Not giving a f***
Alright, so i have been thinking about writing about this from long(Thanks to skillful procrastination, it took so long). Its about time, i finally wrote about this.
Lately, i have been reading a ton about Women in Engineering or Being a Women Engineer and stuff like that. One question i asked myself was, did i face the challenges other women were facing ? Answer was yes. So, what did i do about it ? Well, i did not give a f***. Let me explain.
One thing i am really thankful for in life, is an amazing family and crazy, yet kick ass group of friends. Growing up was simple, when i wanted to achieve something, only thing my father ever told me was — “You want something, work hard and go get it. It doesn’t matter if your supposed to or not supposed to”. Fast forward, started pursuing my masters in Carnegie Mellon University.
At CMU, my roommates and i, started hearing a ton about hackathons. We were like, hey lets do it. So my two best buddies + me, started doing hackathons. We found it to be dope, and won hackathons at ESPN, Electronic Arts, AT&T(You can read all about it on my LinkedIn i guess).
One thing i noticed was, we were usually the only — All Girls team. When we started out, we did read a lot of articles about how Hackathons were all men’s club. Guess what, it din’t matter. or rather we din’t give a f***. We went ahead and participated anyways.
After graduating, i was so fascinated by the concept of — having to work on whatever you wanted — really cool. A really old friend of mine was also fascinated by startups and cool stuff in general. We started working on an idea and were determined to make it a success.
We spent a good amount of time coding and developing the product, and applying to bunch of accelerators. Got rejections like crazy.
Shit got even more crazy. Unfortunately, around the same time, my father got really sick and things never got better. Giving up on the startup was my only option then. Those few months, were some of the toughest days of my life.
Imagine facing problem X, and not being able to talk to anyone about it(Partly because you thought, no one can understand). Dealing with rejections about your dreams along with mourning the loss of someone who had a major impact in your life, is tough. I mean really tough.
It almost felt like i was supposed to fail. I took some time off, to figure things out. I finally snapped out of all the failure and decided to go back to my fathers advice.
Fast forward, after a bunch of searching around, i finally started working as a Full Stack Engineer at AnalyticsMD. I was their first technical hire.
11 months of working at AnalyticsMD, i have touched code in literally every part of the stack. I have learned tremendous amount of things being part of this amazing team. I would have never understood how, hard work + determination + crazy persistence = Something cool.
Sometimes, not giving a f*** and just going after what you want — is all you need.
PS: A big fan of Naruto. I totally recommend it.
