From a Crushed Dream to an Unexpected Path

A Dream Come True

In 7th grade, I was the C student who barely passed his exams, admiring how his classmates got perfect scores effortlessly. By year’s end, it hit me: a top university could be the golden ticket to my dream life. So, I became obsessed with academic success. More obsessed than an OCD person in a cluttered attic. Anything else was a distraction. Parties? The only one I attended was graduation because exams were over by then. Crushes? Avoided, not for fear of rejection, but fear of success—dating would steal precious studying time. Exercise fell off the map, and quick, easy meals led to a 20kg weight gain—shoutout to McDonald’s. All for one reason: to get into an elite university. I had my eyes on several universities, but Columbia University was my Mount Everest—seemingly impossible to conquer.

Columbia University is not as famous as Harvard, MIT, and Stanford but it is just as hard to get into. The acceptance rate is around 3 percent for these universities. In a room of 30 top-notch students—think perfect GPAs and endless internships—only one gets accepted. Just one. Even though I had been obsessed with my academics, I didn’t imagine myself being that one student in the room of 30. Either way, I filled out the application, repeating to myself Abraham Lincoln’s “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”. And then I forgot about it, thinking there was no way I would be accepted.

In late December, I got an email from my advisor, telling me that Columbia’s admission results would be published that night at 1 AM my time. That was the first time I thought about the Columbia application after submitting it. I didn’t want to bother staying late to see the result because I had school the day after and was pretty sure I wasn’t accepted. But, very deep inside me, there was a small yet strong sensation of hope that made me stay up at night to see the result. So, I stayed up until 1 AM, opened the website, logged in, and a video started playing. A scene over Columbia’s campus in Manhattan, trumpets sounding, and a text faded in, reading “Congratulations!“. I simply couldn’t believe it. I had been accepted into Columbia University, my Mount Everest. All the late nights, early mornings, and other sacrifices had finally paid off and my dream had come true. However, between all the happiness, disbelief, and shock, I had a feeling that something would go wrong. And I wasn’t wrong.

After finishing the academic year successfully, I started preparing for Columbia in the summer. I knew that I was going to compete with people much smarter and more hard-working than me so I wanted to be as prepared as possible. I had to take an obligatory Chemistry class in the first year after three years of doing nothing with Chemistry so I started studying. I started planning my class schedules, knowing more about the professors, looking for the best food places on campus, and visualizing myself where I was going to be in a few weeks. As the time passed, however, I kept getting more nervous.

The Summer That Was Ruined

The visa process that I had to go through was supposed to take a few weeks and it was getting close to the start of classes. I was in frequent conversations with the embassy and Columbia but none of them could give me a good answer. The answer was just “wait”. The time kept passing and I kept getting more nervous. It looked like my feeling that something would go wrong was right. In the end, the process didn’t conclude in time and I was forced to take a gap year that changed my life.

As I requested the gap year, I was sad and disappointed that when it finally looked like my dreams had come true, an absurd bureaucracy prevented me from what I had earned with years of discipline and sacrifice. I felt cheated out of what I had earned and that made me angry. I had given up everything to be ahead of my peers in academics and career and I was now a year behind. I also felt a bit insecure because I had been massively congratulated by everyone in my school and not attending Columbia that year, despite of being a bureaucratic procedure and out of my control, made me undeserving of all of those congratulations, even though I was congratulated for being accepted and that hadn’t change and never would. It was a complicated few days of handling all these thoughts and feelings but after some time, I remembered that “the obstacle in the path becomes the path, and within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition”. The Obstacle Is The Way is one of the best books I’ve read and it came to my help when I needed it most. Within all those negative thoughts and feelings, I began to see a huge opportunity.

The Gap Year That Changed Everything

Throughout this gap year, I was going to have something that I had never had before, and probably would never have again in my life: 24 hours of the day to myself, for an entire year. I decided to focus on 2 areas: fitness and career.

As I mentioned before, I didn’t prioritize fitness these past recent years. That’s a mild way to put it. I ate fast food most days and didn’t exercise, very consistently. And don’t imagine a Big Mac when I say fast food. Imagine 2 Big Macs, large fries, large Coca-Cola, and a Kit Kat or Oreo ice cream. That was my meal but I also ate snacks. Not healthy ones and not in small amounts. Looking back, I don’t know how I allowed myself to go so far off the rails but I can’t change the past. I can, however, determine the future. I forced myself to stick to a fairly strict diet, but nothing crazy, and go to the gym 6 days a week and enjoy a nice cheat day (with pizza and Ben & Jerry’s) on Saturdays. Extremely simple plan. Very hard to execute. But it has to be done and there is no way around it. I decided to walk to and from, taking two hours total of walking, to burn more calories. The walking and the gym took around 3 hours and I had the rest of the day to kickstart my career in a way that even Columbia couldn’t offer.

