I “dropped out” of college to work at an AI lab.
I put “dropped out” in quotes because, as you’ll see, I did eventually finish my degree. But for most of my final semester, I was living in California, working full-time at xAI, while technically still being a Rice student.
In San Francisco and the Bay Area, dropping out to work at an AI startup is almost an “aura” thing to do. But when I actually did it, I wasn’t just excited. I was pretty sad.
It was my senior year of college. I had spent years imagining what my last semester would look like: random nights with friends, trips, Beer Bike, doing stupid things because we knew it was the last time all of us would be living in the same place. And suddenly, I was about to leave all of that behind.
This is mostly a story about that decision, whether I regretted it, and what I ended up taking away from it.
The offer
In November 2025, I got an email inviting me to an xAI event in New York.
I remember being ridiculously excited just to have the opportunity to go. I had always dreamed of working at one of the big AI labs. At the same time, I was already pretty deep into the Google interview process, and I had more or less assumed that was where I would end up.
Then I went to the xAI event.
Listening to the people there talk about what they were building completely changed how I felt about my future. Suddenly, the idea of going to a huge established company felt less exciting. I wanted ownership. I wanted the rush of a startup. I wanted to work somewhere where the problems felt almost unreasonable and where I could look at something and feel like, somehow, I had actually helped build it.
While I was waiting to hear back from xAI, my Google recruiter called me and told me I had passed the final round and would be moving on to team matching.
I was over the moon.
But at the same time, I felt this weird sense of unease.
Working at Google was something I had dreamed about since I was a kid. So why wasn’t I as excited as I thought I would be?
Two days later, essentially on Christmas Eve, I had my final call with Jimmy Ba, one of the co-founders of xAI. At the end of the call, he gave me an offer and told me they wanted me to start ASAP.
I walked out of my room and told my parents:
“I got the offer. I guess I’m moving to California in two weeks.”
Trying to Have It All
At first, I was convinced I could somehow make everything work.
I could work at xAI, finish my degree, and still have the senior spring I had imagined.
Did I have an actual plan for how I was going to do that?
Kind of.
I still needed one PE credit to graduate, so my brilliant idea was to fly back to Houston every weekend.
I explained the plan to my sister: work all week in California, take a midnight flight Friday, land at IAH at 7 AM, Uber to Rice, go to PE class, work for a few hours, hang out with my friends Saturday night, work Sunday, then fly back to California Sunday night and go straight into another work week.
She told me something I think nobody wants to hear:
“Arsh, you can’t have it all.”
One of my favorite anime is Fullmetal Alchemist, and a huge idea in the show is equivalent exchange: nothing comes for free. To gain something, you have to give something of equal value in return.
I thought that was bullshit.
I was going to have it all.
I would just spend every ounce of energy I had to make it happen.
Turns Out Flying Across the Country Every Weekend Sucks
On my first day at xAI, I left the office at 10:30 PM.
The next day, 11 PM.
And I loved it.
For the first time in my life, I felt this insane amount of energy around the work I was doing. Everything moved fast. Everything felt important. I was learning constantly, surrounded by people who were absurdly good at what they did, and I felt completely alive.
Then Friday came.
I took a midnight flight from California to Houston. I landed at IAH around 7 AM, took an Uber to Rice, went to PE from 9:00 to 10:30, worked for a few hours, and was finally free in time to play Catan with my friends that night.
Sunday, more or less the same thing.
Then I flew back to Palo Alto and did it again.
I lasted two weekends.
Turns out my sister was right. This fucking sucked.
After a lot of begging, emails, and back-and-forth between me, my professor, and administrators, I eventually got permission to take my yoga LPAP remotely.
I had won.
Sort of.
Because once I no longer had to fly back every weekend, I also lost my excuse to fly back every weekend.
That was the part that hurt.
This was the final semester where all of my college friends would be living in one place together, probably for the last time, and I was going to miss most of it.
The Part I Didn’t Expect
The first few weeks in California were honestly pretty lonely.
I would come back from work to a completely desolate room: a mattress on the floor, piles of clothes sitting on top of the suitcase I had moved here with, and a Luffy figurine I had bought on a Japan trip right before all of this started.
That was basically everything I owned.
I would get home late, scroll Reels for maybe thirty minutes, fall asleep, and do it all again the next day.
For the first two or three weeks, I didn’t really know anyone.
That part didn’t fit the romantic version of “dropping out to work at an AI lab” very well.
Eventually, that changed almost accidentally.
At the dinners, I started talking to random people. Then I started recognizing them. Then we started sitting together. Somewhere along the way, I actually made friends.
And the place started feeling less temporary.
Now I have a bed frame, a desk, and drawers, so I guess things worked out.
So, Was It Worth It?
Yes.
Absolutely.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t tradeoffs.
When I came back to Rice for Beer Bike, I had to run back to my friends’ dorm after the water balloon fight because one of my training jobs needed debugging. We were in the middle of a sprint, so I sat there staring at logs while everyone else went to watch the races.
I missed trips.
I missed random nights.
I missed memories I would have liked to have been there for.
But I made different ones.
I remember working on our video extension model with three other people for two straight months, grinding on it until it finally shipped. Then one day I saw the thing I had worked on actually deployed in production.
That feeling was hard to describe.
For two months it had been experiments, bugs, training jobs, bad outputs, better outputs, more experiments, and then suddenly it was real. People could use it.
I remember the surprise 11 PM dinners, when someone would post in Slack that food had arrived and we would all go downstairs to find some absurdly good fancy meal waiting for us. There would be this massive crowd of people still in the office late at night, all of us working toward the same goal.
I remember random Friday parties, Pizza Fridays, and going on walks with the other drop outs.
I remember sitting around the cafeteria talking, everyone stopping every few minutes to check in on whatever agents we had running, then jumping right back into the conversation like nothing happened.
After-work basketball is always fun too, even though I suck.
I remember all of us getting the email that xAI was being acquired by SpaceX.
I remember SpaceX IPO day and all of the chaos around that.
I remember being in a meeting room with Elon on my second day of work and thinking, How the fuck did I end up here?
Those are memories I would never have had if I stayed at Rice for my last semester.
And somewhere in all of this, I finally accepted what my sister had told me from the beginning.
You really can’t have it all.
Equivalent exchange was real after all.
I gave up a version of my final semester that I had imagined for years. There are memories with my college friends that I will never get back, and I don’t want to pretend that those didn’t matter.
But in exchange, I got something else.
I got to see something I helped build to reach production. I got to work alongside people who cared enough about what they were building that the office was still packed at 11 PM. I found a new group of friends in a city where, for the first few weeks, I barely knew anyone.
And I grew more in a few months than I thought was possible.
Would I tell everyone to drop out of college to join a startup?
Probably not.
But if you’re ever lucky enough to have an opportunity that feels terrifying precisely because you know how much it could change your life, I think there are times when you have to take the leap of faith.
You might have to give something up.
Maybe that’s the point.