I used to think growing up between countries was just a quirky part of my childhood, something you mention in icebreakers and then move on. Now I see it has shaped almost everything about how I think, learn, build projects, and even how I scroll through a website or walk through a museum.
So if I answer it plainly: growing up as a Third Culture Kid trained me to be fluent in context switching, to be comfortable in in-between spaces, and to pay close attention to systems that other people treat as invisible. That mindset is what pushed me toward art history, research, entrepreneurship, and the kind of curiosity that fits quite well with people who like to build or work in tech.
What “home” means when you grow up in transit
I was born in London, moved to Singapore before I could tie my own shoes, then landed in Los Angeles and stayed for roughly sixteen years. On paper, that sounds glamorous. In real life, it felt more like having a folder of half-finished definitions of “home” that never quite matched.
London is a place I know through stories and photos; Singapore lives in my mind through smells, sounds, and my first Mandarin words; Los Angeles is the place where my daily life actually unfolded. None of them is a single, clean answer to “Where are you from?”
For a long time, that question made me pause more than it should. I would try to fit the answer into one neat sentence and it never worked. At some point I stopped trying to compress it.
Being a third culture kid taught me that “home” is less a point on a map and more a pattern of people, languages, and routines that you carry with you.
Oddly, that pattern is not so different from how a developer might think about environments and configurations. The code is the same, but the settings change everything.
In my case, the “settings” were:
- Different countries and school systems
- Several languages in rotation at home
- Lots of travel, often back-to-back
- Family in one continent, daily life in another
You start to look for constants. You also get used to the idea that the interface of your life might change quite often.
Growing up in three languages
If you grow up around tech, error messages stop being scary. They are just signals that something is off. For me, language misfires worked the same way.
At home, Hungarian was the default with my parents and with almost all extended family. English took over at school and in most social settings. Mandarin was a third layer that started in Singapore and kept going when our Mandarin teacher moved in with us in Los Angeles as an au pair.
We did practice tests, sometimes on camera, and uploaded them to my mom’s YouTube channel. Those videos were slightly awkward and a bit funny, but they forced a habit that feels very close to debugging: say something, see what sounds wrong, correct, try again.
Constant language switching taught me to pay close attention to context, tone, and small signals. That same attention is what later helped me read data, user stories, and artworks with the same kind of focus.
If you work in or around tech, that mindset probably feels familiar. You think in states. This person is in this context, so this word means this, but in another setting it means something else. The idea is simple, but living inside it every day shapes how your brain works.
Hungarian as a “secret” interface
Hungarian sits apart from English and Mandarin. The grammar, the sound, the vocabulary, everything. In the United States, almost nobody speaks it, so it quickly became our quiet channel.
In public, if my parents switched to Hungarian, it meant the conversation had just moved into a private layer. It felt like toggling into a private Slack channel that nobody else could see.
For a third culture kid, that kind of switching is not dramatic. It is routine. But later, when I started working on projects that crossed cultures and industries, I realized how useful it is to have built-in respect for different communication “layers.”
Patterns from three continents
The part that shaped me most was not just moving countries. It was the constant sense that I am always a little bit inside and a little bit outside of every place.
In Singapore, I was the small foreign kid at a half-American, half-Chinese preschool. In Los Angeles, I was the Hungarian kid from Europe who still built LEGO sets like an 8-year-old long after most of my friends stopped. In Hungary, visiting family, I was the American cousin who spoke fluent Hungarian but did not always get the local jokes.
Living between cultures trains you to be a quiet observer. You watch how people behave, what they value, what they ignore, and you start to see patterns that locals sometimes miss.
That habit is very close to user research. You sit, you watch how people move through a space or a product, and you notice where things do not match what they say they do.
Here is one way I sometimes think about it:
| Place | How I felt | What I learned to notice |
|---|---|---|
| London | Attached by stories, not memory | How family history shapes identity even when you do not remember the place |
| Singapore | Visitor and student at the same time | The role of language and school culture in how kids see themselves |
| Los Angeles | Settled but still foreign in some ways | How different communities in one city live almost parallel lives |
| Hungary (summers) | Insider by family, outsider by daily life | The gap between local traditions and the version of “home” you carry in your head |
If you are building products for global users, this tension is not abstract. It is very real. The app that feels “normal” in one country can feel strange or even rude in another. Being a third culture kid keeps that fact sitting at the top of your mind.
From slime to small ventures
I did not frame myself as an entrepreneur when I was a kid. My siblings and I just liked making things and then, somehow, people wanted to buy them.
We started with bracelets at the local farmers market. Later, my brother and I fell into the slime world. We learned recipes, played with textures and colors, and at some point it turned into a small business. We sold hundreds of jars, then flew to London for a slime convention and sold around 400 to 500 in one day. We hauled everything from Los Angeles to London and back. That part was chaotic.
