Disclaimer: This is too honest, if you want to work with me and/or hire me.. maybe don’t read this?

As a kid I had always struggled with the concept of life and death and our place in the grand scheme of the universe or our insignificance in the enormity of it. But I’ll leave the discussions of philosophy, faith and science aside. A story for another time.

Today, I want to share a personal snippet of my ‘professional’ journey

Life is fair because its unfair to all, thankfully for me, where I complained about its unfairness was quite high up in Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, and I have always been aware of that and try to be conscious of that fact even now when I get into complaining mode (a bad habit but a necessary evil for me to function).

We all have dreams, of a life and of a future, for ourselves or for our loved ones and no matter what your philosophy on life is, hope is the only thing that makes us go on every day in this world of grey and unknown.

At some point, you might have felt stuck, in a life that feels too small for your dreams, or goals that seem too far away, a life that seem impossible. Maybe you’re restricted by finances, by your environment, or by a path that someone else laid out for you. Or maybe you’re already walking the walk, following the path that sits right with you or chasing your goals in the suffocating weight of isolation, either of these or all of the above.
But, you’re not alone, there are so many others like you, some are not at this point yet and some have altered their course to more ‘achievable’ dreams, and yet there are some living in the clouds or parting the seas or running around the clock to wake up and start again. Talk, share and be kind, you don’t know their story and they might not know yours. This fabric of reality we live in, is weaved together by billions of stories.

My story is just one of those billions. It wasn’t as straightforward as I anticipated, and the life I wanted often felt entirely out of reach, maybe not “creating a wormhole to travel to distant exoplanets” out of reach, but close enough.

The Origin Story

No, we’re not started at when I saw the moon for the first time, or took my first flight (the airplane flight, though maybe someday I’ll write about my first space shuttle flight).

I grew up in a very sheltered community, away from my parents home country, no internet for the most part of my life (yes, I am a Gen Z, and that is real struggle right there!), and then there was a dial up with 20Mbps and every website in the first two pages of google search was filtered out by the government, and no print media (obviously) and a very limited selection of books (most of which were old rusty no name books of lost times).
So, you see my window to the outside world was very limited, the information I had was random, like the foreign diplomats who moved to the area for a year or two bringing stories of their lives and the world they experienced, that felt so.. different and these stories were noisy, like static filled signals our makeshift TV antennae occasionally managed to catch (which, in hindsight, was probably operating in a legal grey zone in that state). But even through the static, I heard enough. I saw enough of that outside world to know I had to be a part of it. I didn’t just want to watch the signal, I wanted to find the source and maybe even be one.

In that small community, society rigidly nudged men and women into strictly defined roles. A woman’s strength was in her ability to multitask, work under immense pressure, and bear great physical and mental exertion and was channeled exclusively into the essential, yet unglamorous, role of a homemaker. Meanwhile, men’s physical strength and socially conditioned resilience positioned them as the “primary” breadwinners. I say primary because some of those women worked jobs in addition to raising their children and managing the household, yet their work paid them less and valued them less.

By middle school, the few girls I knew were already raising their younger siblings and doing the chores their brothers didn’t have to touch. Some of them were already promised by their family and engaged to be married, not all of them made it to high school, some got married and had kids before I graduated high school, and I don’t want to come out as criticizing their way of life, there is no right or wrong way of life, this is how we existed for most of human history, but I don’t think its fair to be denied the choice. Where there are no opportunities, or no knowledge of opportunities, there is no choice.

Both of my parents worked in education, and I grew up believing that learning was a fundamental human right. It’s a philosophy I still fiercely stand by: education shouldn’t be a system guarded behind doors of privilege. Everyone should have the resources and access to study whatever they want, whenever they want, from all walks of life and all ages of experience.

And the ten year old me didn’t just want to learn, I wanted to be immortalized in a textbook (I was also trying to read Shakespeare’s sonnet of gilded monuments – and of course someone i.e. my mom had to explain Shakespearean English to 4th grader brain), but yeah, I wanted to set an example of what an average girl can do, if given the choice, someone who wasn’t extraordinary but just had the opportunity, to create a path and create more opportunities while having my share of fame of course, as I said, I wanted to be the source.

