A New Chapter

Software and the City Episode 5

Graduation, uncertainty, and the decision to start over in Germany.

Four years ago, I started studying Computer Engineering with a fairly vague idea of what I was getting myself into. I knew I liked computers, loved solving problems, and was endlessly curious about how things worked. Beyond that, I didn’t really have a clear picture of where those four years would take me.

A lot changed along the way. I learned how to write code, build projects, work with data, train models, debug things that absolutely did not want to be debugged, and spend an unreasonable amount of time wondering why something worked on my laptop but nowhere else.

But I also changed in ways that had nothing to do with code. My interests changed. My career plans changed. The things I thought I was good at changed. Even my definition of what I wanted from a career changed several times.

In the previous part of Software and the City, I talked about what four years of studying Computer Science taught me. But there was one question I didn’t really answer:

What happens after you graduate?

For four years, there was always a next semester, another course, another project, another exam. There was always something telling me what came next.

And then, suddenly, there wasn’t. I graduated. And instead of feeling like I had reached the end of the road, I found myself standing at the beginning of a completely different…