Week 1: Begin again, and again, and again
Starting again in a new country is scary.
Doing it in the middle of a pandemic is scarier.
Oh, before I go on, welcome to Week 1 of #myvoyagehome; the journey officially begins! In case you were wondering what is it I do (because we all “do” something), I used to to be a consultant at EY Melbourne’s Data & Analytics practice, working in data science, data visualisation, data strategy, and data migration projects, to broadly generalise. And as part of my move home, I enrolled in a Master of Science in Innovation course with SMU, in hopes of adding more tools to my career toolbox (and out of curiosity to see what doors it will open for me).
This (massive) move was, as some would say, a divergence in my career path. I wasn’t doing an MBA, or furthering my studies in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, the next “logical” step for a Data and Analytics consultant. It was almost as if I was erasing everything on my life’s whiteboard and starting again on a blank slate.
But the one saying I kept reminding myself of whenever I started doubting my decision was —
“Don’t be afraid to start over again. This time you are not starting from scratch, you’re starting from experience.”
Perhaps what we write on our life’s whiteboards aren’t as erasable as I thought it was; maybe we write with permanent markers that, no matter how you try to erase, will leave a mark. Or perhaps life isn’t a whiteboard after all, maybe it is a plank of wood that you carve notches in; a notch from every experience in life that changes you permanently.
I am fearful of the unknown, but also excited about all the things I could make out of nothing. Hopefully, with lessons learnt from before, I can speed up the growth process by making a little less mistakes, but also have room to make new mistakes and learn from them along the way.
Tomorrow is orientation day, marking the beginning of my Masters course, and I must say, I am beyond excited to meet all these unique personalities, who come from different parts of the world, with different life experiences and stories to tell.
That’s really it, right? Our life experiences shape who we are and how we think, and we take them with us when we begin again,
and again,
and again?
So, I say, take the plunge. You’ll never know what magic awaits!