For a third culture kid, that mix of logistics, different currencies, and different expectations from customers across countries felt oddly familiar. Traveling with products just felt like traveling with family, plus inventory.
Those early projects did a few things for my brain:
- Made “online + offline” feel normal. We were selling both to local people in LA and at events abroad.
- Turned feedback into fuel. Kids are very honest customers. If they do not like your slime texture, they say it.
- Connected creativity with actual numbers. Quantity, costs, margins, shipping, all of it.
These are the same muscles that product people, founders, and engineers use, just in smaller and stickier form.
The teen art market
Later in high school, I co-founded a teen art market. Think of it as a small digital gallery where students could show and sell their work. It was not a huge company. It was more like an experiment in how to bring emerging artists together and give them a real audience.
What caught me off guard was how much friction there is between talent and visibility. You can make beautiful work and still have almost no one see it. That is a technical problem, a design problem, and a culture problem all at once.
Growing up across cultures, I had already seen how some voices travel easily across borders while others stay stuck in one city or one language. The teen art market just turned that feeling into a concrete project.
Art as a debugging tool for culture
People sometimes ask me why I chose art history instead of something more traditional for tech, like computer science or engineering. I like those fields, and I spend plenty of time around people who work in them, but art felt like the place where my third culture brain could do its best work.
When you grow up around different cultures, you start to sense how images, symbols, and stories work in each one. An ad that works in Los Angeles might feel empty in Budapest. A painting that is read one way in a European museum can be read very differently in an American classroom.
So I leaned into that and studied art and visual culture, museum studies, and curatorial practices. I spent a full mentorship on Velazquez’s “Las Meninas,” pulling apart how one painting can both reflect and question the power structures of its time. In a strange way, it felt similar to analyzing a complex codebase where every part hints at something about the system that produced it.
For me, art history is not just about beautiful objects. It is about reverse engineering the values, biases, and blind spots of a society from what it chooses to put on a wall.
If you work in tech, this might sound familiar. We talk a lot about bias in algorithms and training data. Art is one of the oldest datasets we have.
Gender, parenting, and art as a case study
In my senior year of high school, I did an honors research project on the career gaps between mothers and fathers in the art world. When an artist has children, what happens? Does their career stall, accelerate, or stay the same? And does that answer change based on gender?
I spent more than 100 hours reading studies, reviewing case examples, and talking with a professor who focuses on maternity in the art world. The pattern was clear: women often hit a wall after having children, while men sometimes gain public approval for “balancing” fatherhood and art.
You could say this is “just” about the art world, but I do not think that is true. If you look at startup founders, tech leaders, or investors, you often find similar patterns. The details shift, but the story is close.
That project taught me a few skills that overlap a lot with tech work:
- Designing a research question that is narrow enough to study but wide enough to matter
- Translating complex findings into visual formats that non-experts can grasp quickly
- Seeing how culture and data interact, not just treating numbers as neutral
I also learned that you can love a field and still see its flaws clearly. In fact, you have to.
Building a public voice through a blog
My longest running project has been the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia, a blog where I write about women in business. I started it as a student and kept it going for years, putting in around four hours each week. Over time I interviewed over 100 women, many of them balancing multiple roles, tough markets, and expectations that were not always fair.
At first, I saw it as simple storytelling. Then I noticed how much pattern recognition it required. You talk to someone in one country about how investors react to her, then you hear a similar story from a different sector on another continent. The surface details change, but underneath, the logic is uncomfortably similar.
For someone who grew up in different cultures, that repetition feels heavy but also strangely validating. You realize it is not “just you” or “just this city.” You start to think more systemically, which is something tech communities talk about all the time.
I also learned some direct, almost technical skills from running the blog:
- Basic site structure and SEO, just from trial and error and watching what people actually read
- Long form content planning and editing
- How to ask better interview questions that lead to real stories, not rehearsed answers
Blogging while moving between cultures and projects made the internet feel less like a separate world and more like one more “country” I live in. Different norms, different language, different risks, but still human at the core.
Sport, discipline, and strange environments
For about ten years, I was a competitive swimmer. Six days a week, countless hours in the pool, then meets that could take up entire weekends. That level of training gives you a durable rhythm: show up, repeat, adjust, push, recover.
Later, I switched to water polo for three years. During COVID, when pools closed, our team refused to stop. We started training in the ocean, which was colder, rougher, and much less predictable. Two hours each day, cutting through waves instead of clean lanes.
If you grew up in more stable environments, that might sound extreme. For me, it felt like an extension of my childhood. You think you know the system, then conditions change, and you either adapt or you stop. That mindset is everywhere in tech: an API changes, a platform shifts rules, a tool you rely on goes away.
