2025 Revealed My Character

Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?

In many ways, every single day of this year has been a challenge, both an obstacle to my peace and an opportunity to write my future.

For most of this year, I was also a data science student pursuing my master’s degree and, for the first half, still employed at a Fortune 500 company as an IT analyst, so, of course, each day was going to be stressful. And of course, my layoff was also stressful. But the other part of this reality was that I was accustomed to this: the 24/7 grind where I pretended that a “day off” wasn’t just another day of ideation, thanks to the advancing state of AI (thanks ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot).

Now, all of my coursework is finished, and I’m anxiously awaiting seeing how well I did this semester, a degree of fear and anxiety that has led me to become extra super productive, even compared to my already highly productive baseline. And at least one thing is clear: I’m graduating, and I will get my diploma early next year. I have worked hard, regardless of my employment status, to overcome my struggles with school, with work, and with social interaction.

However, I also learned about the people who were (and weren’t) in my corner. I’ve lost touch with so many people I once considered staples of my life, simply because we no longer worked at the same place or because I lost my ability to keep people I thought were friends interested.

That, in particular, has been difficult. Whether it was 8-year-long friendships or intense working relationships, I had no idea I would be in a place where I would lose access to my peers and friends.

But I have also accepted that I’m not as “mature” as I once thought and that I need to do significant work to ensure that my peace is preserved. Otherwise, I would just let friendships fade and accept that the things of the past have passed. For me, someone with a long memory, that’s also difficult.

2025, however, gave me food for thought in this way.

Because this year completely turned my life upside down and transformed everything, from my relationships, line of work, and academic pursuits, I was able to find parts of myself. However, I know that 2026 will bring forth the challenge of putting the pieces together.

I got into my second master’s program (in Political Psychology) and my first internship in policy and political science.

When my family lost our house in 2018, the general mood of that year felt eerily similar to this year. In so many ways, this year has been a mirror of 2018. Just after that ordeal, I graduated with my bachelor’s degree that same summer. This year, I will also graduate a few months after my layoff.

That year also marked the start of a period of my life where I genuinely lost myself. Everything between 2018 to 2024 was about justifying survival for my family and I. I genuinely felt powerless about the situation, and I thought that I could do nothing to change the fact that I needed to survive and work towards that.

Fast forward to 2024, and I found out that this company was laying off people at some point. I immediately began to look at the process and realized that I had a possible “out”, so to speak. In essence, we could “volunteer” to be laid off, get severance, and be officially “laid off” instead of being fired or having to quit.

Perfect.

I wanted to do this, but I anxiously awaited to see what would happen.

And this was also the year I discovered Coursera and started taking a million and one courses. But because I knew the job market would not accept certificates alone and because I also knew that formal education has always been my best bet for improving my professional, working intuition, I applied to grad school.

At first, I applied to IT programs and was accepted into Florida State, Kennesaw State, and Boston University. Then I noticed that Boston University offered a new Data Science program, to which I applied, was accepted, and enrolled. All of this occurred during that year’s summer.

Fast forward, and I’m actually graduating. Even though I’m anxious about my grades and performance in the last few courses, I know I’ve gone from 0 to a graduate degree holder, having only had informal coding experience and some Java programming experience (from a previous attempt at a graduate degree). Mind you, Java is a programming language for creating software, not data science. Now that I know Python and SQL, I know how to investigate, clean, and preprocess data, and how to construct and evaluate models for a specific purpose.

This is a highly satisfying skill set to have, something I never thought I wanted and only thought I wanted to learn to “make more money” (see the average salary for a data scientist). Data is a lot more interesting a subject than I once thought, and I’m happy to know that I can put these skills to good use.

Though I knew that I liked data enough to finish that first semester this time last year, I didn’t realize how much I would enjoy it. However, I knew that education was how I would change my circumstances.

Now what?

I am at a point where I have a lot to look forward to, but a lot to mourn.

I mourn the 5 years I spent in a career I didn’t enjoy or wasn’t passionate about. I also mourn the fact that, at any time previously, I could’ve found an “out” and be in a better place in my mental health and my career than I am now.

But the important part is that I’m here now, and I still have a lot of life, the majority of my career, and the new year to look forward to.

Though I had prior knowledge of some of the things that would happen this year, no, my life is different from what I thought a year ago.

I thought that I would never have the courage to be myself or to pursue a different path.

I was wrong and underestimated myself. I am proud of myself for walking away from a life that was draining my soul, for feeling guilty about that company’s involvement in resource theft (especially in Gaza), and for rediscovering who I am.

For that, I am thankful.

So, while I have no idea about what will happen in my life in 2026, I know for a fact that I’m building a life filled with purpose.