[gkya]

2013. My 19yo self, having spent almost two years doing nothing but learning programming, wants to read CS at the uni, but knows not maths. Signs up for a class to prepare for the national uni qualification exams in order to learn enough 1 + 1 to qualify for a CS undergrad course. But midway the preparatory classes has a crush on the philosophy instructor and reads a platonic dialogue and 1984 to impress her. But ends up actually falling in love with literature and studying Italian literature from fall 2014. Fast forward to 2018: I'm now freshly graduated and considering whether to study general literature for my master's or comparative literature. I'm also planning a career in academia. But I also have programming skills and live in Gnu Emacs compiled from master and run Debian stable on my laptop (after a year of FreeBSD after some years of Arch Linux). So a bit of a unique blend I have ended up being :)

I guess I should be thankful to how stupid I was back then (hopefully I improved a bit since) :) Getting into philosophy and literature has not only change my career plans, but helped me tackle my adolescence depression, have peace in my mind, and overcome the coercions of tradition and society and work towards realising myself.