Sports, especially in changing settings, taught me how to:
- Work in teams where trust matters more than comfort
- Stay calm when the environment is not “designed” for you
- Attach my identity less to outcomes and more to consistent effort
That last part helped with moving countries, too. If you tie your sense of self only to a place or a role, it cracks every time you switch. If you tie it to how you show up each day, you have something more stable.
LEGO, museums, and how I think about systems
I did not grow out of LEGO. If anything, my interest deepened as I got older. At some point I counted and realized I had built around 45 sets, more than 60,000 pieces. I liked the bigger, more complex ones the most.
What I enjoy is not just the final build. It is the way the instructions break down a big structure into small steps, and how one missed piece can quietly throw off the entire model. That is not far from reading documentation or working with layered architectures. You are constantly aware that every small choice nests inside a larger system.
Growing up as a third culture kid, museums felt a bit like physical versions of LEGO. You walk through rooms built on decisions: which artists to show, which stories to center, which labels to write. Many Saturdays we went gallery hopping or visited museums, and I started to see how different institutions “architected” their spaces for different audiences.
That habit of reading physical and digital spaces together is probably what pulled me toward art history and also made it easy to talk with friends in CS or product design. We are all, in different ways, dealing with the question:
“Who is this space built for, and who is silently left out?”
Third culture thinking and tech culture
If you are still wondering how all this connects to tech, let me be a bit more direct. There are at least a few clear overlaps between growing up as a third culture kid and the habits that help in technical or product work.
1. Context switching as a daily skill
Moving between countries and languages teaches you to scroll through contexts fast. You learn to ask:
- Who is in the room?
- What is the shared language here, literally and socially?
- What part of myself fits, and what part will stay quiet today?
If you work in a team that spans time zones and cultures, this is daily life. The difference is that third culture kids did not learn it from a workshop. We just lived it.
2. Curiosity about edge cases
Third culture kids often feel like edge cases ourselves. Forms do not always have the right boxes for our backgrounds. Assumptions about “normal childhood” or “typical family structure” tend to miss us.
Because of that, we learn to respect edge cases instead of treating them as annoying exceptions. When I look at a product or a system, my mind goes quickly to:
Who is this missing? Whose story or use case was not on the whiteboard when this was designed?
That question matters in art, education, hiring tools, recommendation engines, and almost any product that touches real people.
3. Comfort with ambiguity
There is a certain comfort in having a single clear label. Third culture kids rarely get that luxury. We are from “here and there and also sort of that other place.”
Ambiguity can be tiring, but it also trains you not to panic when something does not fit a known template. You learn how to hold partial answers in your head without shutting down. That helps a lot when:
- You are early in a research project and do not see the pattern yet
- Requirements shift and you are not sure what the final scope will be
- You are working with data that raises new questions instead of neat answers
Family gravity and long-term perspective
One detail that shapes my sense of time is that most of my extended family lives in Europe. My immediate family in the United States is almost an outpost. Every summer, we went back, spoke Hungarian, saw cousins, and re-entered a different pace of life.
That back and forth does two things:
- Makes you quietly aware of different economic and social systems
- Reminds you that what looks “normal” in Los Angeles or New York is not the global default
Many tech conversations happen as if the lifestyle of a few major cities is the baseline for the world. Being a third culture kid pushes back against that assumption. You carry other baselines in your head.
I think that is healthy. It stops you from treating any single place as the center of the universe, which is useful when you are trying to build things that work across borders.
A small Q&A with myself
Q: Would you choose this kind of upbringing again?
I think so, yes. It was confusing at times. Rootless, in a way. But it also gave me a wider sense of possibility and a sharper sense of how much context shapes people. I would not trade that.
Q: Did being a third culture kid make anything harder?
Socially, it sometimes did. Small talk about “where are you from” still feels more loaded than it should. I also sometimes felt like I was always explaining myself. But that difficulty turned into a strength when I started interviewing people, doing research, and working on cross-cultural projects. You become careful with how you ask questions.
Q: How does this actually help someone in tech, beyond being an interesting story?
It helps in much quieter ways than most people expect. It shapes how you:
- Notice who is not in the room or in the dataset
- Talk to users whose lives do not match your own
- Design for people in different countries, languages, and value systems
It will not magic you into being a better engineer or designer. But it might make you a better observer, and that is often where good products, fair systems, and more thoughtful art all begin.
Q: If you are not a third culture kid, can you still think this way?
Of course. You do not need to move across continents to learn to notice context or question your defaults. You can build that mindset by:
- Listening carefully to people whose lives are structured very differently from yours
- Spending time in spaces where your language or habits are not the norm
- Reading or working across disciplines, not just your own
I grew up with these habits because of where my parents moved and how our lives unfolded. You can choose them on purpose. The effect on how you see art, tech, and everyday systems is surprisingly similar.
