On finding your path

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to attend a short talk from a very interesting woman.

She was everything anyone could ever aspire to be — smart, talented, successful. She’d played in Carnegie Hall, attended MIT, worked for the Peace Corps, and secured a high-paying job not long after. It seemed like she’d had a very specific plan for her life — and one that had gone off exceedingly well.

That, however, was not the case. Quite the opposite, actually. As she said at the end of her talk: “Life is non-linear.” She explained what she meant, saying: “Your journey will not follow a clear path from point A to point B to point C. You will skip around, and things might not always turn out as you plan. But in the end, you’ll find that you will have a non-linear path to success. So get comfortable with the unknown and unexpected.”

At the time, I thought that advice was absolutely ludicrous. Non-linearity seemed like a luxury, one that might be afforded to others but certainly couldn’t be afforded to the daughter of first-generation immigrants, someone with the weight of insane expectations and even crazier goals on her shoulders. No, I thought, I was going to follow the path I had in my head, and that was that. I would go to an Ivy League school, take pre-law courses, get a law degree, and someday work for the United Nations. Easy.

Of course, life doesn’t work that way.

Clearly, I took a very different path. Now, on the verge of graduating, I finally understand what she meant about non-linearity. Life is just unpredictable like that.

Still, it’s a hard belief to keep in mind. For college students especially, there’s so much uncertainty at every turn —  anxiety related to not hearing back from companies, performance in classes, the weight of extracurriculars. Sometimes, it can all seem like too much. But I’m just here to say — Relax. Breathe. Things will work out exactly as they should, even if you can’t see it just yet.

A quick anecdote of just that: this past summer, I interned in the tech division of an investment bank. Prior to the start of the internship, we had been told that our assignments would be determined by HR, but I wasn’t worried, confident I’d get something interesting and relevant. That was, until I got my role…  a placement on the bank’s Cyber Security team.

What?

Initially, I was incredibly upset. I’d made it clear that I wanted a data science role, even gotten them to specifically note that down when interviewing. That was my niche, the only damn thing I was good at. Why had I been assigned to a (seemingly) unrelated field? One that I knew next to nothing about, and had never expressed any interest in?

I tried my best to get a different assignment, but I had little say in the matter because of the impending deadline to accept or decline the offer. I accepted, but not without worrying that I was somehow making a bad decision, all because it didn’t perfectly match the plan for my career I had in mind.

I needn’t have worried, really. Things fell into place, exactly as they should have.

Not without some effort on my end, mind you — I was initially given a project better suited for an Econ major, and one that I had (frankly) no clue how to solve. Rather than just accepting my assignment as set in stone, however, I spoke to my manager about it immediately. I asked him to see if he could find me a more analytical role, and though it took a little time and some patience on my end, he did — a machine learning project that had been dropped by the Security Analytics team earlier in the year, and one they wouldn’t mind having a fresh set of eyes look at. The rest, as they say, is history.

Now, I can confidently say that my work in Cyber Security was one of the most rewarding on my resume. I learned a lot about the field, and wouldn’t trade that experience for anything — even if it wasn’t exactly what I had planned for myself, or even something I had initially liked. More importantly, I learned to accept the non-linear path that it took to get there — compromising where I could, and standing firm where I couldn’t.

So to other students trying to make big decisions, waiting to hear back about jobs, or just generally frustrated with the non-linear way things can be at times, all I can say is — embrace that uncertainty.

Yes, life will take you on a path you didn’t plan. But who knows?

You might just end up somewhere you really want to go.