I've had a blog around long enough that I've documented my career from trying to be an official mobile developer to the more recent move to devops. Looking back making those choices were pretty easy. Nowadays with this AI "rush" there are twice as many options and nothing is calling to me as a end all be all. Lots of these job title have overlap. So how do I fix that is what I've been trying to figure out. ## Soln 1: Going back to school Honestly I was supposed to complete a MS before 30. If your asking who put that timeline out there it was me. I thought I was hiding from school when I dropped out of NYU, but what I realized is that I just don't like the classroom and my mind wasn't willing to keep suffering through the bordum. That's fair with how I've pushed my body through the years. On the other side of that I've been super drawn to studying math and systems. If there is a career that better mixes the two I'm down for that too. I want to be somewhat of a Quant, but also a System Engineer. Few years ago I had started a AS in math. I've been out of school so long and I wasn't sure I wanted to fully commit to quant life so this seemed like a good start. Unfortunately for me that was also the time in my life where I decided to get more serious about doing things I'm interested in. Started competitive shooting, went back to chasing the money in my career, started going to more concerts...all the fun stuff. Made things a bit ruff with trying to truly cram in 20-40hrs a week for school. It was actually kinda wild that school took up that much time, but I just couldn't keep going and I put the AS on pause. Well life is slow again and honestly I'm just in a "finish what you started" mood, so I'm going to go back. Not sure what I will do after this degree is done, but expect a MS program by Fall of '27, because I want that degree and then my trip to Hawaii for graduation. ## Soln 2: Mentoring Another piece to the puzzle is asking for help. I think I have a hard time doing 99% of the time. Historically formal mentoring is hard for me because I tend to try new things a lot of time. If you can't help me form an exact path to follow or tell me when things feel off course then I might as well do what I do best and wing it. This time my job has a pretty solid mentoring program. The thing I love about my job is everyone has their thing and nobody likes sugarcoating if they don't have to. Anyway i got assigned a mentor for the next 6mos and honestly he is pretty cool. His experience is quite possibly what I aspire to retire with. I respect his honesty and I'm intimidated by his background. It's a good mix for me. It reminds me of my first advisor at school who was like "can I throw you in the fire and watch you grow?", of course I'll always say yes. By the end of the 6mos I'm pretty sure I'll be well prepared for Ml Ops or AI Engineering positions, I think I'll have a cool project or two that I can reference, and I'll be well prepared for my MS program. Sometimes it's hard to ask for help when the people you know haven't been where your trying to go yet, but I think you should keep trying to find someone to answer your questions. ## Soln 3: Listening This might actually be the most important one of them all. I gotta listen to my body and friends more often (don't tell them I said that). Why? Well I don't like slowing down and the only way for my body to survive and my friends to not kidnap me for a intervention is to pay attention to my energy and such. Relaxing to me is like traveling to go eat, but that's still pretty active because sometimes I like to take red eye flights on meh sleep and then wonder around being a tourist. I'd be happy, but exhausted. If I'm going to be the best version of myself that can "do all the things" then I have to slow it down a bit behind the scenes. Nothing wrong with this, but I got a long way to go. PS: If you can convince my friends to do bull riding or ostrich riding with me I will also invite you to the chaos lol --- So anyway the TLDR of all the things is...I'm going back to school, I got a mentor, and I'm listening to my body. This should make my goals more obtainable and allow me to really figure out the next steps in my career and life. PPS: Before i finished this I found a way to try bull riding. Lets go bucket list!!!!