food, the atmosphere? Wrong! The quality of the attendees takes precedence over everything. If there are good speakers, you could probably read their interviews on the interwebs. If there are amazing topics at the conference, I'm sure that any average joe could probably find it in the local book store. But people are different - in order to make lasting connections/friendships or whatever you'd like to call them, you must physically be present at the event.

Next, what is considered to be a high-caliber conference attendee? You could look at this from many different perspectives. Firstly, no sales people, and absolutely none of those silly network marketers! If you're paying hundreds/thousands of dollars to go to a conference, (I'm not one of them!) then you probably expect the sales people to be completely rid of. A good conference attendee may not necessarily be a wealthy celebrity. In fact, these people may be so popular that they'll want nothing to do with you. That's why it helps to have invite-only events. In the example of Harvard Model United Nations, only undergrads from colleges came. There was no application from attendees, but the expectations of a "Harvard" conference weeded out the lazy kids who didn't really care about debating and negotiating on world issues. As you may have read, I recently got accepted into TED - often described as a "group of remarkable people that gather to exchange ideas of incalculable value". The incredible value from this conference comes from the fact that most TEDsters are of such a high-caliber. This is the precise reason why invite-only groups are of such high value. Events such as TED don't only want smart people - they want attendees who are open to helping others with their interests and aspirations. And at the Harvard Model United Nations, there was no option to sit passively in the back. Sure, many people did it, but plenty more motivated students sat in the front and played an active role in the committee sessions.

Picture of me and my fellow "early-college" classmates at Harvard Model U.N. I'm the Asian down below if you couldn't guess that much.

Conferences need to manage the work-play relationship. For example, having too many workshops and/or keynote speakers can be boring! When I first wrote about the Harvard Model United Nation Conference, I mentioned how I saw plenty of people falling asleep at the opening ceremony. The basic idea is simple: bring in a charismatic keynote speaker or don't bring one at all! My opinions are controversial, but I hold my belief that a boring keynote speaker will do nothing but help set a *boring* attitude to the rest of the conference. This means that the conference had a rocky start, but quickly picked up pace when the attendees were thrown into action. After the committee sessions ended, the conference organizers threw cocktail parties, delegate dances, and more! Of course, the attendees threw their own private parties that nobody can know about. Whoops.

Overall, it was an amazing experience. Great people, great work-play balance, and all of the other good things that go along with having a grade A event. (minus the super boring keynote speaker) Don't be misled: Sure, this was a kiddie conference and I'm still one of them, but it seems essential that any good event must bring in quality people who are engaged in both learning and helping fellow attendees. Harvard Model United Nations, TED, and any "un-conference" are particular good at achieving this.

Plenty more to come! I can't wait to report on Northern Voice 2008.

PS - I wore formal attire throughout the conference. First time ever. Now THATs impressive!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.