When I look at my kindergarten graduation photos, the first thing I notice is that almost nothing fit me properly.
My uniform was oversized because I was told I could still use it when I grew bigger. My shoes had tissue stuffed inside so my feet would fit. Even my graduation cap looked bigger than my head.
The second thing I remember is that I already had a career plan. I wanted to become a doctor and help treat sick people.
At that age, becoming a doctor seemed incredibly straightforward. I would become a doctor, help people, and that was basically the entire plan.
If only I knew how complicated that dream actually was.
That was the first of several futures I imagined for myself. I did not grow up always knowing I would become an engineer. The direction changed many times, usually because of whatever I was interested in—or confused by—at that point in my life.
Elementary school — the future businessman
During elementary school, I became interested in art. I joined poster-making contests, won some of them, and enjoyed turning ideas into drawings and designs.
Despite that interest, my dream career was not related to art. I wanted to become a businessman.
My reasoning was simple: businessmen had a lot of money, so becoming one would let me give my family a better life. In my understanding, starting a business apparently meant becoming rich automatically.
Young me had everything figured out.
The reason behind the dream was sincere, even if my understanding of business was not exactly complete. I wanted to be able to provide for my family. I just had no idea what that would actually require.
Junior high — art, architecture, and getting excused from class
My interest in art became stronger in junior high school. I joined the Visual Arts Club and started thinking that architecture might be the right path for me.
I liked painting and making things with my hands. I was genuinely happy whenever we were asked to paint stage decorations because it meant being excused from regular classes. Sometimes I was also exempted from MAPEH.
At the time, it felt like the perfect arrangement: I got to paint, I got to do something I enjoyed, and I got to skip class.
Architecture made sense as a possible future because it seemed to connect creativity with practical work. For a while, that was the direction I imagined taking.
Then Grade 10 gave me a project that failed.
Grade 10 — the drone that became an airplane
For one of our science projects, my group decided to build a DIY drone.
It sounded like a great idea. The only problem was that I barely knew anything about Arduino, electronics, programming, flight control, or most of the other things required to make a drone fly.
Unsurprisingly, it did not work.
We eventually turned what was supposed to be a functioning drone into a model of an old airplane. Thankfully, the airplane model was accepted.
Technically, the project failed. But while trying to build it, I became curious about how electronics, code, hardware, and machines could work together. The failure did not produce a drone, but it gave me a new kind of question to follow.
That curiosity was one of the reasons I chose the STEM strand for senior high school.
There was only one small problem: I was not particularly good at Math.
I chose STEM anyway.
Lakas tama.
Senior high — the Smart Face Shield
During senior high school, I became part of a group called the Invectors. For our research project, we created a Smart Face Shield.
The build came with plenty of uncertainty. There were many moments when I was not sure whether the thing we were making would actually work. We experimented, failed, changed parts of the system, and tried again.
Eventually, it worked.
What began as a project we needed to complete and submit went on to win several competitions. The recognition was exciting, but the more important part was what the project revealed to me. I liked building systems. I liked the mix of hardware, software, experimentation, and problem-solving.
I am especially thankful to the teacher who guided us through that experience. The project helped me understand that engineering was not just another career option I had imagined. It was something I genuinely wanted to pursue.
For the first time, the direction felt clearer.
College — engineering became real
I entered Laguna State Polytechnic University to study Computer Engineering and immediately found myself in a different environment.
There were new people, harder subjects, deadlines, projects, pressure, sleepless nights, failures, and plenty of moments when I questioned myself. Engineering stopped being an idea represented by a successful school project. It became something I had to work through every week.
When I started college, I had a specific goal: graduate with Latin honors and make my parents proud.
My first-year grades were good, so the goal seemed realistic. Then engineering humbled me.
The second year became harder. The subjects grew more complicated, and eventually I received a 2.50 grade. That made me ineligible for Latin honors.
I was disappointed. Not devastated, but definitely disappointed.
After some time, I realized that losing that goal did not make the rest of college meaningless. I began paying more attention to the skills I actually enjoyed developing:
- Programming
- Software development
- Robotics
- Electronics
- Building applications and websites
- Creating projects that worked outside a classroom explanation
I put more effort into the things I genuinely enjoyed and, admittedly, a little less effort into the things I did not enjoy as much.
Whenever a subject involved applications, websites, robotics, hardware, or another kind of technology project, I wanted to do my best. Those were the moments that reminded me why I had chosen Computer Engineering.
Thesis — building without a roadmap
I entered our thesis with another ambitious goal. I wanted to make something I could be proud of—hopefully one of the best projects we could build.
Instead, we chose a topic that was probably far more complicated than it needed to be.
There was no convenient YouTube tutorial showing us the complete process. I could not find one blog post explaining the entire system or an existing project we could copy as a reference. We were figuring out the architecture while trying to make it work.
It was a gamble. We were not completely sure the final system would work.
Eventually, it did. Not perfectly, but it worked—and getting it to that point was already a huge achievement for us.
For around six months, I kept returning to the same device. I worked on wiring, electrical connections, component placement, ESP32 firmware, frontend and backend development, communication between hardware and software, debugging, and the countless smaller problems that appeared during integration.
We also went through revision after revision, both on the physical system and the thesis paper. There were many days when I was tired of looking at the device and trying to understand why one more thing was not behaving the way we expected.
My thesis groupmates helped me keep my sanity. All three of them had their own kind of saltik.
The work was stressful, but we also laughed a lot while doing it. I am grateful to them and to our friends from Studie Shesh for supporting us throughout the process.
At some point, my thesis ambition became much simpler. I stopped worrying about making the perfect project.
The new goal was:
Survive. Finish what I started. Graduate.
Eventually, I did.
Graduation — I finally made it
After all those years, I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering.
Looking back, the path makes more sense as a story than it ever did while I was living through it. I started as a child who wanted to become a doctor. Then I wanted to become a businessman. Then an architect. A failed drone made me curious about technology, and a Smart Face Shield helped turn that curiosity into an engineering direction.
College added difficult subjects, a Latin honors goal that did not happen, projects I enjoyed, and a thesis that forced us to work without a clear roadmap.
It was not a straight path. I changed my mind, failed at things, lost goals, found new interests, and kept building.
That is what brought me here.