Nearly a month ago, I graduated from my data science master's program and, to be honest, it still feels unreal. It seems like it was only a few months ago that I was preparing to leave Germany and move back to the US, but it's now been almost two years!
In a layover in Amsterdam waiting for my flight to Boston
August 2022
The year before that, I visited Boston right before my relocation to Berlin, and I remember walking around the Harvard campus and thinking about how incredible it would be to study here. I also stopped by the Boston area seven years ago while on a road trip before my first internship in New York City. That time, I recall spending a rainy afternoon in Cambridge and saying that it was the perfect college town. I was still in my undergrad but I was already considering doing a graduate degree at some point in the future, and I distinctly remember sitting in a café and daydreaming about one day studying in this "perfect" town.
Walking along Harvard Bridge
May 2017
Six years before that afternoon - now thirteen years ago, I stepped on Harvard for the first time. I was on a campus tour - ironically, in the same kind of touring group that later, as a student (and especially when running late), I resented for congesting Harvard Yard, and I was unbelievably excited to visit this renowned university where so much history had taken place. During that first visit I got a Harvard sweater and took a photograph in the Science Center. Both items disappeared years ago but, during a recent trip to Colombia, I was able to recover the latter from a dying old laptop that hadn't been used in probably a decade (the laptop in fact died a few times while I was in the middle of transferring the files to a USB drive, so the entire process took a big chunk of time and a whole lot of patience). The picture ended up being pretty bad but, in a lot of ways, finding it felt like coming full circle.
I act and react, and suddenly I wonder, "Where is the girl I was last year? Two years ago? What would she think of me now?"
As I've mentioned in many posts, I love to read, and while I am in the process of reading anything (or even just while scrolling through social media), I usually keep track of quotes that I like. I now have several "quote journals" with my favorite snippets from books, articles, or posts that I have encountered. The quote above, from the Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, is one that particularly moved me and one that somewhat illustrates my feelings about graduation and the aforementioned photograph. Thirteen years ago, when my mom took it, studying at Harvard felt like an exciting but distant and improbable aspiration for me. And in all honesty, so did studying in the US and interning and working in New York and living in Germany. I now take a lot of it for granted, and of course I still do things that disappoint even my current self, but I was touched to realize that the girl in the picture would have been thrilled to find out that so many of her (our) aspirations really did come true.
Graduating from Harvard
May 2024
Afterword
As often happens when I write, the text ended up taking an unexpected direction. I usually start with an idea but then jot down whatever comes to mind as long as it's somewhat related. This time, the original idea was to talk about graduation day: how I woke up at an ungodly hour to have my hair and makeup ready because Harvard decided it was a good idea to start the day with a 7 am procession through the Yard; how it was all made harder by the fact that I had woken up at another ungodly hour the day before to get ready for a 7 am photoshoot and was exhausted after attending all possible graduation events on multiple days in a row because my parents did not want to miss anything; and how, in the typical unlucky fashion that seems to follow me around sometimes (my mom has a running joke that I need to take not just one but multiple baños de ruda or rue baths, which are traditionally believed in Colombia to intercept bad luck), I (along with my gown and hair) got soaked right before the diploma awarding ceremony thanks to an intense downpour that started just as I was on my way to Sanders Theater (where the ceremony was happening) and stopped shortly after I reached the place. Evidently, I ended up writing about something else, but I still wanted to share a little bit of graduation day even if just as an afterword.
Downpour right before the graduation ceremony
May 2024
I wanted to end this post by thanking everyone who was, in one way or another, part of my grad school experience. A special thank you to my mom and dad (none of this would have been possible without their unwavering support every step of the way), to JIDG and family (I could not be more grateful), to the Harvard, Hamilton and Augie professors (both those whose classes I took and those I did research or worked with) who helped me make sense of data science and the world in a much deeper and more meaningful way, and to the friends that became family, helped make the bad times more bearable and the good ones a lot more fun, and made Harvard feel like home.
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