I wanted to be next to Newton’s laws of motion, undeniable, something simplistic enough to be explainable, explaining the ways of the universe, a universe that is completely blind to age, gender, and religion, something that couldn’t be deleted or altered like chapters in history and be painted into a new picture with words of literature. So, that when my classmate’s daughter went to middle school, her mother could point to my name and say, “She was my classmate, and she was just like you”. The world we live in is big and the universe even bigger, so much to explore, so much we don’t know. That was my driving force then. Today, it has evolved into a pure awe of the grandeur of celestial bodies and the beauty of the equations that explain forces far beyond our comprehension.

(although as we progress we learn we don’t really use Newtonian laws of motion as is anymore, but they still beautifully explain our earthly observations and hence integrated into education – you don’t have to be right – you have to make sense and you have to be useful)

The Escape Velocity

By the time I was 15, we had moved countries, and I was uprooted into yet another life of isolation. I had no friends, no anchor, and no real sense of belonging at least that’s what I thought, I was a teenager, can you blame me. What I did have, however, was a motivation to study and make something of myself and the curiosity to explore the world beyond. I wanted to study space and the universe. I wanted to understand the fundamental physics that governed the universe.

But I was also grappling with the messy reality of being a teenager. I was growing up isolated, navigating the shock of changing countries, and waking up to the fact that I had lived a profoundly sheltered life. You don’t know you’re living under a rock until you finally step outside – a real-life caveman paradox. Worse, the life laid out in front of me wasn’t the one I wanted. I was spiraling into an existential crisis. Again, I was a teenager at the time, the world is often ending, if you don’t have friends, or if the teacher call you out.

So, at 17, I made a terrifying, necessary choice: I left home and moved to Canada alone. I needed independence. I needed an escape from a trajectory that felt hopeless.

This was terrifying for my parents. I was their only child, traveling across the world, seemingly throwing away my “good grades” and the prestige of a traditional competitive university degree, which I had even secured a scholarship for, to attend a community college miles apart. We were a close bunch, so moving halfway across the globe was a tear-jerking decision for everyone.

We simply didn’t have the money for a university degree right out of the gate, especially not with ridiculous international tuition rates. And when I say “we,” I mean my parents. At 17, I had no financial leverage and laughable international scholarships at best. So, heavy with the guilt of spending their hard earned money and intensely insecure about taking such a massive risk, I enrolled at a college, in Canada, Sheridan for a 2-3 year computer program.
It wasn’t astrophysics, but a two year Computer Programmer diploma was a practical, tangible step towards survival. Anything I wanted to do at the time, whether it was aerospace engineering / mechanical engineering, software systems and coding was a useful skill to have i thought. And I was fully planning to pay my parents back even if they definitely didn’t want it. To be honest, you can do nothing in life without people who support you, even if they disagree with you.

This was the first major decision of my life, and I absolutely refused to let it be a disaster. So, I went all in.

I poured every ounce of my pent up energy into that program, I had never studied programming before, so it was entirely new and had some charm to it. Alongside juggling three part time jobs – tutoring, working at the library, and helping at the student union (under all the legalities and managing immigration documentation – which is a time consuming affair in its own right!). But, I met incredibly supportive people and soaked up every piece of knowledge I could, maintaining a near perfect track record. I would have had a flawless 4.0 GPA across the board, if not for this Project management course in the last semester I was just 2 mark short of a perfect score! You always remember the one that got away. In the end end I graduated at the top of my class and earning the Silver Medal (which by the way is the highest they do, there’s no gold, I feel like I need to clarify, cause whenever I try to boast about it, someone asks me that).

The Gravity of the Grind

The path isn’t straight and dreams don’t pay the rent.

