What happened post graduation?

It’s been a while since I last wrote on this blog, but I felt the need to write and share this since I saw the graduation posts of the class of 2026.

I want to explain the story of everything that has happened to me after graduating, so let’s start from August 2025.

August 2025

After graduating, I was quite scared for what was coming ahead. I knew that the tiny world I had lived in for 4 years and built for myself (as a very convenient comfort zone) would change, if not collapse entirely, but to be honest, I felt the need for that change. It was about time to leave MSA and enter a new era.

That world was made of small things mostly. The people I would see every day without having to plan it, the labs I liked staying in after class, the community we built, the research I got to work on. None of it was very big, but it was mine and I always knew exactly where I stood in it. After graduation all of that just stops at once, and nobody really warns you about that part.

What I was most sad about was that after graduation, many of the scientific endeavors I used to love exploring would stop making sense. At the end of the day, for any graduate, any sense of meaning comes from how much money you make, not from how much science you hold. So unless you enter a new entity where you are rewarded for scientific endeavors within that entity, scientific work doesn’t really make sense if it doesn’t help you achieve certain financial goals. In plain words, any work would be valued by how much money it generates, not by any scientific progress, which was something I used to enjoy doing a lot.

As a student you never have to justify any of it. You can read a paper just because it’s interesting, or spend weeks on a problem that will never pay you anything, and nobody asks you why you are doing it. After graduation that question comes up in almost every conversation, and I didn’t really have an answer for it yet.

I had to do my military check in January and could not enter an official position anywhere until after that was done. So, I started working at MSA as a part-time teaching assistant.

Life of a Teaching Assistant (September – January)

As a TA, things are quite different. You can’t really do most of the things you can do freely as a student, there is always the responsibility of having to be the bigger person, always.

It is also strange being in the same place with a different title. Same building, same corridors, same halls I used to sit in, except now I’m standing at the front of them. You can’t complain about a course out loud anymore. You can’t join in when the room gets loud. And the students treat you like you were always on that side of the desk, they have no idea you were sitting exactly where they are sitting a year ago.

And I can’t begin to explain how lonely it was after my class graduated and left. Most of my friends got into the military or traveled abroad.

This was quite a lonely period where I couldn’t work at a new place because of my military status, so I couldn’t meet new people there either, and at the same time I couldn’t meet the people I used to know here since they all left after graduation. So most days were the same, I would go to campus, do my work, and go home. The place was full of people and I still had almost nobody to talk to in it.

What made this period worse was that I had fallen out with a few people who were very close to me, for various reasons, but that is out of scope for this blog post.

But I am very grateful that I at least had Amr Akl as a work colleague and as a friend, as he was the only one left I could talk to freely. To be honest if he wasn’t there I don’t know how that period would have gone. Every bad period has one person that makes it bearable, and he was that person for me, so thank you.

Start of Spring 2026

I went to my military check and got my exemption. So, finally, I was able to work!

This meant I could finally leave MSA. But… for the first time, I realized that I don’t want to leave this place, it is my second home after all. Which was kind of strange, because I had spent the whole year before that telling everyone I was just waiting to leave. So, instead of completely leaving, I suggested to the faculty that I would teach 1 day, to try to provide as much quality input as I could to the courses I would teach.

I thought this was a noble goal. I had no reason to take on an extra day of work and work 6 days per week. But helping teach the students something valuable meant trying to build better individuals, which meant a better community, which eventually would let us have a better working world, so yeah, I thought if I could do that it would be worth the burden.

Looking for a job

I started applying on LinkedIn for jobs. I thought I would find a job very easily. I graduated top of my class (first class honours), worked as a TA and freelanced. I thought I would get hired immediately by the first employer. This was hardly true.

The tech market was collapsing due to AI and everyone was pulling recommendations to get into any company. And I tried doing that, but most of the recommendations I got were for positions very far from my area of expertise, which was AI. I had been interviewed for CRM developer, Database, Full stack, ERP and anything else you could imagine. But never for AI, as the market was kind of saturated with AI developers.

Those interviews were tiring in their own way. You go in and try to sound excited about something you don’t actually want, and most of the time they can tell. And even then, most of them never came back to me anyway.

Month after month, I kept applying every day on LinkedIn but found myself with nothing. The routine was always the same, wake up, open LinkedIn, apply to everything that was even close, and wait. Some of them rejected me within a day. Most of them just never replied at all, which was somehow worse, because at least a rejection is an answer. Then go teach my day, then do the same thing again tomorrow.

It was now May and I was still without work. I was depressed and kind of disappointed. I had spent 5 months looking for work and I was rejected for weird positions which I didn’t even want in the first place.

In May, on a random day, I received a call from an HR from a random company I had applied to on LinkedIn. It was an AI & Data engineer position. To be honest, at that point I couldn’t care less about what the status of the company was. I just wanted a full time offer to start working in the corporate world.

I took the interview and passed! Ironically, this was my first job at TechLabs London. And to be honest, I am very grateful it was at this place, the environment was wonderful and people were amazing. After 5 months of thinking I would have to accept literally anything, I ended up somewhere I actually liked, which I really did not expect.

After a month, I got a message from a LinkedIn recruiter from one of the big 4 consulting firms, EY, telling me she saw my profile and thought I was a good fit. She invited me to an interview and I accepted, I went to the interview and passed. The funny part is that it was the same LinkedIn profile that had been sitting there for 5 months while nothing happened. Nothing about it had changed.

I am currently a data and AI consultant at EY.

What I got out of this year

This journey was kind of rough but I am very grateful for every part of it.

If I look at the whole year now, the thing I notice is that nothing moved for 5 months and then everything moved in about a month. I had no way of knowing that while it was happening. Month 4 felt exactly like month 1. So if you are in the middle of that period right now, the silence doesn’t actually mean anything about you, it just feels like it does.

The other thing is that most of the rejections were not really about me. I used to read every ignored application as proof that I wasn’t good enough. Some of them were about me and those ones were useful, but most of them were about headcount, or timing, or a position that was already filled before it was even posted.

And about the thing I was most scared of back in August, I was partly right. Work does get measured by how much money it makes, and I have accepted that by now. But I also found that you can still keep a small space for the other thing. For me it’s the 1 teaching day I kept, which is the least profitable day in my week and the last one I would ever give up.

So to the class of 2026, the year after graduation is not the year your plan works out, it’s the year you end up rewriting it, and that is fine. Keep applying, keep the part you actually love alive somewhere, and don’t be too hard on yourself while nobody is replying.