Plot twist.

After spending more than three years in industry, I realized I wanted to understand the why, not just the how. That curiosity led me to make one of the biggest decisions of my life: packing my bags, moving across the world, and starting over at the University of Maryland to pursue a Master's in Data Science.

The next two years became one of the most challenging, yet rewarding, chapters of my journey. Between coursework, projects, teaching assistant responsibilities, two part-time jobs, internship applications, interviews, and more coffee than I'd like to admit, life rarely slowed down. But somewhere in the middle of all the deadlines and late nights, I found myself genuinely enjoying the process of learning, whether it was predictive modeling, NLP, machine learning systems, or simply figuring things out one step at a time.

There were days that felt overwhelming, and moments when everything seemed to happen at once. Looking back, though, every challenge shaped me into a more resilient engineer, a better problem solver, and a more confident version of myself. If this chapter taught me one thing, it's that growth begins where comfort ends.