TIL 01/45 Summary (Last 45 days) đź”—
Last 45 days have been a roller coaster ride for me. I saw some steep falls, some momentary peaks and had some very helpful realizations. After Semester 4, I had a pretty hard time coping up with the shortcomings and results of the semester,I lost my confidence and felt insecure about my career (I still feel that ;_;). Through all this time I felt helpless and drifted away from people. But my family helps me calm down. But one thing I do best is realization, a bit slow but sharp accuracy.
After realizing the hard way, that one should have a continuous learning-time curve, This summer I explored many tech domains and got a bit clarity about what I can do for next 10 years of my life and it has always been there but yet not so clear that R&D is what suits me the best. Reason being that I can’t do the same thing everyday but yes I can learn something everyday and do it for some days and then start something new. I never regret (ok maybe 80% no regret) not starting early because mostly I don’t feel clueless about what 2 geeks of any other domain talk about. Still I wish I was a master of some trait, but cool.
When the summer breaks started I was willing to prepare for all the domains (SDE, finance, core, etc) for the campus internship drives to get any backup for next summer as most of them had just one prerequisite basically Competitive Programming. But I am glad I didn’t make that mistake and focussed on finding the domain suitable for me. I spent the vacation learning from MOOCS, building self projects and working on a sponsored research project. I participated in campus internship drive primarily for core electronics and R&D(in my field of interest). This Summer was definitely better than previous breaks.
I have/had many problems to deal with but I gained a bit of confidence in myself and was clear on some fundamentals to move ahead. Seeing people worried about CDC internship drives, some biases/preferences, some not so fair processes caused rift between many people, increased toxicity and through that I was able to see clearly that me or anyone else can’t change the process, the world is unfair we have to accept that and move ahead. I sat for some tests and 1 interview each on Day 1 and Day 2. I felt the fear of losing the day 1 chance at Google Hardware but the next day after losing Google Hardware, I was not so worried on Day 2 and got an offer from Texas Instruments. It was a long weekend but I was lucky to make it through. After that I have been looking for projects and research opportunities to work on, but I am out of ideas. I am confused again about what I should learn next ? Should I master core electronics or explore something new ? Becoz this is my last year to learn anything during undergrad (Pre-Final Year Undergrad).
The only thing I learnt from last 2 months is that, the beauty of time is that whether good or bad it passes away…
Signing off
Aditya Ranjan Jha