I landed a full stack developer role right after graduation at 20, at the same company where I had done my co-op, I will be the first to admit: I have always found interviews intensely stressful. I rarely know what I’m doing wrong, and my success rate has historically been low. I will always be grateful to my coworker now an ex-coworker and a friend for giving me that initial internship opportunity. Without him, I would have missed out on so much, and at the rate I was going, I probably wouldn’t have landed an opportunity for a while and it was an amazing opportunity, to work with really really smart and nice people, and I actually began to really like the building stuff and solving problems part of the job and if you hadn’t guessed from my academic background I can get easily carried away with a new challenge and a shiny new complex problem (that’s the only way you can get a good grade in all subjects, you can’t have favorites)
I made really good friends, I explored so many things and I grew so much professionally and personally, I think I loved my job, I loved working with my friends, and I loved solving problems.

By March 2020, I transitioned into a Data Scientist role, my manager used to sit right besides me, so, I do believe that played an important role in him offering me the position, to someone without a bachelor’s degree and no work experience in the field and oh my there was a lot to learn, it was an exciting world of online courses and ml models, and statistical models on such a huge scale. There was a sense of creativity and a hunt for answers, for the right questions, for finding the signal out of noise, building something out of nothing, finding driving forces, it was science taking messy observations and finding patterns.
As a Data Scientist, I taught myself Machine Learning from scratch and worked with statistical, classification and regression models at work. I experimented with complex architectures Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and later in the years Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and Transformers. I built distributed geospatial pipelines processing multi terabyte scale data. I think I was decent at it and I had fun. I learnt statistics and analytics from folks with PhDs, it was like having my own PhD supervisor, and in hindsight I feel like I didn’t make most of that opportunity.

Over an year or two I learnt all I could at the job, across the board, talking to everyone, scouring codebases, volunteering for problems, putting in all nighters and the weekends, I was of the mentality that I have two years to learn as much as I can about data, software and ML before I go back to school. I was lucky enough to have a job and no financial responsibilities by the time, having my previous part time jobs help pay half the tuition and my new job helping pay my parents back, and saving for a house and further school. I was incredibly lucky.

With Covid and us all navigating the global crisis, some of us were more fortunate than others, to have roof over head and food, and that thought was probably the only thing that kept me optimistic, being so far away from family and doing something I never set out to do as such (lots of self reflection) and it also gave more time to explore and study and reconnect, I found a way to get back to school while working and have less tuition so I went through another lengthy immigration process.

With my finances stabilized and tuition 1/3rd! I was going back to school for Astrophysics!

Orbiting Two Worlds

I only applied to one university, the one with the biggest telescope, and got in, so that was that. In 2022, I started at York for a BSc in Physics & Astronomy.

I didn’t quit my job. I couldn’t. Instead, I decided to run two parallel lives. From 9 to 5, I was a Data Scientist, analyzing data, working with Terabytes of data, productionizing complex ML systems. And in the evenings, nights, and weekends, I was an astrophysicist in training, battling through Advanced Calculus, Differential Equations, and Modern Physics.

There is no glamorous montage of studying in aesthetic coffee shops (which is what I thought it’d be). Managing full time work and full time school is a war of attrition against your own mind and body. There were days I felt like a ghost, existing only on coffee, deadlines, and the sheer, stubborn refusal to fail. I technically “sat at a desk” for 14+ hours a day, though if I’m being honest, I mostly lay on the couch with my laptop, taking full advantage of the work-from-home life.

But here is the strange paradox of the grind: It was very fulfilling and dare I say fun.

I felt incredibly productive. Despite the exhaustion, I squeezed in swimming lessons, dropped in on Muay Thai classes at school, and proudly never asked for a single deadline extension. (I also made zero friends on campus, but that was a trade-off I accepted). Balancing work and school meant something had to give which was social life.

Operating in both worlds also gave me some very strong opinions on the philosophy of education. If I didn’t have to go to a university to get a physics degree, I wouldn’t have. To anyone who criticizes community colleges: they actually teach you real, practical skills. You meet people from all walks of life, your professors are from the industry, and the administration actually understands that you are a functioning adult with a life outside of their walls.