By the time I graduated high school, I was already good at programming Python and had built a pretty complex application for my Computer Science final project. Python is amazing for its simplicity and ability to work with lots of data and write scripts. That’s why it’s heavily used for data science and machine learning. For the early stage of my career, though, Python wouldn’t be ideal because I didn’t want to dive deeply into machine learning at first. I simply wanted tools to build out my new ideas as websites and Python wasn’t for that. After some research, I found out the exact tools I would need to learn for building out my ideas as websites and I almost gave up on my career plans immediately. The list of everything I had to learn was longer than the last-period Math class on Friday: HTML, CSS, Javascript, React, MongoDB, Redux, Express, Node, and more. But thankfully, I found a course on Codecademy that combined everything and could be learned in a few months. My journey learning all these programming languages deserves its own essay, but I’ll tell you that I came close to pulling the plug on programming and switching to journalism at leat 37 times. But, I stuck with it, through the frustrations, for the whole year and the results were surprising.

As I’m writing this essay almost a year after starting the gap year, I’ve lost 14 kg and look and feel infinitely better than when I started. I also finished the programming course and started a project to practice what I had learned which has now turned into a fully-functioning software company with more than 70 users, without me doing any marketing. I could have lost more weight, I could have done more, I could have gone faster, but overall, I consider this gap year a huge success. Things have turned out even better than I had hoped for at the beginning. I believe a huge reason for that is limiting my focus to these two areas. That meant if I made no progress in my fitness or programming, then this entire year would have been a huge failure, and I would have been a huge failure because an entire year would have gone by without any progress at all. When the stakes are that high and it becomes personal, you just can’t give up and have to make it work, whatever it takes. I was now more prepared to attend Columbia, much fitter, and with more experience. But life had other plans.

It’s Not Happening

After frequently asking the embassy for updates regarding my visa situation, I still get the typical response: “Wait.”. Summer of 2023 has started and I know that I can’t afford another gap year. It’s just not an option. I benefitted greatly from the gap year I took but I don’t think another one will be beneficial in any major way. Therefore, I decided to apply to IE University, a well-known private university in Madrid, as a backup option, still being a Columbia student. I was accepted with a significant merit scholarship, making IE an extremely attractive option. As I keep waiting for a visa response, August arrives and I have a deadline to officially enroll in IE University. To be able to enroll in IE University, I would have to officially withdraw completely and permanently from Columbia University. It’s August 9th and I have 2 options and I have to make a decision today. The first option is to give up my IE admission with the scholarship and hope to get the visa in the next 20 days or be forced into another gap year. My second option is to withdraw from Columbia University and enroll in IE University. Considering that I still don’t have a visa response after 14 months when the process is not supposed to take more than 60 days, I decided not to gamble on another gap year and make the logical choice. I sent the official withdrawal email to Columbia and confirmed my enrollment in IE University. The whole saga had come to an end. My future was finally certain, after more than a year. . Two days later, I got a call from the U.S. Embassy, telling me that my visa was approved and ready to be issued. By that time, I had already sent the emails and filled out the forms, so I told the person on the phone and thanked him for his call. I could be attending Columbia University, but I missed it by 2 days. 14 months of no response and they approved my visa 2 days after my withdrawal is processed. You would think I would be furious, banging my head against the wall because everything came together for me not to go to Columbia. But, in fact, that gives me peace. After a year of constant anxiety and uncertainty, I was finally experiencing peace and clarity. Through that mental clarity, I realized that not going to Columbia wouldn’t be just okay. It will be awesome because of some things I hadn’t even thought about before!

New Paths Emerge

An obvious benefit of staying in Madrid would be the money that my family would save. I didn’t have a scholarship for Columbia so I had to pay the full price. I got a significant merit scholarship from IE University. The difference between the final price of the two is astronomical. It takes most people decades to make that amount of money, and my family doesn’t have to spend it now for 4 years of my life. Getting a Master’s in the U.S. would be cheaper than four years at Columbia. A Master’s can also get me a better job. By that time, I’ll be older and smarter, which helps a lot when you’re moving far away. And because I can code now, I’ve got four years to build stuff that’ll make me stand out to schools and jobs. This is a much better plan for every aspect of my life and I hadn’t thought about it. A forced event that looked like it was crushing my dream has now put me on a much better path. I’m now more excited than I’ve ever been my entire life, without any exaggeration.

Facing a huge roadblock can be devastating, especially when you think you’ve got it all figured out. But with some grit, you can turn that obstacle into a stepping stone, uncovering even better paths you never saw before.

Honestly, I don’t know how this new path will pan out. It might turn out to become a complete disaster and if I had gone to Columbia this year, I could have become Elon Musk. I will never know and there is no point in thinking about what could have been. I’ve learned through my limited yet eventful years in life until now that life is extremely flexible, and nothing is the end of the world, no matter how devastating it is at the moment. There are key moments that can change our life but there is no shortage of them and if we miss one, another one will come our way shortly. The best we can do is learn from the ones we miss, to not miss the next one. I believe that our destiny is largely in our own hands and we can make it happen in a million different ways, no matter how many challenges we face.