I reluctantly returned as an intern at the same team with Tesla this week.

I say reluctantly because they were ready to offer me a full-time position, but I delayed graduation on purpose, and pushed back my last core class I needed to graduate to the fall semester, so that I could use my CPT at another company and gain some experience on actual data science work in a mature team with best practices in place.

To me that means being able to work with senior data scientists, having access to good data infrastructure, writing code that goes into production, running experiments and doing ad-hoc analysis that are actually seen by people and have value, working with data engineers, writing data pipelines, all that fun stuff.

For summer, I applied to 120+ companies and only got 2 interviews. I was really close to getting an offer with Glassdoor, but they ended up going with a graduate student.

I had no other options.

I signed the offer letter to go back as an intern, and I felt no emotion at all. I told myself that I failed.

It felt like I made the wrong decision at that time. The entire Spring semester I wasn't looking forward to coming back.

But now that I'm here, I'm glad to be back.

It's only been 5 days and I've already met so many new people, explored new places

My parents are visiting too and I'm really excited.

And all this wouldn't be possible if I were somewhere else.

It's funny how life works. It never goes the way you expect it to be.

I worked so hard to escape what I thought was not the right for me, as if I knew what I wanted.

Instead of trying to control how I want my life to be like, which causes a lot of unnecessary anxiety and disappointment. I'm optimizing now to just have fun, and take small steps towards what I like doing.

This summer will be exciting.