My Humble Beginnings as an NLP Engineer — I
First : A word that reflects curiosity,fear,excitement,anticipation and a lot of overwhelming emotions at the same time.
My First(failure) was the least expected and the most important turning point of my career. Getting rejected and losing the most important game of my life lead me to the doors of AI/ML.
Key Takeaway: Life is not what we expect it to be: it is made up of innumerable twists and turns.
Origins
Being from a Printing Technology background,lot of questions popped into my mind to try anything other than what I already knew and was trained on. I was unsure about the leap towards ML and skeptical about my ability to face and conquer the daemons.
After a long wait of over 24 months, I am now a full time ML engineer at a conversational AI company for close to 6 months now and I think it is a good time to take a step back and reminisce on what brought me here.
Key Takeaway: We all have fears.We all have self doubt.There are always obstacles in a journey.It is okay to be intimidated by them.But it is not okay to give up and quit.
The Trail
There was no dearth of challenges on a day to day basis.I traversed the path with almost nil progress each day. Staying at home and making up my mind everyday to figure out the next step to take, was a big struggle, as at the end of the day,it would never work the way I wanted it to. The progress was so slow that I second guessed myself if I would be able to get on par with the onslaught of technology on me. As this phase extended out a tad bit long,my well wishers kept urging me to try out other options like Banking,Higher Studies with the likes of GATE,GMAT,CAT,etc.
To top the frustration, opportunities skipped my way at various levels for various reasons for a really long time. I just waited and hoped for an opportunity to see light at the end of the tunnel.
Key Takeaway: Challenges come in a package.Self-doubt is one of them.Sometimes you need to take risks to achieve success that no one can see but you.
At the End of the Tunnel
Every day would be spent in gaining a little knowledge and simultaneously losing a lot of motivation at the same time.There was a period where owing to peer pressure, I ventured into the other avenues(CAT exam), while getting back to square one all over again.
Whatever I tried,none of it would work out as expected, except for the fact that time was moving at a blazing speed. But once I crossed these hurdles and tried my best to hustle, I found that things progressed,slowly but surely.
Key Takeaway : A Work-in-Progress, out of comfort zone,is a lethal combination.
The First Milestone
It all fell in place when I got an interview call from Uniphore Software Systems, a conversational AI Pioneer, and I found myself being selected for the role of Associate Engineer.
Key Takeaway: Little by little, a little becomes a lot.
The Real Journey Begins
I thought that was the end of the struggle, but it turned out to be the beginning of the actual journey, with the most challenging yet interesting part yet to come.
In the next part of this post, I will try to consolidate the wonderful journey that all this hardship has converged into.
Key Takeaway: The Movie has just begun. Sit back and watch it unfold.
Thanks to everyone who has been patient enough to have read this so far and I hope this and my next post (whisper) will help wasps like me take the giant leap of faith during adversities.
