For a long time, I thought my life in STEM would look linear. There’s an unspoken blueprint we absorb early: pick a major, get a job, climb upward. A tidy graph with a clean slope.
That isn’t how it went.
My career has looked more like a series of experiments — some successful, some inconclusive, some abandoned halfway through because the hypothesis stopped making sense. I’ve changed roles, navigated strange corners of industry, built things on the side, quit things that felt wrong, and realized that “figuring it out” is less of a phase and more of a lifelong practice.
Read the full essay on Substack
