people whom i am grateful for: series 1

Last week, I came back from my senior trip to Vegas with my friends. I had a genuinely great time, and part of what made it feel so meaningful was knowing this would probably be one of the last times all of us would be together like that. Soon, everyone will scatter to different cities, different jobs, different lives, and there is something strange about being surrounded by people you love while already sensing how much harder it will be to gather like this again.

Vegas itself felt absurd. It is a city built to overwhelm you, where everything seems designed to make you want more: brighter lights, louder music, bigger bets, fancier rooms, more spectacle. It is all smoke, flashing screens, casino carpets, and people chasing a better night than the one they are already having. And right next to all of that is the Grand Canyon, quiet and enormous, as if the world decided to place something ancient and indifferent beside all this noise.

At Grand Canyon with my friends.

It probably was not the right place for broke seniors to go, except maybe for a few clubbing spots. Still, we somehow ended up staying at a ridiculously fancy hotel because one of our friends found a deal that made it cheap enough to justify. We spent so much on the room that we could barely enjoy anything else, though it is not like we were all that interested in gambling anyway. Most of the people in the casinos seemed decades older than us, sitting at poker or blackjack tables and placing bets that looked larger than our entire weekend budget.

I will probably write about the trip itself in more detail another time, because that is not really what has stayed with me.

What Stayed With Me

What stayed with me was how grateful I felt to be with people I love, and how aware I was that getting to be there at all was not something I could take for granted.

It was my first trip with my full core friend group, or at least as close to full as we could get. I had missed earlier trips because of money or because other plans got in the way, which made this one feel different. It was not just fun. It felt rare, and maybe a little fragile, because I knew even while it was happening that this stage of life was already beginning to end.

We went to a few places, including Zedd and Illenium. At one point, we were stuck farther back because we had arrived late, and I remember looking toward the VIP section. The people there did not seem all that different from us. They were still young, just separated from everyone else by wristbands, bodyguards, and a little more space.

At Omnia, with my friends. (Sorry Ryan, you look quite drunk here.)

Later, when we finally made it closer to the front, my friends were completely in it, dancing, shouting, getting crushed forward by the crowd and carried by the music and the chaos around them. Everyone near me had their phones raised, filming Zedd, but I realized I did not really care about him at all. I filmed my friends instead, because they were the part I wanted to remember.

Somewhere under the flashing lights, with that giant metal machine hanging over the crowd and women spinning through the air above us like part of a circus, I had this sudden, oddly clear feeling that I wanted to succeed. It was not because I cared about the DJ, and it was not because I wanted some table-service version of success. What hit me in that moment was something much simpler: I was looking at my friends and realizing that nights like this, where everyone is young and together and free enough to waste time in exactly this way, become harder and harder to have as life moves on. Jobs, responsibilities, distance, money, timing: all of it begins to close in.

Why I Want to Succeed

That was the part that stayed with me. I want to build a life where those things do not always get to decide whether we can be together. I do not mean that I want to be the guy buying a VIP table or putting everyone in some private section of a club. We would probably be too old for that anyway. What I mean is simpler than that. I want to do well enough that once a year, I can pull everyone together without people having to stress too much about PTO, flight prices, or whether saying yes is financially irresponsible. It does not have to be glamorous. I just want us to be in the same place again, maybe even in that same club, not because the club matters, but because being able to share a night like that with the same people would.

That feeling stayed with me for the rest of the trip, more than the clubs or the hotel or Vegas itself. What remained was this deep sense of gratitude for where I am, for who I was with, and for all the people who made it possible for me to be there in the first place. As much as I want to keep pushing forward and build a life where I can give better experiences to myself and the people I care about, I also want to take time to recognize the people who helped me climb this far before I move into the next phase of my life.

That is why I want to write a few posts about the people I am grateful to. Maybe three, maybe five. People who, in one way or another, helped place me in the life I have now.

Justin Campbell and the Rekha Iyengar Family

The first is Justin Campbell and the Rekha Iyengar Family.

Recently, I got a request from the financial aid office asking me to write a letter of gratitude to the donor. When I opened the portal, I saw that my scholarship was funded by Justin Campbell and the Rekha Iyengar Family, who specifically wanted to support students involved in entrepreneurship.