University is a different beast. The coursework is incredibly detailed and heavy, they do not give you enough time to cover it to satisfaction, and while all of my professors were highly knowledgeable, most professor were nice, some actually liked teaching and others were at least reasonable but, the university bureaucracy is an absolute nightmare. Admissions, credits, insurance, finance, graduation – every single logistical step was a painful chain of emails, a ping-pong match between departments, and an exercise in stress completely devoid of logic. I overpaid for dual health insurance because of automatic enrollments, and my graduation ceremony was delayed by a whole semester because the graduation department refused to accept a more advanced credit in the same subject, despite me having more than enough total credits. Two days before my delayed ceremony, they were still emailing me saying it wasn’t happening. I survived it, I appreciate the opportunity to learn, but I never want to deal with those administrative departments ever again.

But coming back to the academic rigor? I absolutely and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was an A+ student, and I surprisingly almost kept that standard. I learned the physics of the universe. I made First Class with Distinction even after getting my life’s first B+ (and then several more), how that added up to a first class with distinction I don’t know, but I’m happy.
The truth behind those B+ s is a story of its own. As I said, I never asked for a single extension. If I missed a test, an assignment, I just missed it and took the hit. The university administration had left me so thoroughly exhausted that I simply couldn’t be bothered to send another pleading email or jump through another bureaucratic hoop. I made a conscious choice: I would try my absolute best to learn everything I could, even if it meant letting the perfect grade slip. And believe me, letting go of that ingrained perfectionism to prioritize actual learning is the highest level of maturity I have ever displayed in my opinion, when I dropped that one course that you would never know about I was devastated. Doesn’t mean I didn’t do bad on some tests, I did! but not as many, even I was surprised.
I worked with actual telescopes, studied and analyzed real data, studied quantum physics and special relativity and vector calculus and differential equations and cosmology and so much more. I did a three year degree not a four year one and that is yet another education system battle I have reserved for another time, they say I would need the longer degree to get into a Master’s program, but let’s see, universities are so inflexible with credits and lecture timing and in no way I’m entering the same bureaucratic nightmare again, I think I’ll study better on my own at this point, especially the concepts I’m very interested in, but aren’t a part of curriculum anyways. Where there’s will, there’s a way.

The highlight of it all however was finally merging my software engineering skills with my love for space. I landed an 8-month internship at a big radio astronomy observatory working under a brilliant and supportive professor. There, I built a real-time CNN to classify Fast Radio Bursts, achieving millisecond-latency inference. For the first time, my two worlds collided perfectly. I was using AI to decode the cosmos.

But I promised to be honest in this blog, and part of being the person I want to be and the life I want to have is facing your own shortcomings.

Looking back at that internship project a year later, I am deeply disappointed in myself for not making the absolute most of that opportunity, which is why I don’t talk about it as much usually. In reviewing the code recently, I found a bug. For a long time, I was simply too embarrassed to reach out to the professor who had put so much trust in me and gone out of his way to get me that role. I felt like I hadn’t seen it through to the standard it deserved.

At my day job, this wouldn’t even register as a crisis. I do this all the time: I make mistakes, I fix my mistakes, I fix other people’s mistakes. We have each other’s backs, and debugging is just a standard Tuesday. But this? This felt entirely different. This felt huge.

And the hardest truth? It’s been a while. I am genuinely afraid to have submitted that without due diligence. But hiding from it doesn’t align with the person I am trying to be

So, I am putting this in writing to hold myself publicly accountable: I am fixing that solution and I am seeing the project all the way through to the end. You cannot decode the cosmos if you are too afraid to fix your own code.

I finished my courses in December 2024 and walked across the stage at convocation in early 2025. I graduated First Class with Distinction.

Realignment: Building at the Intersection

You’d think the end of that journey would feel like a triumph. Instead, it felt like stepping off a treadmill going 100 miles an hour and immediately collapsing.

While I was studying, the sheer velocity of my dual life had masked the stagnation at my day job. But once the academic noise faded, the quiet, frustrating reality set in. The pace of the work had become painfully slower than the speed of ambition. My proposals, once fueled by academic inspiration, were stalling out, caught in an expanding web of corporate restructuring and creeping politics. The charm was rapidly wearing off. My favorite teammates and friends were leaving or had already left, and the brutal truth was that my soul simply wasn’t in it anymore.

