On Pivoting Toward What Actually Excites Me

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I don't mean that in the modest, self-deprecating way people say it at networking events. I mean it literally. I came from Ostia, a coastal suburb of Rome, as an international student with no alumni network to lean on, no older sibling who had navigated this before, no family friend to tell me which classes to take or which opportunities to chase. I'd spent my high school years waking up at 5:40am to commute four hours a day on the Roma-Lido, working one summer as a waiter to fund my education, studying every night with an American flag pinned above my bed as a reminder of what I was working toward. Getting into Harvard felt like the finish line. I had no idea it was actually the starting gun.

The thing about coming from where I came from is that the goal for a long time is simply arrival. You're so focused on getting there - on proving that someone from Ostia can do this, on making the commute worth it, on honoring the sacrifices that made it possible — that you don't spend much time thinking about what happens after.What do you study? What do you want to build? What kind of life are you actually trying to create? Those felt like luxuries. First you get there. Then you figure it out.

But figuring it out at Harvard is harder than it sounds, especially when you arrive without a map.

Everyone around me seemed to already know — the right clubs to join freshman fall, the right internships to apply to sophomore year, the right way to position yourself for whatever came next. There's an entire invisible curriculum at places like this, passed down through networks and connections and older siblings who went before you, and if you don't have access to that curriculum you spend your first year or two reverse-engineering it in real time. I was learning the rules of a game while everyone else seemed to have memorized them already.

So I did what made sense given the information I had. I gravitated toward government and computer science. It felt logical. I had spent my high school years pursuing activism and public service, while studying at a scientific high school. But Harvard was different. It was as though the entire campus already knew the rules, and I was just trying to figure out what they were. It was then that I pivoted to economics, thinking that quantitative methods would be a good fit for me, and abandoned computer science. I told myself that I had to, because I was afraid of being left behind. Yet, as much as I liked what I was now doing in government and economics, I was still missing something. That something was a sense of purpose. It was then that I realized that I had to find my own path, and that I had to do it on my own. Thus, I switched to Applied Math.I became a CA for a introductory data course. I started thinking about research proposals, internship applications, the kinds of things that look good on paper and signal seriousness to the people evaluating you. I was being strategic, or at least I thought I was. But really, I was just following the most visible path because I didn't yet know what my path was.

The problem with following a visible path is that it can take you pretty far before you realize it's not yours.

I want to be fair to that version of myself — the one doing econ, thinking about finance, building a resume that made sense. It wasn't wrong. Economics is genuinely interesting. Econometrics taught me to think rigorously about data in ways I still use. Being a CA for a course as an undergrad is something I'm proud of. None of it was wasted. But there's a difference between doing something well and doing something that lights you up, and for a long time I was confusing the two.

I've been coding for a while. It was never the thing I led with — not in how I presented myself, not in how I thought about my future. It was just something I did, something I was decent at, something I kept in the background while I built the more visible parts of my profile. But this year I took CS 1090A and CS 1090B (the Data Science and Machine Learning courses at Harvard), and something shifted. Not because the material was entirely new — I'd seen some of it before — but because of how I felt while doing it. Building models, constructing pipelines, getting something to actually run and produce output. I kept losing track of time. That hadn't happened to me in a classroom in a long time.

I started paying attention to that feeling.

The part that excited me wasn't the abstract theory or the mathematical elegance, though I appreciate both. It was the building. The engineering. The moment when a system you put together does something real — processes data it's never seen, produces an output that means something, scales in a way you designed it to scale. There's a specific satisfaction in that which I haven't found in much else. I'm someone who gets energized by making things that work. By shipping. By the concrete over the abstract. That distinction sounds small but it actually matters enormously when you're trying to figure out what kind of work you want to spend your life doing, especially when you have no guidance to begin with.

I'm someone who gets energized by making things that work. By shipping and buidling.

So I'm pivoting. Toward ML engineering, toward building, toward the technical track I kept treating as a background interest rather than a foreground one. Junior year — which feels late until you remember that most people spend their entire careers doing work that never really excited them because they never stopped long enough to ask the question. I'm asking the question now. That feels like the right move even if the timing isn't perfect.

I won't pretend I have everything figured out. I'm applying to things, exploring, still occasionally second-guessing myself the way you do when you're making a real decision rather than just following a script. The finance/consulting path was comfortable because it was legible — I could see where it went, I could explain it to people, it made sense given my background. The technical path feels less certain in some ways and more certain in others. Less certain because I'm earlier in it. More certain because it's actually mine.

There's something I keep coming back to from those early morning commutes on the Roma-Lido, four hours a day on a train that was always late, studying for a test that most people around me thought I had no business taking. Nobody handed me a playbook then either. I just kept going because the direction felt right even when the path wasn't clear. I think that's what this is. A different version of the same thing.

If you came from somewhere that didn't have a pipeline to places like this — no network, no map, just the belief that the work would eventually speak for itself — I think the most useful thing I can tell you is that getting here is only half the battle. Figuring out what you actually want once you're here is the other half. It might take longer than you expected. You might spend a year or two on a path that turns out not to be yours. That's not failure. That's how it works when you're navigating without a guide.

This is me figuring it out. Publicly, a little vulnerably, and for the first time in a while — excitedly.

I'm posting this because I think people who know me have a somewhat incomplete picture. They see the economics, the finance track, the econ CA, the Gov CA — and they draw conclusions. I don't blame them, I built that picture. But there's a version of me that's been quietly building things, writing code, thinking about systems and models, that I never really put forward. Partly because I wasn't sure it was serious enough, partly because I was still figuring out if it was really mine. I'm putting it forward now. Not to rebrand, not to perform a pivot — but because I think the most useful thing I can do at this stage is just be legible. This is who I actually am! and if you made it this far, thank you for reading :)