I started out studying computer science, not design. Somewhere around the middle of my degree, COVID hit and everything about "the plan" fell apart, classes went remote, the traditional path forward got a lot less certain. Instead of waiting it out, I started designing, teaching myself as I went, and landed my first real design role at Hikup while I was still in college. I never went back to a "normal" CS track. Everything I know about design past that first project, I picked up on the job: at a food-tech hardware startup, then at a mental health platform, figuring it out one shipped feature at a time rather than in a classroom.