TODO 7/29 - 8/4

My mantra for this week is "Nirvāṇa". (I know, I am a little dramatic 😅)

I don't mean that I have endured great pain or complete destruction. But I did experience a lot of self-doubt since last year. I started my first job and soon realized this is not where I want to be. I blamed myself for not asking some key questions that I should (How do you version control your code? Do you do code review? Do people hang out after work? Is there a dress code? Is there lunch? What's the attrition rate? What's there to do in Delaware?) and ignoring several red flags during the interviews (one of the interviews said "PhDs are not for girls, you should get an MBA" and ended up being the person I report to on a day to day basis.) I compared myself with my fellow CMU classmates who landed a job in Google and Facebook and felt like a failure. I spent thousands of dollars on a big data engineer bootcamp only to realize I don't really want to be a big data engineer I am just unhappy with where I am. I failed to change my job beginning of 2019 so I had to wait almost a whole year till October to try again because of my visa.

It's always been challenging for me to be kind to myself and accept that the old Tina didn't have all the information I do now and she has made the best decision she possibly could.

BUT! I feel much better now after working with my career coach and connecting with a few mentors. I learned about what I want and don't want in my next job. And I felt I am in a much more confident and oriented place to say no to opportunities and focus my energy on a few dream companies. I actually just rejected a pretty good offer with crystal clarity that it is not a perfect match.

I feel I am quite mentally prepared for new challenges and I would like to work on a few things that get me back on track with active job hunting this week:

• revise resume
  • read IT Consulting project report
  • SearchAds project focus on machine learning piece
  • add placeholder for hackathon project
  • send to friends/mentors for review
• practice summary of qualification for 5 job postings
  • data scientist
  • machine learning engineer
  • NLP
  • deep learning
  • schedule review call with career coach
• gender equality hackathon
  • data source research
  • brainstorming ideas -> decide on a topic
• Kaggle competition on Kuzushiji
  • data exploration
  • call calligraphy teacher
• settle into new apartment
  • morning routine
  • sell stuff, declutter

Thank you @ryan_furrer for motivating me to start my own weekly todo post. I will report back next week on my progress. What's your mantra this week?