About career choices

When I was a child, I used to live in a little world of my own. I imagined and designed in my mind inventions, robots, and ideas that would change the world. I read books, made technical drawings (for a child they were pretty detailed!), and walked around with an old mailbag collecting knowledge (or, well, plants, seeds, leaves, and stones) and wrote everything down in a small notebook that I kept hidden with my “secret notes”.

Those were good moments. I imagined that one day this would make me someone who explores, invents, and researches new things.

But there are moments when reality hits.

I come from a simple family. While I was growing up and studying, no one talked about college or how that worked. Not because they didn’t care, but because we lived in a small town where few people knew about these things. I remember that when I told my family that it is possible to work and be paid to do research in universities, they were shocked.

In short, no one taught me about the possibilities of an academic or technology career. These futures were unknown to us. And, well, since it seemed impossible to have a life of research and studies — as far as I knew — I started working early.

With that desire to innovate and always discover something new, I found myself in technology and programming. Programming gives us the ability to create things, and that always fascinated me. For a long time, I thought I had found what I wanted for the rest of my life, but today I know it was only a mask. It was not the kind of “creating” I was truly looking for.

Working with programming is something that, after some time — sometimes shorter, sometimes longer — can give you good financial stability. And this is very important for a person’s quality of life. When we reach a more stable moment in adult life, we have space to think clearly, reflect on our options, and make new discoveries. I was lucky to find myself working in a research foundation during this time. That helped bring back the creative, curious, and inventive version of myself that I had as a child, instead of only the “software developer” version.

And that is what I did. With more confidence and clarity, I went back to something I loved when I was younger: physics, research, science, and innovation. I stopped seeing programming as my final goal, and started seeing it as a tool to research and innovate in different areas of technology and science.

Today I know I made the right choice, and I plan to continue on this path.

I have been working on very interesting projects, using all the knowledge I built in technology to create useful tools for the future of science and tech. Bringing together physics, computing, technology, and using that to create innovative solutions that are truly useful for society has been amazing.

Sometimes change comes early, sometimes later, but I believe everyone should keep exploring and thinking deeply about their own lives, without fear of changing or trying something new. The result can be something very good. And if, for some reason, it turns out bad, you can just keep looking. At some point, something meaningful will appear.

I am happy that I found something that makes me happy, but nothing stops that from changing in the future. After all, life is a constant search.