A New You: Living life on the backfoot. The start…

In summer of 2018, I had one year remaining for my Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering & Operations Research at one of the top public universities in the world, the University of California at Berkeley. I had come to the United States three years ago in 2015, and was well-settled into my new life as a foreign student. I had several impressive accomplishments to my name, since having gotten into Cal:

• Through consistent effort & perseverance, I had succeeded in bringing my respectable first semester GPA of 3.714 down to 3.2 within a span of two semesters at Cal.
• I had been absolutely promiscuous in deciding on an academic career, having flirted with almost every major at some point, with little to show for it.
• I had also managed to not accomplish anything meaningful extra-curricularly, save for brief, irregular endeavors to fill in the requisite one line on my resume, but not amounting to anything personally satisfying.
• I had succeeded in avoiding the siren call of corporate America (and adulthood) by not obtaining a single internship on my own merit, not once, not twice, but on three occasions! Impressive!
• I was equally diligent in spurning Berkeley’s opportunities as a first-rate research university, not doing any research at all over my three years at Cal.
• With creative effort, I was also able to invent novel excuses to avoid going to the gym or live any sort of a physically fit lifestyle or invest in myself personally.

To add to such an excellent track record, I arrived at Berkeley after a 16 hour flight from the UAE for a third summer (2018), to find that the professor who had promised me research work, was now ghosting my every email and had almost vanished of the face of the Earth. The good news: I would be taking two tangential classes (History, Finance), while also racking up exorbitant living costs at I-House. In the meanwhile, most of my friends were busy building the foundations of a great future, studying abroad and interning at awesome firms.

It was with such a promising background that I decided to go to graduate school for a Master’s immediately after Cal.

A life lived weekend-to-weekend on the backfoot was finally paying a handsome reward…