So I wrote them this letter:

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A little bit about me:

My name is Tristan Shin, and I studied what I like to call two fake sciences: political science and computer science. I have lived in Sorin, Siegfried, and now Fischer Undergraduate Community. I also love making food for my friends every now and then.

What I wish you knew:

In my freshman year, Tami Schmitz, my Moreau instructor, asked everyone about their journey to Notre Dame and said that every journey is sacred. The way she put it struck me deeply.

Having been raised by my grandmother after my biological mom left when I was born, I grew up Catholic. I went to church, sat there watching people bow and eat that curiously round white thing, and went to a kindergarten dedicated to Saint Mary.

However, after my grandmother passed away from a neuroendocrine round cell tumor, I began to hate all things related to Catholicism. I questioned every person who claimed to be Catholic and asked difficult questions that were hard to answer. To me, my grandmother was the kindest person I knew, and my little mind could not understand why God would take her after such long prayers.

With that, I always thought it was ironic that I chose to come to Notre Dame. I was too dumb to even know that the name meant Saint Mary, and I did not know much about the school since I had lived most of my life abroad. The reason I chose it, though, was because Notre Dame was the only school that invited its students for a send-off event near the end of the Covid pandemic. All the Ivies claimed to care about their students and talked about their great alumni networks, but I saw Notre Dame actually put that into action, and people spoke so highly of the school that choosing it felt natural. If I had known how Catholic it really was, I might have made a different choice.

So when Tami said that the journey to Notre Dame is sacred, it felt almost like an invitation to try being around people who follow Catholic morals again, as if things had come full circle. And deep down, I wanted to try again, because the people I have deeply cherished and admired in my life have all been Catholics, including my preschool teacher, who, even when I was very young, tried to fill the shoes of a motherly figure and once wrote to me to have confidence in what I do.

With that, my time at Notre Dame has not only been a pursuit of academic challenges, but also a spiritual one, and I must say it has not disappointed me. Of all the people I have met, my closest friends are people I am very confident I would not have been able to meet anywhere else, even at the top Ivies or other academically strong institutions. I believe that deeply.

There are, however, a few things I regularly complained about. It had to do with the entrepreneurship scene at Notre Dame, the location, the weather, and the lack of technical talent. Being in San Francisco last summer while working on my startup, I somewhat regretted my choice to come to Notre Dame after seeing Berkeley and Stanford kids intern at Nvidia and casually show up to coffee chats with some of the biggest names in the Valley. I would jokingly say that I wished I could just lift Notre Dame and her students and place them right in the Valley. And as graduation neared, those complaints only grew louder, and I often said that maybe I could have done much more if I had been there.

But I was complaining about the situation without fully realizing how much help I was receiving from strangers. When I learned that my tuition had been supported by people who genuinely wanted the entrepreneurial scene at Notre Dame to thrive, I felt ashamed. Without people like you, so much of what I was able to do here would not have been possible, and yet I was still complaining about the environment around me. For that, I want to sincerely thank you for giving to Notre Dame and for supporting students like me.

With the help of your scholarship, I was able to do the following during my time at Notre Dame:

• Raise $20k for my first social media startup, Atti
• Become a finalist at Telora, Solo Founders, and LeapYear, and receive an interview invitation from Y Combinator W26 with my second startup
• Become a fellow at Kleiner Perkins and Bessemer, the first time for a Notre Dame student
• Start ND Founders Club, the first student-run, founder-focused club designed to give back through mentorship, connect students to top fellowships, and help them get into top startups

I would not have been able to achieve any of this without your help. After graduation, I will be moving to San Francisco to work on my startup, planarian.ai, which is an AI model that would learn bioelectric communication between cells. If successful, it could help address certain birth defects and restrict cancer in a limited sense.

I carry this belief that my life is not just mine, but also shaped by the people who came into it as strangers and still chose to guide me in the right direction. If it were not for the help I received from strangers throughout my life, I would not have become who I am today. I may not become a billionaire one day, but I can assure you that I will not live a life that goes to waste. People like you, people who care deeply about the community, are the very reason why I chose Notre Dame. And now that I am graduating, I hope to become someone who can do the same for others, whether that means inviting accepted students to dinner, supporting their career journeys, or simply showing up for them the way others showed up for me. So thank you again for giving me the opportunity to be among, to be part of, and to be shaped by the people of Notre Dame.