I’ve realized that true ambition isn’t just about output, it’s about strategic alignment, its about the journey as much as its about the destination, its not just the person you want to be but the life you want to live.. I don’t just want to be a data scientist or an astrophysicist in a vacuum. I want to make a difference.

I want to operate at the ultimate sweet spot – do all what I love and make an impact: apply high-level engineering and algorithms to immediate global challenges, while pushing the boundaries of human knowledge in physics. In the end these both aren’t opposite world, they require similar level of mathematical reasoning, theory and handling of astronomical data (literally and metaphorically)

I have restructured my focus to align with my true passion: Earth Observation and Space Tech. I have spent over 6 years productionizing complex machine learning systems for media and marketing and scaling distributed geospatial pipelines, working with big data technologies that they don’t teach you at school. Now, I am pointing those tools at the Earth. I want to partner with teams solving critical, immediate problems on this planet – using satellite data and ML for disaster management, nature protection, agriculture, and sustainable planning or building mission-critical tech in this space. It’s an uphill battle, and I am ready to start from scratch, take a pay cut, and sit through the ever-so-stressful job hunt if need be.

And I do want it all, I’ll be honest I have applied to pursue an online MSc, I got in, if finances aren’t a problem, that could be happening soon. This is a calculated stepping stone. Someday, after I have done my share of independent research and read all the books I want to read, I am going to finish my independent studies, finalize my research proposals, and apply for that PhD position with Sean Carroll.

I am going to take my time doing rigorous cosmology research. I am going to explore the universe, and hopefully do something for the humankind. But I am also going to ensure that the problem-solving skills I deploy every day make a tangible, positive impact on this planet for current generations. I see this not as a dual path but one path, my path, my worldline.

To the Dreamers in the Trenches

If you take anything away from my story, let it be this:

Do not let your current reality dictate your ultimate trajectory.

It will be hard. You will be misunderstood by people around you who don’t share your drive. You will face closed doors. You will have to work twice as hard to build the bridge between where you are and where you belong. But you have to build it anyway.

If you are passionate about something, do not wait for the perfect conditions to start. Teach yourself. Work the late hours. Reach out to the people who scare you. Build the models that your company doesn’t care about yet. Learn the math. Read the papers. Take pen and paper and work it out. Do it for yourself.

I haven’t achieved anything yet, but, I’m happy I’m trying my best and some day sooner or later I will, and so will you, don’t give up.

You and me, we may not become the absolute best in the world, but you can become the absolute best version of you. You are an amazing miracle of a strange worldline.

In the grand scheme of things, we are all just a blip in the universe. No one in the vastness of the cosmos might ever notice the splash you make. But you will notice. And that is enough. That is what dreams are for.

We all have low days. Days where you think it won’t work out, that it’s stupid, that it’s unrealistic. But if your dream isn’t hurting anyone, and if it brings you joy, and yes, joy is a good enough reason then go after it relentlessly. Just remember to be kind. Learn to have fun along the way. Find the people who will have your back, make sure you have theirs, and realize that nothing can actually stop you but yourself.

We are all just moving through space and time, trying to make sense of the noise. Be the signal.

I am putting this all out there with a mix of hope and, frankly, a little bit of fear.

For a long time, I wanted to write this, but I held back. I was apprehensive, insecure, and genuinely worried that being this honest about my life, my academic struggles, my burnout and my fears and even my real dreams would have a bad effect sooner or later, people would be apprehensive and it might somehow decrease my chances of landing the exact opportunity I’ve been trying for (with no luck so far, might I add).

But I finally realized that if I am feeling this fear, you probably are, too.

You might be at the exact stage I was when I first took a risk, terrified, isolated, and wondering if you made a massive mistake. Or the stage where no one believes in you, thinking if you’re being too over ambitious, too picky or too selfish to want it all. Or you might be right in the thick of the grind, juggling a demanding things like school and work, or in the very existential crisis that started it all, wondering if your mind or your body is going to break first.

I wrote this to tell you that it will be alright. I want you to know that if I can do it (anyone can really, but), so can you. Just keep at it. If you want it, go get it.

May the force be with you. And honestly, may it be with me, too, hoping no recruiter sees this : P