That one leap
There I was in midst of pandemic mentally broken, thoughts racing my mind, thinking of everything I could. “Never had I thought that this moment will also come but there it was in front of my eyes and I could only make it worse”. “Sometimes losing a friendship hurts way more than a break up and there is nothing worse than disappointing the one person who was always there for you”. All these thoughts raced my mind as I sat in my room all by myself crying every now and then.
I had to get my mind off this and so decided to continue with the online courses I had been doing for a while. When the only choice in a lockdown is to study for ur undergraduate degree which barely interests you and watch DARK you tend to do something different and so I had started with the online data science courses. It had been going well, seeing some graphs , deciphering single episode of DARK per day and studying for my upcoming “online” exams was my schedule. This helped me keep my mind off things but I needed something more to deal with what had happened.
Human mind is a very funny thing to have, it can do many things and one of the many things my mind does is overthink. One thing it cannot do well is comprehend and digest what has happened and accept the fact that it cannot be changed. The only way out was to make it flooded with something that I feared was very tough.
I was avoiding this course I had purchased online for a while then as it feared me. It was an advanced course and I was sure this course is not for me, I just cannot do it. But the only option left with me to start it so that my mind could contain its thoughts. Coming back to my bedroom while thinking about so many possibilities, I decided to start doing it and I cannot be more glad about it. Little did I know that this course was the one that was gonna change my life for the good and the change had begun since the beginning of the pandemic.
Pandemic is such a unique time frame for me, it literally took a huge toll on my mental health. Nothing was seaming to go right at all, I was mentally shattered, all that gave me a laughter was my family, these courses and some YouTubers I used to watch back then. I am not someone who shares his things easily at all, so my family had no idea whats going on with me though they did something was up but I never spoke about it. I had started making some new and good friends at the same time but I was too sad to see all that. All I knew was I wanted to get through the day with minimum crying.
Looking back at it, that very course laid the foundation of Neural Networks for me and it was the first time that I saw life as I had never seen before. I still remember when I trained my first ANN and saw the loss decrease per epoch, it reminded me of life and how we learn from our mistakes. This helped me boost my mental health a bit and I started engaging more and more into it. One of the biggest blessings of my life has been Dr. Andrew Ng’s Coursera and his courses which thought me so much. Slowly and steadily I had started to learn so much and started to enjoy the lectures so much that I started to recover from the trauma.
I still remember I used to study more than 6–8 hours a day during the peak of pandemic and had finished like 15 courses in just 2–3 months of span. I was officially addicted to Machine Learning and Deep Learning. My mental had improved and I had made some new friends for sure. It’s rightly said that when you lose you will also gain something. My undergraduate degree was in a field, I did not enjoy much and I had started to tell about my interests to the new friends I just had made. I still remember, one of them, Darsh Vithlani, who is now many things, was the one who saw my interests and just was like go and talk to people in Maths department. This was my second biggest leap and talking to the faculty in Maths department made me realize the value of what I had learnt. I was standing on the verge of exploring a whole new field, where in I could be exploring my interests in Machine Learning and Data Science in combination with one of the sciences.
This completely changed my life, as now I had a clear path to move on and goals to accomplish. It felt like my life was back on track and I had made so many good friends who just boosted me to try and push my boundaries. From that I never looked behind and never stopped, from being heart broken shattered, doing an undergraduate degree in Chemical Technology with no interest in what I was studying to doing multiple lab work remotely in the field I liked while doing my undergraduate degree to doing my graduate studies in a field I love, I did come a long way I guess.