My past experience 🕥

I’ve been a mentor myself before. The topics were mostly:

  • How to be an open source contributor.
  • How to utilise the existing women in STEM opportunities
  • Mentoring on coding concepts.

I learnt a lot via this process. In order to teach people something, you gotta be well-versed in it yourself. Therefore, providing mentoring to others pushed me to learn better, communicate better, and be accountable.

These resources show my past mentorship activities:

However, now I needed mentorship. And it has been quite a journey to find what I was looking for.

Why do I seek mentorship? 🧑🏻‍🏫

Why is it ALWAYS beneficial to have mentors in life? What can you expect to gain from a mentorship experience? How do you find good mentors?

I recently graduated with a Masters degree in AI. I had previously worked in the industry as a Software Engineer and my experience was extremely enriching. However, I knew my true calling was to be associated with AI. So naturally, after graduation I was brimming with ideas about my career, my goals, opportunities I wanted to be a part of - and I couldn’t wait to join a company and get started!

However, my plans came to a standstill (more like delayed) because I happened to graduate in the thick of mass tech layoffs globally and impending recession. Moreover, I was looking for highly speciliazed roles in the AI domain (such as deep learning, AI engineer roles) which had just started to gain popularity commercially, thereby rendering very few actual core AI jobs. And on top of that, even though I had applied to jobs in all major countries, I was unable to secure any interviews owing to requiring a sponsored work visa (all countries decided to restrict immigration at the same time 🫠). Finally, I turned to India for prospective jobs and I observed that majority of the companies in India either didn’t have highly specialised AI roles yet (used basic stats and ML to get by), or the offered salaries were lesser than my expectations.

The struggle for those 4 months was real.

The truth is:

  1. AI is irrefutably up and coming. You can see it, I can see it, there is no denying it. We’re literally living the AI revolution right now.

  2. This automatically means that there will be a high demand for core AI skills in the future. I have already started seeing a slight surge in AI jobs albeit some restrictions**.

  3. However, currently the global industry is in a transitioning phase themselves. They’re riddled with recession and how to use AI for their usecase (or should they even?).

  4. And due to this reason, I see most companies requiring a minimum PhD for core AI entry-level jobs. They require an expert in the field to shape how AI can be used for the company ➡️ a completely reasonable requirement!

  5. However, it means I have the hardest time finding a good, well-suited job. The whole experience gave me a huge reality check of what it is like right now.

The Process ➿

Don’t get me wrong. I still have goals, just not a concrete direction at the moment. Therefore, considering my constant internal strife, I decided to seek external perspectives and their advice to learn from their experiences. With this motivation, I started to actively look for mentorship opportunities.

I started with what I knew - googling and asking friends. However, after a few discussions it was evident that its not the best resource. On one hand, my friends are all around my age and figuring out life themselves. On the other, my family is too close to the issue. They start with an objective advice but then tend to show biases 🥲. For e.g.:

  • “you should definitely think about pursuing a PhD. It has xyz benefits and you have the callibre for it.”
  • “however, its a major time commitment and you gotta think about other things too”.

😑 Yeah. No. Won’t work. Sorry.

Hence, it was important I looked for someone who was firm and objective, with no biases, and would tell me exactly as it was. I personally believe, it is important to have mentors you can realistically look up to. Someone with whom you interact periodically and gain guidance from. Someone who has diverse experiences to share. I’m spelling this out for myself right now because at one point I thought I don’t really need mentors. I could just look up to great personas such as Elon Musk and try to follow in his footsteps. However, in hindsight, that is the most ridiculous thing ever. Elon’s work is admirable. But his circumstances were extraordinary and nothing like mine. I cannot possible read a few articles on his life story and make important career choices. It just wouldn’t translate. (maybe one day it might not be as ridiculous as today haha! 😏).

I finally found a few leads!

  1. I had been following the work of a Senior ML-engineer at Google for a month on LinkedIn and decided to reach out to them. They were exceptionally helpful, especially since they work in the thick of AI.

  2. I signed up on a website called vLookUp which is a platform to connect rising career women with prospective mentors. Via this, I got connected to a professional who has been in the industry for decades. They understood my worries and shared great stories about their experiences - how they witnessed the big Windows OS, SQL boom and how it was changing the landscape of tech at the time.

  3. I approached friends of my friends who have been current data scientists for a while and heard their stories (a lot of which were funny 😂).

My interactions with these people is still ongoing. I still have unresolved worries but I’m trying to take it one day at a time. I will continue to seek their advice over the next coming months. But I’m so happy that I’m a step closer than yesterday 💪🏻.

Some other resources to look for potential mentors:

Some Self-Introspection 🧘🏻‍♀️

Earlier at the start of this post, I said:

And it has been quite a journey to find what I was looking for.

Turns out, the journey was 95% about figuring out what I wanted from life, and only 5% finding the right people to guide me through it.

I had to think long and hard about it - and somehow, it isn’t as easy as I had thought. For the longest time, I couldn’t answer the simple question: “What do you want to do in life?”. I suspect it was a series of things that made me this way:

  • I’ve been in a school setting for as long as I can remember. Everything is planned out, everything around you runs on a schedule. And you are expected to blindly follow it and excel in it. 25 years of schooling. It obviously made me feel disoriented when this structured path was taken away from me. Now I was expected to create my own habits, my own routine, my own path - HOW FREAKIN SCARY! But also, in hindsight, how freaking nice. I get to choose.

  • The world of tech I was familiar with had 2 specific roles: SWE and Data Scientist. I was the former and desperately wanted to be the latter. And just like that, this world transformed in a day rendering 10 different AI specific job titles with overlapping requirements, and somehow I was qualified to apply to all of them but still not enough to be considered for any. And the funniest thing is I am a Master’s graduate in AI. This really made me take a step back and re-evaluate life.

Every single day I learn more - about myself, about AI, about how to navigate tech. The key is to embrace and adapt, be consistent, and be present. If you don’t fit in any of the roles now, you don’t have to. I have finally realised that given the current circumstances, tech hiring is little based on skills and a lot on luck (+ strong referrals 😛).

As for now, I’m forging my own path. I learn and re-learn and try to keep up. I’m just trying to be consistent haha.

Next Steps

This is an initial list of things I hope to achieve in the coming future:

  1. Be more aware of the current trends in the industry. Specifically, precise trends, direction, and future prospects in the tech industry.

  2. Build connections for prospective career growth.

  3. Actively seek publick speaking opportunities. It makes me accountable and pushes my learning capabilities.

  4. Be so much better at leetcode (lol I’m super average right now 🤪).

  5. Seek external collaborations with research labs. It’s exciting to stay in touch with R&D, especially right now, with blazing fast AI developments happening every week.

  6. Look for roles in AI safety and build my skills accordingly.

Fin.

P.S.: This post will be updated as I get new insights. It’s still a WIP because I’m still a WIP 🙂.

**This in itself presents a plethora of interesting challenges and I plan to write a blog post dedicated to just this very soon.