There's a version of me that had everything figured out before I even stepped food on campus. I knew my major, Ihad a rough idea of where I wanted to work after graduation, and I had a mental picture of the kind of professional I wanted to become. Organized, technical, predictable, in a good way. Then I took BADM261, and that picture started to look a lot less complete. One of the things this course kept circling back to, in different forms, was the relationship between technology and the people who manage it. Not just the technical side of things, but the human side, the decision-making, the leadership, the ability to navigate uncertainty. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my comfortable mental blueprint for my career wasn't actually just preparing me for that uncertainty. I was hiding from it.

I think a lot of college students, myself included, fall into a pattern early on. You pick the things you're already decent at, you build your identity around those things, and you stick to them. For me, that looked like technical computer science skills, they felt safe, and something I could defend spending my time on during an interview. But one thing that kept coming up this semester was that the people making real impact at the intersection of technology and business aren't just good at one thing. They're people who have put themselves in situations where they didn't know what they were doing yet. Product managers who used to be engineers. Operations leads who started out in marketing. Founders who had to become a dozen different things.

So I've been trying something this year. Instead of pursuing only opportunities that fit neatly into what I'm comfortable doing. I've been intentionally seeking out the ones where I have to figure things out as Igo. That means joining more niche student orgs, raising my hand more, and being okay being the least experienced person in the room. What I've noticed is that these experiences teach you things that no class really can. You start to understand how innovation actually happens, not in a clean, linear process, but through a lot of improvisation, adaptation, and willingness to look like you don't have it all together while you figure it out. The discomfort doesn't mean things are going wrong, it's a sign that I am growing.

The technologies shaping business right now, AI, automation, platform-based models, data-driven decision making, they're not stable. They're changing fast, and the organizations trying to implement them are changing alongside them. The managers and leaders who thrive in that environment aren't the ones who mastered a static skill set. They're the ones who stayed curious, stayed adaptable, and were willing to pick up entirely new ways of thinking when the situation called for it. You can't manage emerging technology from a fixed position. You have to be willing to move. For me, that means treating my time in college less like a preparation phase where I'm building toward some final, polished version of myself, and more like an active period of deliberate experimentation. Trying roles that don't fit yet. Building skills I don't immediately need. Getting comfortable with the feeling of not knowing what I'm doing, because that feeling is almost always temporary, and what replaces it is something much more valuable than comfort.

I don't think I have this figured out. I'm a freshman, and I'm aware that most of what I think I know right now will get revised pretty significantly by the time I graduate. But I think that awareness itself is something worth holding onto. The students and future professionals who are going to do interesting things in this field aren't the ones who found the safest path and stayed on it. They're the ones who were genuinely willing to try something new, fail at it a little, and keep going anyway. That's the version of my career I'm trying to build. And honestly, this course is a big part of why I'm thinking about it that way.

If you're interested in following my journey or collaborating on innovative projects, feel free to reach out. Let's push boundaries together!